isabellapdesn2002

[isabellapdesn2002]

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Hello, person reading this! You've stumbled onto my blog for Assessment 3 of DESN2002. Let's hope this works!!!!

You can either scroll down and read my blog out of order, or click here to go to the start!

You can also check out my reference list here!

Happy reading!

- Isabella, aka c3393680

[isabellapdesn2002]

Reference List

Brown, T & Katz, B 2019, ‘The new blueprint’, Fortune, vol. 179, no.3, pp. 92–95

Brown, T 2008, ‘Design thinking’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 86, no.6, pp. 84–92 

Esposito, E 2018, October 22, ‘4 types of research methods all designers should know’, , Inside Design, viewed 4 June 2023, https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/research-methods-designers/

Kelley, T 2011, June 24, [Streaming video], Field Observations with Fresh Eyes

Ma, M 2021, February 8, ‘Rose, Thorn, Bud’, Research Methods 2021, viewed 5 June 2023, https://medium.com/research-methods-2021/rose-thorn-bud-44906e93a76

Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning." Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169. 

Thomas, P 2016, April 10, ‘“What’s the difference between Design Thinking and making?”’, , Medium, viewed 3 June 2023, https://medium.com/@parkerthomas/what-s-the-difference-between-design-thinking-and-making-614cb089bc5e

Wahl, DC 2017, April 29, ‘Facing Complexity: Wicked Design Problems’, , Age of Awareness, viewed 7 June 2023, https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/facing-complexity-wicked-design-problems-ee8c71618966

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Thirteen & Conclusion

With our final week in this course came the time to present. All the work was done, now all we could do was hope. Overall, I was incredibly proud of all the work my group and I did together, the final presentation and promotional video came out amazingly, and despite stressful technical difficulties our group had during our week 13 presentation due to Prezi, we managed to pull through and present a piece that we could all be proud of.

References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Eleven & Twelve

By week eleven and twelve, our group was in full swing with creating our prototype and preparing for our presentation. I had been assigned the job of liaising with the MAC in order to organise interviews with staff and get the okay for us to come in and film on the following Wednesday, as well as creating the previously mentioned prototype ideas and a small animation for our film. Whilst I had some issues at first getting in contact with the MAC administration staff, my group and I were able to sort it out and ended up arriving at the MAC, and successfully filmed and interviewed whilst there. 

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Nine

By week nine, it became imperative to our group that we would have to refine our prototype idea to differentiate it from other apps, by using the Rose and Thorn method to work out these ideas. The Rose and Thorn technique is a way of noting out negatives (Thorns), Positives (Rose), and potential ideas (Bud). (Ma, M. 2021.) From this, we were able to come up with the idea of a game-based app that would allow Museum guests to be more actively involved in the museum. This also led us in the following week (week ten) to recreate our user journey and personas with this new prototype in mind. 

By this point, my designs for the app were more detailed and fit well with the prototype we would eventually use:

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Eight

We did not have class in week eight, however, my group continued on with our research. One of our main takeaways from what we had discovered was the lack of visual cohesion on the MAC’s webpage, there was an effect where the logo of the web page would change every time a new tab was opened. We knew we would have to create a new cohesive logo for our app, one that utilised the pre-existing orange triangle logo with a more youthful visually appealing spin. I was put on the task of creating this logo and visual branding elements. 

Here are some of my beginning prototype sketches:

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Seven

Week seven was spent, mostly refining our ideas and listening to other group presentations. It was back to the drawing board for our group, in terms of revision. The biggest aspect for us to improve on, in my opinion, was research. Primary research is one of the most important aspects of the design process, including field research, interviews (direct and non-direct), contextual inquiries, and focus groups (Esposito, E. 2018) Our group decided it would be best to go to the museum in person and organise interviews with museum guests, workers, and take the issues with the MAC in first hand, as field research is a hugely important task when undertaking a brief like this (Kelley, T. 2011.)

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Six

I could not attend the week 6 lecture/stakeholders meeting but thankfully due to our great group communication, we were all able to access the notes and ask questions through the group members who were able to attend through our instagram group chat. Afterwards, our group met up together and discussed in person the notes from the stakeholders. I feel like our groups biggest strength was our communication, almost all of us were always on the same page and always working hard together to help each other. In my personal opinion, my favourite part in this course was the group aspect, not only because it forced me to branch out and make new friends in my degree, but it also taught me new skills about working in a group and delegating rolls especially through virtual communication. 

