Presentation - Week 12

I presented today despite being taken over by nerves. My presentation was short and concise, just explain my 4 main touch points and how they relate to the 5 ways of well-being.

I received positive feedback from class mates.

I spent the rest of the afternoon finalizing my dossier for the final submission.

Design refinement - Week 11

Session 1&2:

Today is all about refining our designs. I am in the final stages with my app screens and over all design process, getting opinions off of friends, those I know who have been bullied in their workplace and tutors.

Design process - Week 10

Session 1:

Today is an interim, I dont have much finalized work to show but I discussed my concepts and app screens with my fellow class mates and tutors to gain some clarity.


Session 2:

I decided to make quite big design changes to my designs, cleaning up the colour scheme and layout to make the app more attractive to the audience.

Design process - Week 9

Session 1:

Leslie Tergas from ThinkPlace came to speak today on inspirational designing.

We are now at the stage of building and refining.
I have designed my stickers and posters that will advertise my app Employ Aid, my stickers have gone through many developments to get to a stage where I am satisfied with them.



Session 2:

In studio I am continuing with my app wire frames, determining what is needed in my app and what is unnecessary. Talking to Lee and Mark has helped a lot with staying on the right track.

Exchange

For my final exchange I turned up to my groups meeting place in the old museum and no one was there, so there was not much I could do about this.

Design process - Week 8

Session 1:

Today Elizabeth Goodwin from the ministry of social development came to talk to us about inspirational design and how it can provoke positive change.

In class I continued to brainstorm and gain feedback from peers and tutors.





Session 2:

Today I worked on my point of view statement.
We have been introduced to the journey map we must complete for this assignment, which gives us an idea of our users experience throughout.

Prototyping as designing - Week 7

Session 1:

Todays lecture was on design thinking provocations
Sam joined us in class to go over the 5 ways of well-being and provocations

At this point I am still brainstorming my design ideas for my workplace bullying brief. It is proving harder than expected when I have think of ways to combat this serious issue.

Once again talking to my fellow class mates helps to gain a fresh perspective.




Session 2:


Today we are introduced to prototyping. With the important process of prototyping, test, iterate in order to get genuine feedback on our conceptual designs.

On our table we focused on testing our ideas on each other, at this point I still feel quite far behind but giving others feedback has proved helpful for my project too.

Conceptualising - week 6

Session 1:
After hand in and looking at briefs on stream I am now deciding between sticking with my original brief or change to another that interested me.

We had Meena Kadri talk today on inspirational designing and IDEO social change.
SLIP  presentation today also to help inspire us to begin creating our POV statement

Session 2:

Today we re-visited Empathy
Looking into ways we can approach our brief to come to some type of design solution
Ask, watch, learn, try. I feel my brief is mostly ask and learn based.

We were given an ethics application to fill out and look through

Reflection - week 5

 
After printing our assignment off today I am excited to present tomorrow and see everyone elses!

I am satisfied with our final outcome, with more time of course it could be more refined but I still feel as if we got our message across with our design and brief.

The main goal was to inform and raise awareness on workplace bullying and the toll it can take on ones personal well-being. It is also to provide the information needed to seek further help and provide victims with a feeling of hope. Our characters and their personal, emotive narrative portrayed this well. You can relate and empathize with them, this makes the viewer more engaged with the text content too.

I have enjoyed this first assignment, although I was unsure on whether the direction I was going in was right some of the time. I am looking forward to the next assignment and developing either my own or a new brief further.

To see my final brief or more work process, look at my workbook blog.
http://222358sarahkenzie.blogspot.co.nz/

Reflection - final outcome

Prototype - week 4

To consider:
Mock up

1st session

Todays lecture was from Chris Jackson on 'Beyond Design Thinking at DNA'
This lecture was a lot to take in, a tad over-whelming but it did make you think deeper into what design is and our future in the design world.

In studio we looked at each others mock up briefs and gave critique. It was cool seeing what angle everyone else had taken with their design. We wrote down notes on what we liked and what could improve/needs to change, this is super helpful for editing and refining for next weeks hand-in.

We didn't receive much feedback on ours as we were still struggling with our visual rhetoric the week before. We have now decided on how we are going to approach it visually. After talking to both Mark and Lee and hearing their feedback we decided to go with the metaphor/visual rhetoric of the hierarchy of the animal kingdom food-chain. We have begun working on our vector animal characters that will represent the bully and the victim in this work situation.

