Boom, done. Week 12 Friday

So, my presenting skills weren't the best today, they deserted me. What am I talking about, I dont have presenting skills haha. However, my cupcake skills were badass. It was an awesome shared lunch, a nice way to end the semester I think. Its nice to just have that moment where you can go, we got there, we finished, take a breath, eat.

Week 12 Thursday

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We aced today. Not even a joke. Sophie had a handin and still needed to print shit out, but we knocked out the design of our dossier, editing the shit I had written for our dossier and we made our presentation. We were at boss level and we nailed it. On a less positive sign, Im not excited about presenting, who thought presenting was a thing that should ever happen. Its just not fun yah know. Anyway Im really happy with where we are, this paper has actually been great for me and Ive really enjoyed it. Which is a big difference from the previous semesters vcd class where I reached breaking point pretty much.

Week 11 Friday

WE ARE ALMOST THERE!!!!

So Im going to be doing the dossier information and all that and Sophie will be doing the animation and the other stuff (fixing it up and all that). In more exciting news. WE HAVE MADE A GIANT LEAP FOR MAN KIND, WE HAVE A NIG IDEA AND A POV THAT WORK!!!!!!!!!!!! Just all of the exclamation marks are need at this point. I did all the illustrations for the animation today in class, like a boss. We have been really good at working during class time which is something I've actually struggled with in the past. I grew up as that kid that just did everything at home and wasted time at school. So this is a nice change I feel like we are really getting there and its working and all that jazz.

Week 11 Thursday

First of all, what even is sleep and can I have it yet. Sooo we are still struggling a bit with our Big Idea and fixing our POV to make more sense now that our idea has changed so much. Once we nail those down we will be fine I think. I mean we are really close to where we need to be with them, Tim says we are almost their. Sophie says she can do an animation for our presentation which I'm pretty excited about, because I cant animate and I think it could present our idea in a really cool idea. Ill just have to draw some new things for it and all that which I dont mind.

Week 10 Friday

So it was just me today, Sophie was sick. I kept her up to date with the feedback we got from Tim when I talked to him. He just let us know that we didn't have to be so serious, like our idea didn't have to paint the issue as something so dire. Where it would actually probably work a lot better in a space where we painted as something more as an issue that can be fixed but its not world ending. I probably haven't worded this well at all, but you know. He also suggested that we add a part to the app where we can assign tasks so in the activities like making pancakes the children dont get missed out because the parents are trying to rush through, be more efficient, or whatever. Both me (and Sophie when I told her) though it was a good idea to look into further.

Week 10 Thursday

INTERIM CRITIQUE DUM DUM DUUUUUUUUM

So it was good getting new eyes looking at our work. Feeback about tha drawings I had doe seemed to be really positive so thats always nice. However, one person just wrote this massive amount of stuff that we had already done just not presented and even though it was probably a good thing that the feedback followed everything we were doing it meant that we didn't get as much from other people where we could have got insight into what else we could look at doing.

Week 9 Friday

So today we wrote what we thought was the perfect description of our big idea. Apparently it wasn't. Funny how that happens. I think we ended up describing to much what we were actually going to physically do, you know, Instead of talking more of the metaphoric shit or whatever is the right term for this.
The fourth year that came and talked to us was really helpful. She was easy to talk to and willing to help which was awesome. She gave us some great ideas on how to get people aware of the app and their 'issue'. That using spaces they frequent could be a good way to go for it. She also let us know about 4th year and that we should just take time for ourselves these holidays to experience things. This way we might something that we truly love (that might not be design) that we could look into for our 4th year project.

Week 9 Thursday

So funny thing happened. We were all given this issue to solve/ work with in groups. Only one group didn't suggest a community garden. It was funny when group after group kept on suggesting this. I mean we all had different ideas on how our gardens would work but I thought it was really interesting that we all went in the same direction.
After that we got planning on what to present to the fourth years who are going to look at our work tomorrow. We wanted to make sure we could get across what we wanted in an effective manner and all that so it didn't come across messy and not thought through. We cut down the number of pages we thought we had to do as well by combining two of the steps on our app.

Week 8 Friday

So Journey Mapping. Yeah, we were like imagine we are 40 year old office workers with a couple of kids. Not easy. I tried to think of what my parents were like when I was younger. Our biggest trouble was thinking of how to actually make them aware that they have a problem. As Phoebe pointed out we cant just be like YOU HAVE PROBLEMS< USE THIS TO SORT YOUR SHIT OUT. You have to take it a bit easier on them, let them discover it for themselves otherwise they might be a bit more resistant to the ideas suggested to them and what not.

