Reflective Diary Questions

What was your biggest learning that you took from this paper?
The biggest thing I learnt from this paper was thinking about empathy and making sure to design for what your audience needs rather than wants. I think this makes a major difference in terms of whether your audience will respond to your issue. Learning to develop the ideas behind the visuals seemed to be a major part of this project.

What aspect of your project are you most happy with?
I like the concept of our project and some of the imagery turned out pretty nice. However, I think that we could also improve a lot of aspects to make our project more appealing to our target audience.

Week 11

We pretty much just continued to refine our ideas further. In class we discussed the prototypes we made and how we could improve them. Also, we discussed the dossier and what we are putting in it. After that we went on to collectively write our dossier, I think it was a lot more helpful to write the dossier together, as we could see whether we both were thinking the same things about the brief and what we made.

Week 10- session 2

We just had a lecture on courses next year and went through the different touch points in the dossier for hand in. We then continued with our work in class and had feedback to apply to our work but also some more insight into what is expected in the dossier. It was also helpful to understand what is expected in terms of prototyping. The 960.gs tool came in handy since I had made most of my files in illustrator to begin with, hopefully there aren't colour issues when I import it into invision. After the critique yesterday, we finally developed a visual style that was more consistent between each of the design responses that we had. Moving ahead, we just need to finish the poster (x3), App and Website prototypes (invision). Then over the course of the week we just need to create diagrams and write content for the dossier so that we can fine tune it better in class next week.

Week 10-session 1

We had an interim critique today. First, we presented in groups and got feedback. I think this was particularly useful in seeing other people's reactions to the work we've done. In terms of "does it make sense?". In our one we found that we still needed to make our posters more sleep related.

The second phase was when we swapped with the other streams upstairs and gave people written feedback. Looking at the upstairs I found that a lot of projects had developed a nice design style, however in our one we still needed to pick the one consistent design style. I think that also looking at other people's work, I found that maybe some were harder to understand as to why they had chosen a specific approach. This would be something to consider as not only the visual style but the products produced need to make sense. Moving forward from the feedback we received, I think we still need to refine a lot of things such as the visual style, content and type.

Week 9- session 2

We continued developing our ideas. From the lifehack discussion I did realize that maybe we were straying from our main topic of sleep. So from the lesson and also the feedback that we got, we tried to revise our ideas a little and make sure that it focused more around the idea of sleep deprivation in students. We also found that maybe we were making the project bigger than it could be, when we only have around 3 weeks left. So we decided to limit down our posters and content a little to make it more accomplish able. However, we will mention that there would be more of a series if the project were to progress further.

Week 9- session 1

Lecture, Workshop and studio

There was a lecture on design thinking. The thing I learnt from the lecture is the importance of perspective of the people who will use or be affected your product or service. It also linked into the whole empathy thing and understanding your users.

For the workshop they had already conducted research on poverty. We were tasked with finding a solution for poverty from the perspective of a created persona that they had already created from their research. We studied the map and then went and thought of a solution to one of the problems on the visual map. We looked at the parent hiding food from her children and how she was always sent away from food banks for receiving too many food parcels. The solution we thought of was the agency hiring an extra group of people who will conduct research into all the cheaper places to buy food and essentials. This information would then be communicated to the person via mail, phone, text or in person so that the mother wouldn't have to go around looking for the best deals herself. From the exercise I learnt that not all solutions need to be products, as services sometimes suit the matter better. The workshop made me think more into user perspectives and in terms of advancing our project, this could be used to identify areas to improve.

In studio we just discussed our ideas and drew up some more ideas. For homework we're continuing with this but also considering colour.

Week 8

We had a lecture on the initiative, s.k.i.p. She mainly just talked about how they used design as an innovation instead of a tool for money and process. The initiative was based around the issue of smacking. The initiative was based on the assumption that all parents did love their children but other reasons may cause them to act out. Through the use of empathy they found that they could find opportunities and get people to relate and help. Just reaching out and asking people to help, got people to go and volunteer for the cause. She found that going out and talking to people changed the perspective she initially had on her target audience. I think the lecture was relevant as it shows how important empathy is in design. Maybe the whole idea using design as a service somehow getting the audience to design your prototype to form new ideas that you couldn't have thought of.

In class we just developed our idea further. An issue we ran into last time was the whole idea that people would just walk past posters. We decided to maybe make the poster more interactive so that maybe people would look at the posters or atlas slightly longer than usual. The other component was an app to keep good habits of sleep. We thought of maybe the poster promoting it and also maybe social media (e.g. Facebook) may be a important component to get people to download the app (maybe through likes and recommendations). I did develop some app prototypes but I'm still thinking in terms of what content would be relevant or useful. I think we did develop our ideas a little more than last session but maybe using the importance of empathy, understanding how students would look at things or use things could be something to look into further.