Below are a few screenshots of our group chat:

 Week 6 was also our week for our assessment 1 presentation, I was really proud of how our group pulled together so well, especially with one of our group members going M.I.A last minute before the presentation. This was our feedback from our presentation:

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Five

In our week five lecture, there was a focus on mapping out the user experience via: Empathy maps, personas, role-play, user journey maps, etc— the way these were made is through research both, desk and field. In order for our group to incorporate this desk and field research into our project, my group and I discussed questions to ask in our week six lecture, where stakeholders would be coming in person.

My group and I met up outside of class to work on our presentation in person. We were still in the early research phases at this time, so we had some issues with allocating roles and overlapping research/information. In order to work through this we made several Google docs that we could all work on to see what research we had already done, as well as this we used our Instagram group chat to send in notes and photos. Because of the importance of the week 6 lecture, as well as a lot of our group being unable to attend the lecture in person, the Google doc and the Instagram group chat became highly important for us to share and convey information. We were able to organise who would be able to go into the lecture in person to ask questions from the stakeholders as well as share questions virtually, so those who could not attend in person could also assist.  

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Four

In our four week lecture we went over the concept of AI (Artificial intelligence), which for me was probably the most confusing aspect of the course. The concept of art as a catalyst was another aspect of the lecture, and a case study about a library in Singleton. 

In our week four tutorial, my group began with the creation of our empathy map

For Says we had:

What’s the point?

Where do I even start?

Is there stuff in here for me?

What do other people do in here?

Do I have to just look at stuff?

Maybe it’s designed for other people.

For Thinks we had:

Why would I go to a museum 

Im not reading all that

What are museums even for

What am I supposed to do here

Do I just look at stuff

Museums are boring

Everything is outdated

Is this place not for me?

For Does we had:

Usually forced to go

Compares to other more fun experiences

Wanders around aimlessly

Avoids going 

For Feels we had:

Uninterested

Bored

Tired

Empty

Uninspired

Anxious

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Three

In our third-week lecture, we began going over the idea of empathy and followed along by learning about the idea of empathy maps and personas for our assessment. 

By our week three tutorial my group and I sat down and discussed our idea, finally deciding on the museum idea, aka the Museum of Art and Culture (the MAC). Our brief was to make the MAC more relevant to young people, and so we used a reverse brief with reference to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) of good health and well-being, quality education, reduced inequalities, and climate action. We also set up a group chat on Instagram to communicate about the project. 

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week Two

In week two we learnt about the origins of art thinking and went into detail about some case study examples. Art and Design thinking was defined in its early years, by Thomas Edison as a way to display a full spectrum of innovative solutions through design. (Brown, T. 2008,). There are six essentials that go into art thinking. These are as follows:

Forming a common language between one or two disciplines 

Risk-taking

A sense of play

Devoid of organisational structure

Freedom from conflicts

Framing practice with contemporary discourse.

The idea of Design making and Design thinking are two separate ideas. Design thinking is a concept created by the IDEO, which involves the elements: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. These are different from the ideas of Design making, where design making is actively creating something that didn’t exist before. (Thomas, P. 2016.) 

In class, we made up groups by writing our names and degrees on Post-it notes and sorting them out so we had the widest array of differing degrees. We also learnt about Wicked Problems which are defined by their inventors, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber as (Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. 1973):

No definitive formulation.

No “stopping rule.” 

Their solutions are not true or false.

No way to test the solution to a wicked problem. 

They cannot be studied through trial and error.

No end to the number of solutions or approaches.

All are essentially unique.

Can be described as a symptom of other problems.

The way a problem is described determines its solutions.

10. There is no right to be wrong.

However Wicked problems also include problems associated with the effects of both social and natural systems. (Wahl, DC. 2017.)

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References

[isabellapdesn2002]

Week One

In week one of DESN2002, we started on the basics, beginning with human-centred design approaches. Human-centred design is a method that allows for design thinking to fully conceptualise and address an issue faced by either a society or a business. It is best described as a creative form of problem-solving that allows for a more comprehensive array of new solutions (Brown, T & Katz, B. 2019). Some human-centred design models include the IDEO, Stanford d. School, Design for America Student Innovation Firm, and the Double Diamond method. Within all these modes of design thinking, five major phases are featured in all of them. These include: 

Context/Problem framing phase. 

Idea generation phase. 

Prototyping phase. 

Implementation phase.

Reframing phase.

For further detail, here are some of the notes I took for the lecture:

For our tutorial, we did a ‘toast experiment’ where we were given post-it notes to draw a guide of how toast is made without words in order to explain Wicked Problem solutions to us. We were told to order them to provide us with a better perspective on how to communicate visually as well as work in groups as we all silently grouped them together. 

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References