Overall Growth and Professional Skills
The past few years have been incredibly influential for my personal growth, both in professional, performance-driven environments and in my private life. I’ve realised creating – in the broadest sense of the word. As of this year, I channelled that drive into exploring the field of Industrial Design, making it the most intense and fruitful year I’ve had. It has left me with a plethora of new skills, but more importantly, showed me that there are an infinitely large amount of skills and proficiencies to still acquire.
Besides design-related skills, personal growth was a big factor as well. My role within a team has become clear: a leader with ease in communication and presentation, but lacklustre in realisation and scientific backing. These qualities and pitfalls have shown themselves within multiple projects, the most notable two being From Idea to Design and Project 1: Intelligent Agents – I led most meetings, took initiative in choosing exciting design directions and made exploratory sketches in my own time. Another notable aspect is a newly learned ability to deal with personal work-hindering situations: communication, time and lowering standards. These issues became more prevalent as the density of deadlines per week grew, but so did my precautions and my ability to seek out appropriate help. This is something that relevant figures in my environment can attest to.
Overall, this year was one of many ups, downs and corkscrews but is a rollercoaster ride I wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
Expertise Areas
Technology and Realisation
Based solely on the line-up of courses that incorporated some sections of this expertise area, it is fairly easy to see how my improvements are immense compared to the start of this year. There is, however, an important distinction to be made within this category: technology-related realisation and purely analogue realisation. Though the latter piqued my initial interests more (as I thought the field of Industrial Design to be less digital tech-focused), I’ve picked up a significant set of skills in both categories.
In terms of technology-related realisation, it has become clear that working with electronics and circuitry is not as scary as it looked. I was extremely hesitant to start practising anything within the E-Lab, acting contrary to my curiosity, but I experienced a major paradigm shift over the year. In courses like Creative Programming and later Creative Electronics I learned the basics, with which I had the starting grounds to explore further, i.e. the use of LCD screens and LED rings in conjunction with physical prototypes. Programming had a major role in this as well, which I will discuss in Math, Data and Computing. This all led to me currently feeling comfortable reaching for my E-kit as a tool for mid-fi to hi-fi prototyping. I don’t aim to become a sole circuit-based designer, but that presence in my toolkit is valuable.
Analogue realisation, which I define as creating without electronics being part of the design, is what I picture myself doing primarily in the future. My goals for the past year were aligned with this – physical prototyping, both as an ideation and presentation tool, and picking up skills related to this. In terms of realising these goals, my achievements were sufficient: there is still a lot more to do in the coming years. Digital prototyping with 3D modelling software like Solidworks (to eventually print out) has shown itself to be my primary and most comfortable tool – easy to work out kinks and revert changes on the fly. I’ve solidified my existent skills, but still, feel too limited due to the CAD environment.
Its counterpart – handcrafting (in a workshop) – is something I’ve failed to do as much as I had pictured. This is based on a severe lack of time I experienced throughout the year, leaving me to resort to my more comfortable, aforementioned tools.
Creativity and Aesthetics
I had serious doubts about choosing Industrial Design in the last few years of high school. Not because it did not align with my past, but rather: wouldn’t I like pure graphic or product design way better?
Creativity and Aesthetics is the expertise area that is most prevalent in my personal life and is at the core of my [professional identity]. Above anything, front-end design that comes in direct contact with the user is something that personally excites me. Over the past year, the role of this area has changed in my eyes – where previously, everything just had to look ‘pretty’, I now focus on the role of graphics within the intention and context of a design. The most evident improvement can be seen in the contrast between my Demoday 1 and Demoday 2 posters for Project 1: Intelligent Agents. I created (distinct) graphics with a purpose and reasoning in the later variants – something that was missing in its predecessor.
Due to my previous experience with illustrator-like software in the context of art, I’ve built up a natural feeling for what would look good. Note that, though this is beneficial for a personal style and aesthetic language, these established habits are not grounded in design theory. A prime example is the manual and work-divide-sheet I made for From Idea to Design: though effective, these were purely based on intuition. Fighting them has proved to be a very tedious and long-winded task, but through discussions with tutors and an open mind for feedback I am slowly improving (referring back to the most notable difference between the two poster sets).
Communication through aesthetics has worked its way into the essence of my design philosophy as well, leading me to choose Exploratory Sketching. Though this course was skill-based, there comes an inherent awareness of your choices by learning these new skills. This helps me define my choices better and sketch out my thoughts in other contexts like modelling or graphic design.
Not to say that I forwent creating graphics for the reason of them being aesthetically pleasing – Creative Programming led to a tool that was solely used for making art. Seeing the excited reaction of users like my family members was invigorating, and reminds me that having fun within design is something that does not undermine its depth.
Math, Data and Computing
Programming was something I thought I would never learn. Yes, the concept of learning an entirely new language seemed like a daunting task, but what could be achieved through it plainly did not seem worth the countless hours of coding. Thus, I had not tried it.
This sentiment has not changed significantly compared to the paradigm shifts I experienced in other expertise areas. Not to say I still don’t have any interest in computing, but I prefer focusing on the bare minimum to illustrate ideas rather than full-on-working and structurally sound code. During courses like Creative Programming, my code remained surface level: if something did not function to my liking, I tried combining several basic commands to achieve that rather than diving into more complex program structures. Though computational puzzles feel challenging to approach and somewhat rewarding to overcome, the monotony of the process and lengthy bug-fixing place it within one of my least favourite areas to work on.
The same goes for data analysis: for me, the excitement is soon lost in back-end work. This resulted in me immediately dropping Data Analytics (due to personal reasons as well), barely getting through Calculus and often seeking out help when tackling computational problems in courses such as Creative Electronics. Realising this attitude poses a problem in the future, I have scheduled my coming years in a way that gives me enough room to gradually change this mindset.
Business and Entrepreneurship
Though Math, Data and Computing is my least liked area of Industrial Design, Business and Entrepreneurship remains the least explored. The reasoning for this is that I naturally gravitated towards electives that immediately sounded interesting: this year was full of basic courses that I felt could easily miss the mark and leave me unsatisfied. With the economics side being far from ideation, other expertise areas posed more natural choices like Exploratory Sketching in Cr&Ae and Intercultural Design in Us&So.
This means there is very little to show in the way of actual progress in this area: short market analyses for From Idea to Design to determine a price for our game or defining a target audience for Halo based on motivation for home-improvement were as far as it went. I realise getting familiar with the economic side of design is essential for my success within the industry. Since I have no intention of rushing through this program, though, I plan to dive more in-depth at a later point in my bachelor’s, preferably during my Y2 courses.
User and Society
Evaluation through user studies; focused design through personas; ethical acceptability through consent forms and philosophic angles – all examples of raw theory and methods I was completely unfamiliar with less than a year ago. Through courses like User Centered Design and Intercultural Design, I learned to re-evaluate my own role and perspective within the context of design. In the following courses like From Idea to Design and Project 1: Intelligent Agents, I applied this theory, creating questionnaires, performing user studies and focus groups and correctly applying Wizard of Oz techniques.
Though user studies on a larger scale have still remained unused theory, the perspective that the Redesign Exercise upon value differences between societies brought with it resulted in a new view on design as a whole. The role that my projects could have a meaningful impact on a part of society regardless of the scope of the design is something I see as a responsibility. This mindset is significantly more professional than my initial ‘I do because it makes me happy’ perspective. Due to this, user-centred design has become one of the keystones of my philosophy.