Three More Sprints: Reflective Thoughts on the Lecture, Resources and My Own
Counting down to the end of this module. This module was rather overwhelming in terms of content and independent studies altogether. I did enjoy the projects, but I definitely would have loved to have some more time to work on the projects. The module did feel like I am on a bullet train on overdrive at times… in fact last week I just needed a couple of days off to get back at a moderate pace and start fresh. But anyway, enough talk. As expected, this week we are to start putting together the selected project in response to the brief. I had already started doing some wireframing of the app earlier this week and watched some tutorials on how to work in Figma for app design. The plan for this week, is to start working on the UI, and possibly prototyping of the app, so that I can collect some feedback.
About This Week’s Lecture and Resources
As per usual, I always go through the content published for the corresponding week. Lately, the lectures were more like a presentation of case studies, and this week, the designers were asked to describe a project were they and to think in a ‘revolutionary manner’. Some interesting topics were brought up. One of them was that of the process of a project being also the outcome itself. It was a bit confusing at first, but when I watched the promo video, it made more sense. This was brought up by Torsten Posselt from Feld. They were approached by Volks, were essentially they were asked on how they would present the idea of ‘autonomous driving’. Posselt himself said that is was a challenge as no one in the studio was particularly keen on cars, and their client did not provide any particular briefing or guidelines. To which the outcome turned out to be a presentation on how one would like to communicate with a car, or with machines in general. I was an interesting project, even though I could not wrap my head around exactly how they went about the project from start to end. Could be the case that Posselt gave a very condensed description of the project, therefore a lot of details were omitted.
Thinking ‘revolutionarily’ can also be interpreted as choosing to take on projects that take you outside of your comfort zone, hence forcing you into exploring uncharted territories within the creative field, or else, the project itself is rather unique. As creatives, we yearn the idea of being the ones to create ‘revolutionary’ or ‘groundbreaking’ work. The case with Accept and Proceed was the latter. They were asked to rebrand Canary Wharf as a newly developed residential area as opposed to the industrial areas people were all too familiar with. SImilar to this, a quote from Experimental Jetset in one of their presentations sums this idea of ‘revolutionary thinking quite perfectly: ‘we are uncomfortable with the notion of reproducing reality. We want our work to be part of reality; not an imitation of it’.
The Upcoming Week?
Always inching closer to the finish line…. It is a very interesting module, yet I would not mind to get it over and done with and enjoy some form of Christmas break. This year was one big blur. I can say that this course was a distraction from what is going on in the real life, but I think that in normal circumstances, I still think the quality of work would have been much, much better. Just need to sum up some more energy to last me a few more weeks, than I get to reboot for 2021.