Week 8 Thurday

The big thing today was to make things customisable. If its not customisable these days then people are less likely going to want to use it because it won't suit what they want/ what they think they want/need. We also were told that learning and homework were a big part to look into in the development of our book app thing. If we can get it all down to what we need it to be and it includes learning in terms of development for kids then it could be really helpful and useful.

Week 7 Friday

So today I had this presentation for Enterprise after class which I was massively freaking out about (naturally) so my focus might not have been completely on the class because I was worried about our slides, talking and all that bs. I think at one point in one of our feedbacks our idea got compared to google plus or whatever it is. Not the nicest thing to be compared to, however its was really helpful and it gave us an idea on where a better direction to go towards is.

Week 7 Thursday

So in class we presented our ideas. They liked aspects of what we had but we knew that we had to change shit. We worked out that targeting them while they are actually at work might not be the best way to go because their boss might not be the happiest choppy with whatever we propose in the end. If we target his/her home life then its up to him/her and their family to make things work which they will want to, obviously. We came up with this idea that they buy this book calendar thing where you get a new activity to do with your family everyday. Just to help stimulate a relationship. Stimulate is a bit of weird word choice actually haha.

Week six friday

Today we did this activity where we had to come up with 20 ideas in 20 minutes. I think we went really well. I was a bit shit because I was knackered but Sophie came up with some awesome ones. Sharing a couple of better ones with other groups showed us in what kind of direction we could look into further over the break. However both me and Sophie are going home so the only contact we will have will be over the internet so we will just have to shared our ideas that way, and meet up again in week seven before class.

Week Six Thursday

As a big group, Sophie, Georgia, Laura and I worked together to come up with several ideas in the SLIP workshop. We managed to separate them into a couple of good groups and so from there we realised that we didn't have to necessarily think of it in such a large way, we could come at it in a really small area of their lives and hopefully that would have an impact on everything else.
We also made a couple of POV statements. I though it would be a good idea to come up with one from two different stand points. One was from Daves and the other was Felicity (the wife). I think they really reacted well with each other and could be something we explore more into in the future.

Week 5 (after Hand in)

SOOOO, me and Sophie had planned to stay together as a group because we thought we worked well together and equally. We were also wanting to team up with Georgia and Laura however Tim told us today that we couldn't, that a group of four is just to big. However we have decided that we will pool our research together so we get that much more research without as much effort. We are preparing to interview people so we can get to really know our target audience. I think we will find out some really interesting things if we can find the right people to interview, because we all know that some people just aren't the best at interviewing (being interviewed?) Im probably one of them actually. Its really weird though that our hand in was this week because we still have that one week to go before the mid semester study break thing. Yet it feels like we've finished something. I dont expect great numbers of people turning up to class next week.

Week Five

The Last Hurrah before Handin (and the run in with a very very negative computer)

Ideate

This was Tuesday night btw. Once again using Ideate as my create label tags thing. Who even knows. My brain is FRIED. So we got together (obviously) to finish this puppy. Everythings going well, just have to fix the info and all that jazz. Then boom, computer shuts down on us. Luckily we were at the beginning and had only just kinda started doing stuff on indesign. We keep on going, had pretty much just finished making all our references into APA then boom computer just shuts down on us again. At this point I could have cried but instead we chose the positive force that is singing spice girls songs (So tell me what you want what you really really want). That song has some seriously bad lyrics (if you want to be my lover you gotta get with my friends). Like seriously spice girls what were you trying to teach young innocent 90's kids. Once again I have gone of on a tangent and I apologise (its to late to apologise, its to laaaaaate). Anyway, it took us a few hours, a few close heartbreaks with the computer deciding to be an evil &*(@#*%!@$*%)(#*%(@#*%)@#(*% we finished. 

Its Printing Time

Oh dear lord. Just no. Your website says you a3 spiral bound. You dont a3 spiral bound. Good god. Sooo we stapled it. Yeah, we did. Regrets, a little. But its to late now. I mean we finished, it was a bumpy ride (esp at the end, ermageeeerd). Now because I realise that we both have to hand in a pdf version I need to get Sophie to email me the file BUUUUUUT both of our internets dont like us and its like a snail pace ind of thing. You know, it reminds me of the time where Dial Up was life. Which was, for me, only eight years ago. Sucks being from the country (semi country). So this could take some time for it to send to me, me download it, then me upload it. I guess Ill just listen to some Michael or something (beat it, beat it, mumble mumble mumble).

