This design charette experience was definitely different from our usual projects and workflow. Having only two weeks to work through an entire design intervention had both positive and negative impacts on our process. It greatly accelerated the rate at which we ideated and made decisions on things, having to commit to our best idea so that we would have enough time to be able to create all of the individual parts and pieces of our solution. I was really surprised by how much we’re all capable of producing in this amount of time that actually has substance to it. This condensed design method seems like it could be a useful tool in the future in some ways. By having the topic provided to us, I think it helped us hone in on where we needed to be a lot sooner, significantly cutting down our period of ideation. However, it also made it seem like we were all trying to avoid having similar solutions as other groups which may have pushed us in unintended directions. The group aspect of this project was possibly the most complicated part of it all. I for one, enjoy working with other passionate designers, it allows us to reach heights that would be unattainable working on our own. The downside is trying to coordinate our work schedules, especially when we have different groups for two other classes going on simultaneously. This really complicated things when we would try to equally distribute work and move forward in the design process.
I think this experience will inform my future endeavors in several ways. When it comes to working in teams, I think it’s critically important to be upfront about how much time should be set aside for a specific project and make sure every member is committed to doing just that. Assessing every member’s varying strengths and weaknesses is also an important aspect and can lead to better distribution of roles and workload. When it comes to focused design challenges like this, I think the greatest future advice would be to constantly recenter and reassess yourselves. It seems easy to quickly become overwhelmed or sidetracked when working on a project of this scale in such a short amount of time. By continually reevaluating the goals and core concepts of a project it could prevent these things form happening. So just remember to take a step back and intermittently notice the overall form your solutions start to take.
Collaborating as a team definitely keeps you motivated and focused. You feel obligated to work as hard as possible so that you don’t let your team down, especially when specific tasks are assigned to you. It also allows for a more diverse selection of ideas and access to varied ways of thinking, however, this can be a double-edged sword. It is crucial to “trim the fat” when it comes to narrowing down these ideas as it is possible to have too many parts or variations. This can end up making your design intervention more convoluted than focused. However, I think we still did a great job when it came to synthesizing our ideas to reach a plausible solution. I think we may have ended up a little astray when it came to the order in which we presented all of the components of our solution, but I still think the substance was there. I think if the final presentation was simply a mid-critique and we had more time to work on this, we would reevaluate how our current solution aligned with that of the original prompt and reordered how we presented everything. By reiterating how everything would start at the trail with the way finding system and then radiate outwards into these future possibilities, our intervention would appear much more appropriate.
For this project I was responsible for the website mockup, producing the video, and creating the core brand identity. I also did my best to keep the group on task and organized in order to keep us moving forward, ensuring everyone had a part to play. I wanted to make sure everyone felt engaged and was contributing as equally as possible.
Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1ybPggY3GIYX3BXbF9UU3lWR1E
GD301_Branding, Interaction, Service Design 