2nd session

Today was all about refining from yesterdays feedback, we continued to bounce ideas and visuals off of fellow students. Our brief is now visually well under way with our information already sourced from the previous week. One thing was hard though, NZ statistics on our topic were difficult to find!

Kenzie and I are planning on meeting all day this Monday coming to finally finish everything off to get printed on Wednesday.

Exchange

Unfortunately I was unable to make it to the 2nd exchange due to work commitments and having to get back out to home in time (upper hutt)

I'm sure it would have been good to see the girls progress, but I feel that missing this exchange also didn't affect my assignment in any way.

From now on I will make sure I don't commit to work on exchange days.

Define - week 3

To consider:

Synthesize 
Proposition
Essence
Point of view
Call to action

1st session

Today's lecture was from Jason about photography in design. I loved the examples he showed and his own beautiful photography work. He used his children and basic surroundings to create many strong photographs that represented a lifestyle, feeling. Photography can be very effective in design and perhaps even our brief if used well.

Studio's main focus today was brainstorming and storytelling.
Kenzie and I had previously completed the 8 pages for our body shaming brief but have now decided to go with a different topic after the mixed feedback and being unsure ourselves.

The 8 pages:
-Issue
-Background
-Audience
-Audience needs
-Client/stakeholder
-Client motivation
-Barriers
-Desired action

Our new topic is on 'Bullying in the workplace'. This idea came from my personal experience with being bullied at work and feeling my well-being going down hill. At the time I did not know where to go for help, quitting and going to the boss wasn't an option. I want this brief to give victims hope and knowledge to improve their situation.

2nd session

We completed our 8 pages for workplace bullying and are just trying to narrow down our topic. We worry that it may come across as boring if we don't find an effective way of visually presenting the information. We have been doing quite a bit of research looking into clients like the Union, Worksafe nz etc. We have also been getting inspiration from looking at existing layouts for presenting information.

We got feedback from Mark, he liked our idea and had helpful advice that got us excited about moving forward.. we needed the motivation! He told me to think of my experience and take it from there, having that empathy for the situation should help resolve a good outcome for this brief.

Exchange

For the exchange I am in group 22, we met in block 10.

Only two others from my group showed up, a photography and a fashion student.
Roxanne Vorster and Chloe Edmonds.

We took turns talking about our assignments, and they were all very different. Even with having well-being as the back-drop we found it difficult to relate to each others assignments and process.
Both of their assignments are only marked at the end of semester.

Chloe was looking into the idea of fantasy and being able to escape from reality and how fashion can do that. The ethereal dresses she was researching looked amazing.

Roxanne is in a group for her photography assignment, she was focusing on how environment helps our well-being, looking at landscape photography.

We gave each other as much feedback and advice as we could, it was good hearing feedback from non-vcd students as they have a different perspective.

Ideate - week 2

 To Consider:

Brainstorm
Mind-map
Wire-frame
Thumbnail

1st session

Today we had a lecture on design thinking provocations, with a focus on collaboration and empathy within our work.

In studio we wrote down our main idea for the brief and we had to place our idea in the category it fit the most. This was to help us see who else in the class were thinking along the same lines and group together in 3's or peers.
I still didn't have a solid idea of what I wanted to do, still open minded at this point. Body shaming and the issue around body image was something I had in mind though.

Kenzie and I decided to team up, neither of us had a strong idea yet but she liked my idea of body shaming.

2nd session

After talking yesterday we decided to go with the body shaming for now. This class was all about listening and sharing information we had gathered, also touching on empathy.
We had to give a 30 second description to the class of our topic, it was good to hear other ideas and bounce ours off of other students. Comments from classmates on our topic were mixed, some thought it was controversial and could be taken the wrong way, others liked it. This is making it hard for us to stay with this idea.

Empathy - week 1

This week we were introduced to our first assignment for this paper.
I'm in stream B with Lee and Mark


To consider:

Understand the brief
Understand the audience
Understand the context
Research
Gain insight   




1st session

We had an introduction lecture on design thinking, global context, student creativity and a run-down of what our brief entails. Then Sam from Lifehack spoke on 'everyday-well being' to give us more of an understanding.

We returned to class and talked in groups about well-being and what it means to us, this helped to open up a bit and listen to other students opinions on the at times 'touchy' subject.


2nd session

Lifehack Workshop
 Our stream as a whole took part in an interactive workshop through various exercises unfolding what kinds of well-being there are, when have we felt un-well and why? Who am I in relation to these other people? What are we going to do together?

 We began to brainstorm our own ideas ready to bring in next week to team up.
 Where to next? The '8 points.'