Week Four Friday

Doom and Gloom (joking, well only kinda)

Test, Ideate

Tim why do you kill our hopes and dreams like dis. We know it was a kinda shit idea but other binding options aren't great either. Annnnnyway. Now we are going to spiral bind it (I know euuugh, shock horror, grossness but come on its stress in the office). Now that I have got the doom and gloom out of the way lets move onto nicer things like realising this is due in next week *cries deeply*. Well we found out our problem areas we need to address/ fix before next week. We also found out that someone didn't know what commonplace meant. Seriously. Commonplace. Seriously. But no really, seriously. That was literally a point someone put in our feedback. I think we are changing it to a more basic word now. IDEK. At times like these I just need to listen to some Fast Car by Tracy (love you Tracy) or some 90's boy band songs. I dont actually have to much to say about this time because well its just classic class time, yah know. On a side note, frozen fingers makes typing a less then fun thing to be doing but its gotta be done.

The Exchange where their were only three people (including myself) that turned up so Donald joined our group (thanks Donald)

Exchange, Define, Empathy

So at the exchange their were only three of us and one of the others is in my stream and I had already seen her work and discussed it with her so yeah. I was quite interesting to hear what (I think his name is Tony but Im shocking with names, thats a problem I need to address pronto) Tony had to say about his spatial project. It was a completely different kind of direction and made me have to really put myself into a different position and kind of try to empathise with his I dont know if its target audience or whatnot. Anywho. He was talking about making a internal kind of community which seemed really cool. I would go into more detail but the words I'm looking for keep on slipping out of my brain and its all technical jargon that I dont necessarily understand anyway. I did find his approach wuite interesting though. Even what they kind of do in class with quick sketches was quite interesting. Donald gave us all some really good points for our work and it was super handy having him talk to us, especially because we had such a small group. 

Week Four Thursday

Heading (jokes) That moment when the camera is forgotten and your partner has class after class and you have to fix and change shit for class the next day!!!!

Test, Prototype

So yeah, we first started up exchanging with the group who's pretty much doing the same subject as us (i've mentioned them before). They had pie graphs, we don't. That caused a moment where I freaked for a second. Then I realised we can add pie graphs or whatever, it wasn't the end of the world. We got some all right feedback from them but thought that because they were doing the same subject as us they were to close to tell us about the imagery because they have all this background knowledge on it already. Going around and looking at others kind of calmed me down a bit because I could see that we were all working at different paces. Some still didn't have imagery, just an idea. I kind of freaked for them a little bit. I think it helped seeing how other people/ groups approached their subject so we could reflect differently on our own. Most people just wanted us to fix the info we were giving and the back page (our desired action) needed attending to. 

Getting together after her class finishes and going through the sandwich hungers (again)

Ideate

This is the moment where we really realised that our scanning idea failed, maybe its because the files actually failed to scan to our emails and we had left uni for the night and we had class the next day. But anyway, I kind of just skipped to the end, I can still feel the anxiety of the failure of a moment. What we found out is that a lot of people just leave coffee cups around Block 12. Like a surprising amount, do they belong to people or have they just always been their... The feedback from class was to start further out hen bring it back in tighter like the building up of stress or whatever so we did that. It took time to try and get angles that we actually wanted and the light was doing weird shit. I feel like we kept on taking a step forward and then two steps backwards. We had massive hurdles. Possibly (definitely) just mental ones. You know how it is. Maybe it was just me, I dunno. In the end we got shit done for tomorrow. 

Week Four Homework before class

Taking de photos with Sophie

Ideate

My definition of Ideate also comes across as the creation process thats why I used it. If thats not what your wanting, oopsy. So we caught up to take our photos and both realised we weren't as prepared as we thought, woopsies. So we had been thinking we would you know take our photos. Turn them black and white. Print them out. Write our shit on it (our stats and whatever). Scan them back in and then print it out again. So that didn't really work out like we wanted. We also wanted to highlight certain lines but realised that it wasn't going to work how we wanted it to. A moment of panic then hit us. And then we were like nah we will just have some of the type handwritten and some not or whatevs. It was pretty late at night and we forgot that we used different phones so we were like NOOOOOOOOOO the next day when we separately were adding our info or whatnot. This post is certainly not feely enough but I dont know how to describe my feelings or whatever for this post. Some was hunger as I was waiting to finally eat the sandwich i brought for my lunch that we needed for the photos. So much hunger. I dont know, just the typical working/homework/creating feelings you know. I felt like our images we made were good enough to share with the class, I was happy with where we were at.

