Documenting the learnings

For this program to be successful it is important for there to be enough lead in time. It is suggested that that there is at least 6 months. This will allow for

- planning

- building community around the program ( collaborating with universities, community organisations and public to have the desired numbers for children and family workshops, design and fabrication sessions as well as installing)

Unfortunately with this first iteration of GGR we did not have enough lead time. If we had more lead in time we could have made the design stage of this process be inline with University or TAFE term time frames and identified different faculties that would mutually benefit from this.

i.e. There is potential to not only engage with design students but also:

- costume design students

- set design

- primary school educators

- STEM educators

- industrial design students

- architecture students

Collaboration learnings:

GGR is the first time that Young People and Families and The Edge teams have collaborated on a program. Both teams have different ways of working as well as different ways of collaborating with community. Due to this we learnt the following:

- Weekly across team meetings for just team members are important.

- Collaborative tools such as slack are invaluable

Engaging volunteers communities learnings:

- It is important to be transparent and clear on what the time frame is for the work. having it up in the space for all to see as well as on the communication channel that is being used (Slack in this case).

- Defining the level of workmanship required. We had some hiccups around designs being very intricate and then designers unhappy with the quality that they were fabricated at. Alternatively the fabricators were a little frustrated.

- Letting community know that everyone is welcome whatever skill level.

- Offering choice of projects to work on. If someone doesn't want to finish a project this is fine. If someone wants to focus on one then they have the opportunity to do that.

- When hot glue is involved always have bowls of water available.

Installing large scale work learnings:

- Allow more time than you think that you will need

Design student learnings:

- Students have varying levels of skill levels. It may be beneficial to offer an introductory session to see where skills are at or at the beginning of each session to walk through digital skills so that everyone is on the same page.

Design learning:

- Some designs were cut on the CNC and were then were extremely challenging to fabricate. At times this meant that whole designs needed to be redone and re-worked. Feedback from many fabricators was that designers should see the design all the way through to the finish so as to see how the design plays out and if it works and what doesn't work as they thought it would.

- Feedback from a designer who saw the process from design to finish in one week that it was invaluable learning and that he actually enjoyed the fabrication aspect more than designing in the end.

Bumping out large scale installation

It comes down a lot quicker than you may expect. We were a group of 6 who spent 3.5 hours to pretty much pull down the work and cut it up for recycling. A couple more hours were spent the next day as well as some clean up time. The rest of the time was spent taking bags over to the recycle bin skip when it had been emptied.

Important things:

- Have large bags to put cardboard in. It would have been useful to have stands for these giant bags.

- Sharp Stanley knives and cutting boards

- break everything into smaller pieces so as to be able to fit more into recycle bins

- If the large scale designs had been designed modular (so as to be in pieces) they could have then been transported to other venues afterwards rather than being cut up like we did with most of the work. They were too large and designed and built for the actual space.