On February 7–8, 2025, the Code&Context bachelor’s program at TH Köln held its annual exhibition and networking event—organized entirely by students. Around 25 of us worked in five sub-teams, each responsible for different aspects like workshops, exhibitions, people, and space. I was excited to lead the exhibition team.
Together with five other students, we developed a concept for presenting artifacts created since the program’s founding. We designed the arrangement, prepared decorations, and coordinated with the authors. The whole preparation process took place in over 5 months and required close collaboration with the representatives of all other teams. My main responsibilities included delegating tasks within the team, participating in the weekly meetings, and facilitating communication across intersecting tasks.
As the leader of the group my main takeaway was that to solve a problem effectively, I must be hard on the problem itself but soft on the people. It has become of great importance to be able to understand everyone’s capacities in the moments of rising tension and evaluate how the team was progressing with completing the task. As another learning for myself, I recognized the great value of clear instructions and leaving team members with their responsibilities. Also, it was important to chill out from time to time a little bit.
At the end, we had team members responsible for keeping track of all the artifacts, people for designing and printing artifacts descriptions, collecting artifacts, setting up the lights and stands, placing them in space. All in all, it was a very insightful experience, making a big contribution, and of course, it was wonderfully satisfying to see the physical results of our work!
interested? visit our Iteration Website: https://coco.study/iteration/
