I just finished reading a really great book by Mischa Glouberman and Sheila Heti (the founders of Toronto’s Trampoline Hall) called The Chairs are Where the People Go. Among other things, it includes a few passages about group dynamics and the way Mischa— as a charades teacher, experimental music practitioner, un-conference organiser— shapes people’s interactions with each other.

“When I’m designing an unconference, I’ll spend a long time with the organizers figuring out how to seed conversations in ways that are useful. A really simple thing I’ll do at the beginning of a conference is get people to put themselves into random groups. We used to program the groups, but it turns out it’s better just to tell people, “Stand up and find four people you don’t know.” Even that one step, something as simple as that — letting people form their groups very early on — really energizes the room differently.”

I found his take on things particularly interesting in light of all the group work I have ahead of me in school this year. ID’s brand of design is inherently a team-based thing, but our process for choosing those teams is woefully chaotic and arbitrary. In every class, the prof has said that rather than make groups for us and have to deal with the ensuing complaints, he will leave it up to us to form our own groups. Fine, except that it’s the first week of school and aside from some small talk at Orientation Week, a lot of us still don’t know anything about each other. The only thing we do know, that has been drilled into our head by the upperclassmen, is that if you get stuck in a bad group, you’re sunk. It’s a really important decision to make and you have to make it before the second class has begun! Instead of adding Mischa’s all important qualifier of people you don’t know, the professor leaves the group making to us and people who know each other stick to their cliques.

For a school that so prides itself on innovation and reframing problems, how great would it be if we could develop some sort of system to talk a bit about ourselves and see what our classmates are interested in before deciding who we want to work with? I spent the past week making shallow, snap judgements about people to decide if they were partner worthy. It would have been so much better if the teacher had set the stage for us to choose intelligently based on complimentary perspectives and interests.

We’re taught that in all the world’s top consultancies, people from different backgrounds are deliberately mixed together to ensure the well-rounded-ness of the group. Yet, left to our own devices, grad students are just like anyone else — we gravitate towards people who seem like us, instead of pushing ourselves to find the best, opposite but complimentary person to argue/challenge/collaborate/work with.