The postgraduate programme has come to an end, and I have gained a lot from this period of study. During my undergraduate studies, I majored in industrial design (mechanical engineering), and I had a certain foundation in interaction design, so I was able to cope with various challenges in my postgraduate study of interaction design more smoothly. Similar to my previous experience, the design course did not focus on the use of tools, so I had to learn a lot of things on my own, but in general I got to know and try out a lot of new design tools, and learnt a lot of practical methodologies.
1 Personal work summary
In some other courses, I was lucky enough to work with some students from MIT background in team, and I learnt a lot from them. Since I come from an engineering background, so I'm usually responsible for the logical aspects of data analysis and direction control in design collaborations, but in those assignments, I could actually responsible for some artistic design work, such as user personas, stakeholder maps, prototype design and so on. As a result, I have been able to fully develop my abilities in all aspects.
2 About teamwork
Most of teamworks were generally successful, with everyone contributing on their own initiative. I often take on the role of team leader or something like that, which I personally think is probably due to my time management skills (making sure tasks are completed on time) and relatively strong sense of responsibility, although of course I didn't take the lead on this course due to joining the team late. In fact, I prefer to be behind the leader to monitor the progress of the whole project and point out problems in time, because I am not good at talking and expressing, and one of the essential parts of the design is to sell ideas, and also the ability to express verbally is one of the most important abilities in the workplace, so I still need to find a way to overcome this weakness.
3 Artistic in design
In my opinion, for most designers balancing the practicality of design and the sense of art is a long-standing problem. Judging from the current curriculum, it seems that the school does not have much arrangement for art content, and the current design thinking class often stresses that we are not required to have drawing skills, and that the most important thing is to express our ideas. However, I often feel overwhelmed by my lack of artistic skills. For example, when I was making personas, I was troubled by how to choose the color scheme and layout for some time, and for this visual report, apart from adding pictures and colors, how to make the whole text look more vivid is also a big problem for me.
In view of this, I plan to take time out of my daily life to observe and study outstanding design works in depth, and draw inspiration and techniques from them. At first, I may practice by imitating those works that I admire. Through imitation, it can help me understand the design principles and techniques applied, and then gradually build up my own design sense. Although my study time is limited, by effectively integrating these fragmented learning moments, I can gradually improve my art and design skills. At the same time, I hope to be able to validate my learning by applying the knowledge and skills I have learnt to actual creations in my future design projects, and to continue to make progress in practice.
4.Practical skills and theoretical concepts
There are a lot of interesting and useful tools and concepts that I have come across during my studies, my personal favourites amongst the tools are: Unity, Figma and Stable Diffusion.Unity has been used before (I used it for my undergraduate design and thesis), and I have reused it in some of my previous courses. Although there is a certain technical barrier, Unity can turn most ideas into real images, especially for some hardware device-related projects (e.g. map mima).I had only a very limited understanding of figma, preferring to use Adobe Illustrator, but when it comes to graphic design that doesn't involve a lot of detail, figma is much more convenient and better suited to the logic of interaction, while Stable Diffusion was initially a personal interest, and I was fortunate enough to have learnt more about it in Design Fiction. AI drawing greatly makes up for my personal inability to draw, and brings me closer to other designers, but both AI drawing and myself have a long way to go in this area.
My favourite concepts are the Double Diamond Model, Agile Development and User Journey Map, which emphasises the process of divergence and convergence to ensure that the designer returns to the optimal solution after extensive exploration, and is more suitable for designing on broader topics, such as cost of living in design thinking. Agile development is very commonly used in the work, and its core idea is similar to the school's Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat. idea, through continuous rapid iteration in order to achieve the gradual improvement of the product.User Journey Map is very suitable for use with persona, to quickly determine the attributes of the target user, and convenient to determine the direction of the development. The User Journey Map is suitable for use with persona to quickly identify the attributes of the target users and to facilitate the direction of subsequent design.
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