Week one we were given the choice to pick one of several collaboration subjects to spend the next semester on. For me, an industrial design student, the choice was obvious and simple: Streetfood cartology. Me and my fellow industrial design students literally ran from the Z-block lecture to J-block to get in line for this opportunity to secure a space in what seemed the most appropriate class for us.
Luckily most of us were fortunate enough to get in and thus began our streetfood cart journey, in which we got to conceptualise and design a street food cart to be ridden around on this bike:
Class one (week two) was our chance to sit down with Helen Bird and Billerwell Daye and learn all about SFA (Street Food Australia), get assigned to our groups of 5 and choose a food group to design a cart for. We were split up into two sides of the room: Helen's side and Billerwell's side. I was on Billerwell's side and quickly formed a group consisting of three already established friends: Alec Palmer (architecture), Caitlin McDonnell (architecture) and Steven Spooner (industrial design). Lisa De Re (interior design) got caught up in the tides and became the lovely fifth member of our group.
Then we were given a food at random. We were very excited to have received the Mexican corn called elote. This moment basically formed what would be our philosophy for the rest of the semester: FUN. We realised that what naturally comes with the thought of Mexican food is vibrancy, fun, culture and community- and this is what we became. We became a fun, vibrant little community and realised from the start that we were all on the same page and would be able to work smoothly together as friends as well as colleagues.
Dressing up in ponchos, sombreros and speaking broken Spanish (Hola!) to our classmates during presentations became synonymous with our group and with that, Team Elote was born.
This was the result of one of our earlier meetings
The purpose of this blog is to record our journey of collaboration in designing our street food cart. In this, design collaboration theories and practices will be discussed and reflected upon in terms of what problems, solutions and hurdles our group came across during the course of this project. While discovering these topics, the roles of each discipline and each discipline's perspective will be analysed and discussed thoroughly, making way for a clear understanding of Team Elote's teamwork and dynamic.
*Note: We were originally given Mexican elote AND ribs but when given the chance to get rid of the ribs and stick with just corn we decided to do just that.
