Upon completing this module I have identified 4 fundamental areas that I have developed in as a designer.
TEAM WORK & COMMUNICATION
This module has helped me improve my team working and communicating skills significantly even further from the last term. Contrasting to my reflection back then, I realised that while working with new people every 2 weeks is refreshing and is teaching you new things, but working with someone who you have worked with a lot before and had disagreements in the past also pushes you to improve. It certainly developed my understanding and communication. Furthermore, due to Covid-19 restrictions, all the learning has shifted to the virtual space which appeared more challenging than I imagined. Not being able to test ideas with your team in the same space was hard and subconsciously made us work on our communication and patience through the screen. Furthermore, finding myself unable to help my teammate Maria when she was working on the projection mapping prototype was a little upsetting, as I didn’t have the same equipment to help her. Nevertheless, every group I was in worked very well together and I found a way to help Maria in our project by developing my visualisation skills.
VISUALISATION
Here, I made some progress I have been wanting to make for quite some time. When helping Maria with projection mapping she taught me how to animate illustrations. This made it so much easier for her and more interesting and engaging for me. I finally developed my first big (small) animations (see previous blog post) using Procreate which I am very proud of. Apart from literal visualisations, I have also noticed that doing LARP helped me be more creative and free to visualise things in my mind that don’t exist and then visualise them in material space which was inspiring as well as sobering in a way that I was reminded that I can imagine absolutely anything.
PROTOTYPING & CONCEPTUAL THINKING
Some realisations and improvements I made this term fall within both categories. Similarly to visualisation this term we explored a different way of prototyping through LARP. Instead of physical objects, we prototyped scenarios, which I found slightly more challenging because it wasn't tangible and very new to me. What was also different is that we were creating a scenario that was supposed to give freedom to create within the scenario, not lead the user into a smooth controlled journey. This pushed me to think more freely and creatively since we could imagine an entire world without actually making it physically. However, we still needed to create the presence of this new world with help of replacements which was also very new and interesting to me as it helped to push further my creativity. These overall, improved my understanding of what could be the prototype and how it could be represented and go from an idea to reality.
