Upon completing this module I have identified 4 fundamental areas that I have developed in as a designer.
Team work & Communication
This was the most successful module/project for me in terms of communication on this course. Working with Tatiana, Maria and Qendresa was a pleasure. We all listened to each other, everyone always had a chance to voice their opinion and have an input. We communicated exceptionally great throughout the entire project without conflicts. We all worked very hard, helped and supported each other. This project will remain an example of an understanding, creative and fun environment to work in for me and I would be delighted to work with them again. While this was a project where I managed to apply my existing communication skills successfully when it comes to working with your peers, I have also learnt another point of communication, which is with a partner company. This was a very new experience to me as I have never had any professional interactions when it comes to design. It certainly gave me the basis of how communication of this kind happens, which will help me in the future when I graduate. Overall, it makes me extremely proud and happy to say that I have worked with a great design studio such as Applied Works and show the work we have done as a team.
visualisation
After the previous module, where I learnt how to make animations, I thought that my visualisation skills were the best they could be. Just because I was very happy with my new skill. Little did I know that this module would help me boost it even more and I would learn so much more. Our imagination and ideas pushed us to explore information hierarchy, how to develop node-link diagrams, software like Unity, Adobe Dimension, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Aero and Figma. All of those were either unknown to me before, or I had very little knowledge of them. They provide very different mediums to visualise your ideas and they certainly helped our process. Unfortunately, Unity was not a success for me and I still struggle a lot with this software, but I discovered great alternatives for it which worked very well to visualise our project. I used to be very scared of even opening a 3D software, but now I am quite comfortable using it and experimenting, which I consider to be great progress for me.
Prototyping : User Journeys
When it comes to prototyping, I believe that it intersects a lot with the area of visualisation. However there was a particular development in this in terms of user journeys. Firstly, I realised how important they are when it comes to developing a complex project consisting of a website as well as the AR. Because we kept working on a user journey throughout the entire project and adjusting things it helped us highlight a lot of imperfections that we managed to correct on time. They were also a great way to present our idea to others. For example, it really helped us get the correct advice from the Digital Lab and Creative Technology Lab, because we showed them what we envisioned through our user journey along with our low-fi prototypes. It is definitely something I want to practice in my work more.
Scope & Context
This is a new area I believe I managed to make some improvements in. Our specific topic was Reinventing Air Travel. And while we did a lot of research on that specifically we also needed to collect a lot of other information about the Hoffmann Centre as well as the work AW have done for them. This is in order to get a better understanding of what they are and what is their purpose, in order to reflect that in our work and make it relevant to them specifically. Furthermore, we considered a lot of different approaches to this design brief such as design fiction, Backcasting, gamification, etc. We wanted to get as much information about what could be done and how we can approach it in the best and most efficient way possible. I believe this is also a great addition to my communication skills when it comes to working with a partner company and has taught me a lot. It improved my understanding of this area but I am still yet to develop it further through future projects.
