Week 10: Design development
You will be working towards achieving the following learning outcomes detailed in the Assignments tab:
LO1: Research — Select and deploy appropriate research methodologies to inform the needs within a project.
LO4: Distil — Position a creative strategic insight that has been distilled and refined through an informed investigation.
LO5: Imagine — Deliver appropriate and innovative ideas that embrace risk, have contemporary relevance and question the boundaries of the discipline.
LO6: Make — Select and utilise relevant tools, skills and technologies in the delivery, iteration and sustainable production of an outcome.
LO7: Collaborate — Demonstrate inclusive and empathetic strategies to plan and execute a project across distributed collaborative situations.
LO8: Design — Realise a final solution that evidences its strategic journey and clear relationship between form and function.
LO9: Communicate — Communicate effectively in a range of contexts and situations to specialist and non-specialist audiences.
Week 10 - Peer reflection, thinking by doing, testing and refining design
Week 10 - ees me still out of my comfort zone, but now asking colleagues, peers and research groups to analyse and critique my work too! Aagh! But, this is the only way I’m going to get essential feedback so I can check my chosen concept and design actually works. It also provides valuable insights, diverse perspectives from different demographics, and constructive criticism which could possibly enhance the overall quality of my project.
At work, I constantly collaborate with my peers, allowing for a collective brainstorming process, and fostering creativity and innovation so this project shouldn’t be any different. I know research groups can bring specialised knowledge and expertise. My professional contacts, on the other hand, can also offer real-world insights and practical advice based on their experiences and I need to see my feedback as a way of identifying potential flaws or oversights but also open up opportunities to discover unexpected outcomes and solutions, rather than being terrified of the criticism.
Through this process of feedback, I can hopefully gain a bit of clarity and design refinement that I might have overlooked initially.
Peer reflection with the ‘design fam’
What better thing to do after working on projects all weekend than catch up with peers in my cohort? It was really good to spend Sunday evening running through all our projects to check they made sense, get valuable feedback and get an honest review from a trusted group of designers.
I think my most valuable piece of feedback was to stop trying to create something in Figma, (which I had spent the day trying to get to grips with) and create my app game in InDesign in the time frame we had left. I probably knew this, but was stubborn and determined to learn something new in this module, but needed to admit defeat for the time being and revisit it at a later stage.
It was great to catch up with my fellow peers for a quick catch up before next weeks critique.
Week 10 - Lecture with Frauke and MA graduate Tove Martens
This week has been pretty intense with developing my design and self-doubt creeping in so it was encouraging to hear from former student Tove Martens talk through her development and concepts through to the final piece for her Science Museum project.
One thing that resonated was the ‘thinking by doing’ and I started to question my methodologies and whether my concept had sufficient navigation detail to be a fun experience for users. Time to but pen to paper to map out my thought process.
One thing that did concern me was that I was overcomplicating my design solution.