Week 11

Studio class:
Just continued to refine all our touch points, making sure they are all cohesive and relevant to the user (using empathy). Also spent the remainder of the lesson pulling the dossier together, making sure to have all the relevant points laid out. Got some further feedback from the tutor in regards to our POV statement and central proposition. We had our initial ideas down but needed a few tweaking in some places to really get the statement flowing strong.

Week 10

We started this week off with an interim. We joined 2-3 groups from the other stream to exchange feedback. It was interesting to see everyone's ideas and how they are approaching the issue with their touch points. As our app is targeted especially for university students it was super helpful to see how the users interact with our product. In terms of our idea, they found it to be helpful for managing their university life however there were some sections where it wasn't working so they suggested ways we can alter it e.g. messaging systems for tutors and students. Although the messages are filtered for specific classes, tutors may still be bombarded with messages. So one of our users suggested to use our calendar function to show when tutors are free and the students could arrange a meeting with them face-to-face, this way they are collaborating in person. There was also an issue of readability and the size issues of things within the app. The second phase included all streams. It was more of a moment of seeing what others have done and to give and receive more feedback. It was interesting to see what stage everyone is at. I think this will help advance our project as we were able to test our app with our target audience to see what works and what doesn't.

For the second session, we had a lecture on 4th year courses and the hand in requirements for week 6. We then went back into our groups had continued to refine our idea. Over the course of the week we need to start working on our dossier and getting our ideas down in words. Through our prototyping and user testing we found that students have different needs. We need to give scenarios to show how they help different students using the 3 main functions of our app.

Week 9

There was a lecture on design thinking, linking back to empathy and understand your audience/users. The thing that I got out of the lecture is the importance of perspective and how your audience will be use or be affected by your product or service. This is something I need to remember when we refine our app, especially since our initial app design was quite busy. 

For the workshop we had to form a small team and find a solution for poverty from the perspective of a persona that they had created from their research. From the map, we decided to choose the issue of transport and how the persona struggles to carry her groceries from the supermarket and back to her house. It is also time consuming as it took about an hour each way. We came up with various solutions but the one we decided to present was a icecream-like food truck that goes to the bus stops everyday, and people will be able to purchase what they need without having to drive/or take the bus to the supermarket. The truck would have specials everyday e.g. meat, dairy, however they will always contain the necessity such as milk and bread. From this exercise, I learnt that all solutions does not need to be products but it can be a service to help with their issue. We have to look into the perspective of the user and see what suits the matter the best. Now we need to identify areas that we can improve by looking into our user perspectives - university students. 

For the second studio class we continued developing our ideas by doing more user testings. We manage to pitch our idea to tutors, students (our target audience) and some fourth years. They suggested that we really needed to work on how all touch points can be cohesive e.g. visuals, language, colours. So for the remainder of the class we tried to revise our topic a little more so we can have at least all of our touch points mocked up roughly for interim next week.

Week 8

We had a lecture on an organisation called S.K.I.P that specialises in creating solutions for issues relating to physical punishment of children. She mainly talked about using design revolution as an innovation instead of a tool for process and money, and also how the element of design can change the community. The initiative was based on the assumption that all parents love their children but other factors such as depression, stress, alcohol etc has cause them to act otherwise. Instead of focusing on recusing these children, S.K.I.P aimed to help the kids by helping the parents. Through the use of empathy, they come to understand the community by reaching out to their audience and forming a connection and trust bond with them. They also were able to get volunteers who had a similar experience to reach out to these people. She found that going out and creating these connections with her audience has changed the perspective that she initially had. She also worked with her audience to come up with an application targeted to hidden families that may not reach out to them because they are embarrassed or feels ashamed. I think I should use empathy to understand my target audience more and this might mean that my target audience can have a role in designing my prototype. Understanding what they need/want, generating new ideas that I haven't thought of as we are in different positions. I think that letting my target audience design my app will really let me learn about them in a entirely different aspect. 

