Tuysina D.M., Bobretsova A.V.
MENTORING MODEL IN CREATIVE COMPETITIONS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE “DESIGN FACTORY” PROJECT ^{[№ 4 ' 2023]}
Recently, there has been a need in society for ways to transfer practical knowledge, especially in creative types of professional activity. The practice of “mentoring” is a form of communication in which an expert has professional competencies and universal knowledge and skills. Analysis of the theoretical material made it possible to determine that mentoring as a process of personal interaction allows you to speed up the stages of training, while actually having a built-in expert tool for monitoring the quality of training. The inclusion of the practice of “tracking” in competitive projects in the design industry represents a modern type of mentoring in communications, that is, a way of transferring knowledge from experienced specialists. During the implementation of the creative competitive project “Design Factory”, the features of the competencies of the “trackers” were identified and presented, in particular the features of interaction with a group of competitors: expertise in their field of design (hard), empathy and communication skills (soft), balance and ability to learning (hard). The key functions of the tracker in the process of communication with design teams have been identified: consider hypotheses and highlight the most successful one, recognize the crisis and find solutions, keep deadlines. The proposed tracking model is a scheme of interaction between all participants in the competitive project, while the tracker relies on clarifying questions as a way to correct the process of group thinking. The parameters for assessing the tracker’s performance during the implementation of the “Tracker School” training program of the “Design Factory” competition in the context of the tracking model are identified: speed and quality of feedback; competent communication; “reachability” to the end. Thanks to the tracker’s competencies, the design process in the competition increases the speed and accuracy of the solution developed by teams, and also makes the project cycle more predictable.
It is concluded that tracking as a mentoring model is based on behavioral models of communication within the team, tracker management of involvement in the design process of creative project participants.