Environmental Design Criticism

I'm pretty confused with the criticism our group received on our environmental design project. We were told that our decorations covered up and took away from the meaning of our structure.

A lot of other groups' designs were mainly supposed to be decorative and making an environmental space different. Groups that made the Spiderweb, the chalk drawings, the birthday bus stop, and others were I think mainly based on making a space look different and getting spectators to feel good, yet not having other meaning behind that. Don't get me wrong, I liked all those designs and thought they were cool. But they were still mainly based on looking cool and decorating a spot.

For our design, we decorated a bridge with natural elements, like the sticks, the rocks, and the ferns. We also had an additional meaning behind it like making the unnatural natural yet unnatural (or whatever it was). And attempting to bring life to our bridge (the ferns), yet ironically killing life (the ferns). And our bridge being there and allowing others to make their own interpretations.

So since other designs were made to basically decorate a spot, we too decorated a spot, and get hammered by criticism. Huh? We not only decorated the spot, but had meaning behind it has well. We had both decorations and meaning, so wouldn't that be better? Had we not had meaning at all so that our decorations had nothing to cover up, would that have been better?

On our stage design, we were told that our first design was the bare minimum, before we changed it and made it better. So basically, we wanted to make sure that we didn't do the minimum, by adding lively decorations like the ferns and the sign and the stick man. And now, we're told we did too much, and the decorations were unnecessary.