We had another user-testing session in class. We joined a different group and explained what our app does and who it caters for, also a brief explanation about the scenario before the user downloads the app. After discussion, our user-testers believe that our app was too busy and had too many things going on. They suggest that we really narrow down our idea, possibly focusing on one aspect of our current app, and doing it really well. Instead of focusing on Massey students, we were suggested to only cater for first year students as they will be the ones really using the components of the app. We then presented our idea to the tutor and he believe that we should come up with 3 words that explains what our audiences needs/be interested in our app. We need to think about how we are going to capture the attention of our audiences, how are we going to persuade them to use our app? I think we should consider the importance of empathy and really trying to understand how students will look and use our app. This is something our group can look into further.

Week 7

On Monday's lecture, we had a look at different approaches to design in terms of well-being. It was particularly  interesting to see how other visual briefs were turned into concepts to improve well-being. This will be incredibly helpful in terms of generating new ideas while also getting inspired. However one example brief shown in the lecture (social media) had a similar concept to the one we had planned in the study break, so we will need to generate new concepts that are more innovative and different. There was also a lecture from lifehack where they reminded us to revise on the things we learnt from the first brief (well-being). I think this lecture was a good way to start the second brief as it was refreshing to revise the things we have learnt to keep us motivated for the new assignment. 

In class we used the spiderweb table that was introduced in the lifehack lecture. It really help unpack our topic further and narrow down on the important ideas that we may want to focus on. This was to slowly ease us into more rapid ideation for our topic. We then went on discussing how we improved our well-being in the study break, and I realised that just the simple things including more sleep and spending time with friends and family really improved my well-being. From this I learnt that the things we take for granted sometimes actually makes big differences to our well-being. For the remainder of the lesson, we revised our spiderweb table and started picking the 2 strongest idea that we wanted to carry on further. We also narrowed down our target audience from university students to specifically massey students as we are thinking of creating an app to help improve massey student's university life. Our original intention was to help university students connect with others however looking through our survey again, we realised that 80% of the responses say that students use technology mainly for uni work (especially cellphones as they are more convenient and portable). As for homework we want to find similar existing apps to help create more idea iterations, while also creating some journey maps that will pinpoint the concepts we want to explore. 


For the second half of week 7, we had another lecture on prototyping. It was a good revision to see all the different types of prototyping we can do. The two that stood out most for me was storyboarding and wireframes, particularly focusing on the user's point of view as this will be very important when it comes to user-testing.

In class we were encouraged to generate some quick prototypes under 15 minutes for user-testing. It was difficult to work under pressure however it really pushed us to think of ideas in a short time span. This was also covered in the IDO video that we watched a few weeks back, reminding us that in order to generate good ideas, we have to first come up with some unusual ideas (thinking outside the box). We originally drew wireframes for user-testing however we thought that using the "wizard of oz" method would help push our project further as we want to find out what massey students wants to see in a massey app, and what better way to test this by getting them to tell us what they want. We ended up having an iphone cutout and getting our users to tell us what they wanted to see on a Massey app. This was a very helpful exercise as we were able to get some new ideas that while also knowing that some of our existing ideas are also what others wanted. It was also reassuring to get some positive feedback from our peers and also constructive cristism that will help us improve our concepts further.

Week 6

In the weekends we were encouraged to go off and interview our audience using the matrix table "ask, learn, look, try". Our group created an anonymous survey (broad questions only) to get a general idea on what people think about technology. Since our target audience are students we only posted our survey to student forums.

Coming to class, we separated off into our groups and started unpacking our ideas further. We used post it notes to sort, label, integrate and priorities all the information we had gathered from the survey. Through this exercise we both realised that we might need to generate more broader questions to help us find the issue and target audience that we want to focus on. Over the study break we decided to form more surveys and generate more ideas for us to unpack (especially limitations which will be an important factor that we have to consider when we come up with concepts). The survey will help to progress our project further as the information will help us create some concepts that can help people with their well-being in relation to technology. It will also be interesting to see how people view technology, and how their opinions may differ to ours. 

