How does one decide what is unethical or plagiarism (and not) in team work. Please shed some light.

Apologies in advance for the long post.

So, we recently did a 4 month design project which was 3 months of research + one month of designing the solution.

Instance 1/3- we were a team of 3 people in the research team, and only two did any work. In the end, the third non-doer member said, “Keep the project to yourself, I’m not even going to put it in my portfolio.”

She didn’t just put the project in her portfolio but also presented it as her end of review project.

Instance 2/3- When it came to the last month, which is the designing/ prototyping phase, the faculty put one more student on our team because he believed he’d lend a new perspective. We were angry but we accepted the condition to get on with our work. Not surprisingly, due to coming late into the project the new guy had no idea about what we were doing and was only slowing us down (while the third person from before was still not contributing).

Long story short, in the end he got equal credit for the entire project for just sticking around with us and is putting the project in his portfolio.

Instance 3/3- my other (and the only active) teammate caught me working on my portfolio the other day and got a peep into one of my layouts, which is unique to the story I’m telling.

Several weeks later he casually comes up to me and simply tells me “I can’t think of a better way to create that layout so I’m going to do exactly how you’ve done it” and walked away. (Also, the guy reeks of jealousy and insecurity which is a story for another day).

After all this, I’m feeling quite low and confused about this whole deal where I feel my hard work has been compromised. We’re all beginning to apply for jobs now and mostly in the same places, and I hate to see they’ll take credit for work they didn’t technically do but were part of that team so I don’t even know if what’s happened is wrong or right.

Again, sorry for the long post. But it’ll be really helpful to hear your views on it. Thanks in advance!

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted August 23, 2018 at 12:09PM by potato-stick https://ift.tt/2PyFXYy