Week Three Friday

Class Time where we shared shit*

Test, Ideate, Prototype, Define

*Shit, as in everyones work where we aren't feeling great about it but we are getting there. 

Theirs this other group thats doing pretty much the same subject as us and they sit at the same table. I always see that they have double the stats that we have and I just don't know where they are finding them. Maybe they just have better google searching skills then me and Sophie. Who knows. Anyway its quite interesting to see their approach to this as well, with the whole not including people and whatever. With the word generating task we ended up doing, it was really helpful. We came up with a way to progress the idea of stress building up over a day. I think that approaching it in a kind of building up of stress through accumulating (is this even the right word, I don't even know mate) items could be a really cool way for us to, you know, show what we want. We just have to get it right, get it tight (*dance break* get it right, get it right, get it tight, get it right, get it right, get it tight,). Im actually feeling really happy with the progress I feel we made in the class today, we had some feedback yesterday and today that I thought was a bit useful from students and tutors. Sometimes with feedback you just end up feeling beaten down, but these last couple of days we got some places where we could really take strides forward which is awesome. We are coming together sometime before class next week to photograph our plans and such. I feel like I should be talking about how my tags more but thats just all in the process of what we did in class time and not how I felt about shit. Sooooo, maybe its obvious in my writing or maybe it isn't but it did happen I just cant think of a way (right this moment) that I feel I can express myself in a way to clearly show these labels/ tags (Are they labels or tags, make your mind up blogger). That last sentence didn't even make much sense *eughhhhhhhhhh*. We tried our shit out in class, got feedback, drew some shit up, came up with some words and ideas and edited some of our points. Nailed it. 

Week Three Thursday

I'm not much of a Diary writer, never have been so please excuse me if its not personal enough, I just struggle to communicate myself in this form.

The Photography talk

Empathy

The talk for me just told me that sometimes those moments in life that we just pass over are sometimes the most poignant in terms of impacting an audience or whatevs. That to be able to so clearly state what happens on the day to day in a clear/ beautiful or not way can sway a reader. viewer. If you can find these points in peoples lives then your design (especially for this brief) could present an idea so much clearer and easier. 

Class Time

Prototype, Ideate, Define, Test

The work I came into class with today was really really really raw. Funnily enough for Barriers we both came in with the same imagery (which we ended up scrapping, typical!!). Annnnnyways, I found that we are definitely getting a much clearer idea about our overall idea though their are still a couple of areas that we are having issues with. Barriers was one, we had a couple but they seemed kind of odd and cold in a way, same with the client. Our desired outcome at this point, we were told, was to narrow. We could kind of see how. Personally, I'm finding it a bit difficult to come up with a way in which we can visually show this in a style that people can appreciate without including people thats is cohesive, thats kind of the job for tonight really. Oh, also, we changed things in class already with the images, they are all without people however, once again, we need cohesion and probably a bit of beauty.

Week 2 Friday

Meeting up again this morning in class with Sophie was obviously handy. We both came back with info from different sources that all seemed to correspond well with one another. I personally found our talk with Tim was really handy in defining and re-iterating our 8 thingy-me-bobs. He told us where he thought we had some solid stuff so thats always nice to know that you are somewhat on the right track, if only you need to take a step to the side or ya know. We didn't manage to share our summed up idea to our classmates before the exchange and Sophie was unable to go to hers so I went in blind but the peeps from the other design areas seemed to get it to some extent, I think we were all just a little bit overwhelmed and a bit nervous, new people and all. It was awesome to hear how the other design peeps are approaching the idea of wellbeing, it will be interesting to keep up with how they develop and continue their projects alongside ours.

Week 2 Thursday

Today I felt a lot better about what was going to happen. The future was, how to put it, defined more. At the beginning of class I knew that I was going to go with the depression side of things over my physical welfare researched side. Having to cut that down (depression) individually helped me get a good grip on what I think had to be done and now I have the opportunity with my partner to push that idea and combine both of our ideas or whatever.