Week 5

In the lecture today, we explored different issues and how they used visual communication design to solve these issues. One example was saving Troy library, and the designers used a strong negative approach to motivate people to wanting to save the library. They used methods such as signs (burn library books) to create awareness and people took it to their own hands from there e.g. putting the issue up on social media (social presence). 

For today's class, all the streams put out their briefs and went around taking notice of the briefs that they might want to pick up for the next assignment. After reading through many briefs, I found a few that interested me and I may take up on it, although going towards a different approach. 

On Friday, our group decided to go split up to do different topics. I eventually partnered up with another student because we were both interested in the technology brief, but wanted to explore the positive idea of technology rather than the negative. I decided on the technology brief because I find that our generation is heavily influenced on technology and we only really look at the negative side of it but never taking notice how it is improving our well-being. As a constant phone and laptop user, I find that technology has allowed me to find information quicker, contact friends from long distances, endless storage etc. Things that people take for granted sometimes. As a team, we decided to research more on technology and how it improves our well-being, while also listing possible target audiences.

Also had a look at an IDO video about a group of people with different disciplines who came together to reconstruct a shopping trolley. Their dead line was 1 week which put a lot of pressure on them but in the end they came out with great outcomes, some concepts that didn't work back then (grocery bar code detector), now exist in our supermarkets and are used daily by some people. I learnt that to generate great ideas, we first have to put in crazy ideas (thinking outside the box) without judgement, so that we can develop them further and not being too attached to one "great" idea from the start. I also took away the quote "doing then asking for forgiveness", something our group should consider for our project.

Week 4

Lecture:
Clearly identifying that design students are the users brief.
The things that we wanted to get out of this was:
-clarity, defined, tangible stuff, legibility
-understanding, well written, effective
-relevant, refined, crips, enough to go on, succinct
-hierarchy, differentiation from heading and context, overview, context position, navigate
-fluidity, flow

One thing I noted was that design is more than just pretty pictures. We have to consider all the elements (above) and making sure everything is relevant to the topic.

During the weekends we all split the work evenly between us so that when we came back together we can decide what is working well together and what isn't. We can then go ahead and further refine our layouts to make sure everything is cohesive. Some of our photos and type composition was not working well together as a whole so we decided to focus on one specific layout and then applying it to the rest of the spreads with small changes. After the lecture we wanted to play around create more hierarchy within our spreads as they were all the same sizes and it was hard to differentiate the heading and context from each other.

In studio we presented out layouts and received feedback from each group. One thing that was often noted was our type composition (blurry text) and how it really gives a sense of being sleepy. Although type was our main strength it had also became our weakness as we had too much variety with our type composition and it was starting to look a little random. We decided to focus on the one that worked the best and develop it further. After our class feedback, we had a talk with the tutor  about our visual rhetoric. We had a discussion on layered text and how it looked more like repeated text rather than it being blurry. He suggested us to play about with gaussian blur tool on photoshop to really make it seem blurry. However one problem that quickly arise with this effect was legibility. In the end it was really up to us to decide on what approach we wanted to take, and after discussing as a group we decided to combine both the old and new idea together to gain a stronger approach (make it more relevant).

Week 3

We had a lecture on photography which I found particularly interesting as our group had decided that we wanted to use photography for our rhetorical approach. One thing I really took away from the lecture was being able to capture the perfect shot (perfect moment) when you have a free control (using auto) and constantly taking shots of your subject. The mistaken shot may possibly become the one shot you were looking for. During studio time, we presented our 8 points on a3 visual pieces. It turns out that our points were still quite broad and we had to narrow it down further. A lot of our information needed to be re-arranged as it had fit better with other context. To back up our statement, we tried to find statistics that works well together and helps prove our point. In terms of audiences, we decided to focus primarily on tertiary students. Our group also decided to not have a person feature in the images (only featuring sleep related objects) to let the images speak for themselves. I think with this process, it really help us understand our topic a little bit more (applying visuals with context).

