June 2021
Group: Tatiana Bohsali, Maria Shuttleworth, Kate Chernysheva
Group: Tatiana Bohsali, Maria Shuttleworth, Kate Chernysheva
Topic
Final. Major. Project. I find it very hard to believe that the MA:UX chapter is coming to an end, but let's keep rolling!
Making decisions for me has always been hard, especially when it comes to choosing the topic of my final project at UAL. There are so many possibilities and things that I am interested in, that it's almost impossible to choose. However, this is also an important step in my development as a designer - being able to zoom in and set focus on something specific to pursue.
After a lot of thinking and searching, I spoke to my teammates from the Macro UX project - Maria Shuttleworth and Tatiana Bohsali, who were also ideating and trying to choose a topic of their FMPs. Working with both of them was an absolute pleasure which also resulted in a great outcome. Therefore, we decided to see if there is something that we can find in common between us that we can work on together. Finally, Maria shared with us her idea of contextualising language learning, which all of us found very interesting.
Meet my team for the Final Major Project - Maria and Tatiana. Photo taken by me.
Upon having a discussion, we realised that all of us have very different perspectives and experiences of learning a language. Furthermore, all of us went through different scenarios when learning our common language - English. For example, my experience was rather sudden and harsh. I learnt the language in context when I moved to the UK with no prior knowledge beyond simple ‘hello’. As a teenager, I had to continue my education and go to secondary school, which was frustrating and physically painful in the beginning as I was getting headaches from listening to speech I could not make sense of. I found it extremely hard and stressful having to communicate with different people on a daily basis, having nothing to help me understand or say what I need to say. Whereas Maria is a native and Tatiana learnt it from a very young age at school and through watching movies. As a result, we came to decide that bringing our different experiences together could become a strong basis to work on designing a new language learning experience. This was very inspiring to me as I saw so many different ways this topic could be explored in.
How do visuals help the learning process? How can we make them work to help retain information? Alongside these questions, it also made me wonder why are the existing learning methods such as apps are not always successful in helping people achieve their goals in language learning? What motivates people to continue with their learning? What doesn't? What do people feel when learning? Where and how do they learn?
In conclusion, we all decided that there is a lot to be done in this field and there is an opportunity for us to create a more interesting, engaging and effective way to learn. Therefore, we decided to collaborate and get started on our proposal.