On Friday we went through our 8 points again and tried to refined them further and make them more cohesive for printing next week. After pitching our idea to the tutor we were asked to find our core message. We discussed that although students have an awareness about having 8-9 hours of sleep, they don't necessarily understand the necessity of sleep and how it can have an huge impact on their well-being. We eventually decided that our core message should be "is it worth it". An example would be "was your project worth it after having 6 hours of sleep". 
We also went through our photos with the tutor and he suggested for us to experiment with cropping and composition to really convey our idea. One of the blurry photos we attend to retake, happened to be the photo that conveyed our idea the best in terms of being sleep deprived. As previous stated in the photography lecture on Thursday, one of our mistake shots happened to create a brand new idea that works a lot better with our concept. Over the course of the week we are thinking of nailing our layouts and share them with each other next week for some final touches.

Exchange

We split off into our assignment groups with multi disciplines. It was interesting to see how each disciplines are doing different projects but they somehow come together to correlate with each other in terms of well-being. Our group consisted of 4 visual communication designers and 2 industrial. It was also interesting to see how spatial students are also exploring and experimenting with VCD components such as animation. Although they said that they are not familiar with any of the programs, I feel that we could use this chance to help exchange our skills. Industrial students are heading towards a visual approach by creating a hands on product using the aspect of food from which they can interact with. Whereas VCD students are still currently on our research stage, finding stats and written sentences. I feel that in our next exchange meeting we will be able to present our ideas with visuals. As my topic (sleep deprivation) is targeting towards tertiary students, I was able to have some interesting conversation with everyone, from which I can take away and consider in my project.

Week 2

We started the lesson by going back to the brief and unpacking it further, while also looking at the outline for our reflective blog. We were also shown some visual brief examples from previous years to help us get a general idea on what we will have to generate by the end of the brief. For this year, we will have to generate our own images, whether it may be drawing or photographing. I think that this is where the whole design feel comes into it. This was an interesting way to incorporate design and well-being together. The lecture was also quite helpful in terms of making the brief a little more clearer.

We started planning our 8 points, incorporating context and images to help us get a general feel of what we wanted to convey. We then formed groups based on similar topics that we wanted to look at.As a group we started refining and reducing our 8 points to really pin-point on what we are wanting to do. We then presented our idea to two different groups and got feedback as a result. At the end of the day we had to do a 30 second presentation to really convey our idea to the audience. We found that 30 second was too short for us and we had to really narrow down our idea as it is still quite broad. At the end of the day, our group decided that for our target audience, we want to mainly focus on first year university student who has just started living on their own. This exercise allowed us to see what information we wanted to look into and push further ahead.

Week 1

We had an introduction to the brief and some examples from forth year. It was interesting to see how they transform the concept of well-being into a product. One example I found particularly interesting was how a group of people was able to make small changes to assist in individual's well-being by altering a space e.g. making stairs interactive to attract people into walking instead of taking the escalator. We also had a speaker from life hack who further explained to us what well-being is and how they adopted the idea of well-being. I started off this lesson by only having a generic definition of well-being, but after the lesson I was able to come out having a more defined description.

We started off the brief with an exercise where we tried and open up about our most happiest times and the time when myself or someone close to me has struggled the most. Since it was the beginning of a new semester, we were more reserved about the information we wanted to share with people we aren't particularly close with. We mainly focused on more generic things such as uni stress and exercising. We then went on discussing on how we can resolve these problem regarding to our well-being, however we found that there isn't a definite resolution where it can completely fix our problems, but instead slowly aid it and make it less difficult/stressful. Although it was harder to share our problems, I found that this exercise really help me to further define what well-being is. For the next step, I will take some ideas I found interesting, research them further and pick one that I want to concentrate on for the first half of the brief.

We then proceed into writing the ideas that we wanted to focus on sticky notes, and then separated them into similar categories. As a group we had to pick 10 ideas and then present them to the class where we identify the similarities between all the ideas. There was a noticeable trend between the ideas but some went into different categories as they could affect different spectrums of well-being. After this exercise, I decided that I wanted to focus on sleep deprivation/insomnia as I feel that as a student we suffer from a lack of sleep which affects our abilities. Although this is still quite broad at the moment.