Final Reflection

As the final reflective journal of the course I think it's pertinent to look back on the semester as a whole and everything I learned about design. Coming into the class, I thought about design more in terms of art and architecture than anything else. What I came to learn is that design is everything from cars to tress, to our own bodies. Design isn't just aesthetic either. It has to have a concrete purpose in order to be considered good design. Image is not enough, it has to aid the development and process of everyday human life. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class. Coming in I was a little skeptical and thought this was going to be more of an art class. What I came to learn was the opposite. Developing a mind for design thinking will help me in the future as a businessman. If I'm working for a company and a new product is on the line I can use the tools I learned about design thinking and be able to effectively analyze the product. The product might be flashy and cutting-edge but if it doesn't serve a purpose or fulfill a need then it's simply ineffective. 

The idea that design should be tailored to the person is what I will remember most about this class. Centering the idea around the person is an important idea in all aspects of life. When I enter the business world, It will be important for me to center the business activities I am involved in around the customer. If I center everything around the consumer I know I'll be successful.

Week 13 Free Response

The Air Yeezy's

 

In all their glory.

For those who don't know, the Air Yeezy Red Octobers are Kanye West's entrance into the shoe world. Made by Nike, only 1,000 were made and distributed. Kanye gifted a lot to those he felt were deserving and the rest were sold on auction blocks.

I think the Yeezy's are a great example of good design. First the sharkskin base looks awesome next to felt-like front. The strap adds another dimension to the shoe and gives it a more rugged, casual look. The ribbed back takes the whole design and really makes it an art statement 

Week 13

Today was by far the most fun in this class I've had all year. All of our materials are pretty much done so it's time to start filming the video. We took a trip to the Rec to film exaggerations of common Rec woes from confusing machines to working out next to a Gorilla-man. We also filmed areas of the Rec we wish to keep and add to the playground like the leisure pool and climbing rock. 

We also finished the poster in class. We put a lot of pictures of concept equipment that would be involved in the playground. There's not much to say about this week because we're pretty much done with everything before.

Week 12 Free Response

 Beautiful.

Sleek.

Practical....

The fork.

I think the fork is a design we take completely for granted. The fork allows us to move away from the primitive style of eating with our hands which I realized was a God-send as I shoveled steaming stir fry into my mouth today

The design is simple but perfect.

We can stab with it, scoop with it, dice with it, chop with it and most of all fork with it.

And looking at the alternatives we have for the fork, I'm happy the fork was invented.

I can't imagine living life eating with chopsticks, I just couldn't do it

The design of the fork is beautiful in its simplicity and practicality. The three prongs evenly distribute the weight of speared food to make sure it stays on and doesn't fall into your lap. The way the shaft of the fork contours to your hand is well done because it's supposed to fit any sized hand from Andre the Giant to a toddler. 

Week 12

 

Week 12 starts off with more prototype work, bringing us closer to a final product idea. Once we nail the prototypes down, we will finally have a complete idea to roll with. My prototype didn't need much addition, however, I did bring a plan for how the dining/seating would be arranged at the snack spot. I want the students to see the entire process of their food being prepared and experience their dining first hand like at a hibachi restaurant. Also, the seating areas are circular in order to maximize socialization.


We also received our first group evaluation. The group we were paired with had generally favorable things to say about our idea. How can you have a problem with a college playground? It appeals to everyone's inner child! Their only criticism was that come presentation time, we wouldn't have enough physical materials to present. Obviously, it's hard to build a whole playground to scale for the purpose of our project.

We also designed our poster in class today. We're keeping the poster simple and letting our prototypes/models do the talking. If we present well, we wont need a flashy poster to get our point across. 
Overall, I think our group is now finally headed in the right direction.

 

Week 11 Free Response

 

I read an article this weekend about a grafitti artist named Banksy and how he rose from unknown grafitti artist to being renowned. It got me thinking about the design of grafitti

To me, grafitti is emotion and expression. Often times, you see grafitti in urban environments in low class areas. I think a lot of grafitti artists do what they do as a way of expressing their individuality and to make their mark on this world. In a large city, it's hard to become noticed so people turn to grafitti as a way of saying: "hey, I'm here" instead of blending into the background.


As far as design goes, it's fascinating for something edgy and illegal like grafitti to have a profound impact on people and move them emotionally. It has to be creative and unique enough while still applying to the people around it living in the area that can relate to the emotion the grafitti artist is trying to project. I think if the grafitti artist appeals to the people, his art can really take hold.

Take Banksy for instance. He went from nobody to a worldwide phenomenon by putting meaning behind his grafitti. He's known to create socially charged art work like his world famous Flower Brick Thrower. 


Since he appealed to a lot of feelings the general citizenry in Britain were feeling, his art took hold and is the reason why he's a household name among street artists.

Week 11

 

As I had time to think about things over the weekend, I became more dissatisfied with the direction our project was headed. It's just way too boring. As a group we're leaning towards improving student health and the only things we have down as ideas are a student quarantine room in residence halls, increased hand sanitizer dispensers and another health center closer to the majority of campus residence halls. There's just no way we can take this idea and run with it. I expressed my feelings to the group and they responded with agreement. So, we took this time meant to be spent prototyping and we scratched our idea and started new. This time around we decided to emphasize crazy and unique while still staying grounded in terms of applicable use.

Our end-product: a playground for students.


The playground would included classic playground essentials like monkey bars and slides that would engage students athletically. It would also contain a leisure pool, foam pit, track, and healthy eating option to refuel after playing hard. 

The next class we came prepared with our individual prototypes. 

I was very surprised with our prototypes and how cohesive our thought processes were. All our prototypes could fit well together to make a finished product. 

My job was to prototype the diner and menu.
  
My favorite part was the menu because I got to let my inner chef take over. I put a lot of salads, wraps, sandwiches, and smoothies on the menu because no one wants to eat a burger after they've just worked out.

Week 10 Free Response

Coming back from Spring Break in Gulf Shores, AL; I've gotten a taste of the sand, sun, and surf and now I'm excited for summer. I don't want the rest of the school to breeze by because I enjoy my time here, but, I'm eagerly awaiting summer's arrival. 

The months of summer mean one thing: wakeboarding, and lots of it.

Wakeboarding is my passion and I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be than behind my boat being pulled through the wake.

This leads me to ponder about the design of a wakeboard boat. The design is truly interesting because the wakeboard boat has to water and shape it into a wide wake allowing for the rider to have a place to take off from, jumping into the air. The wakeboard boat uses its shape and the displacement of wait with elegance to achieve its goal.
The wakeboard boat was revolutionary to watersports when it first came out because the classic bow-rider shape remained unchallenged in its primacy. No boat was shaped like the wakeboard boat and it even employs a large metal tower to lift the rider out of the air. When the wakeboard boat made its appearance onto the scene, it made a splash that redefined watersports and changed my life.

 

Week 10

Now that we've been assigned our groups and have completed our observations, it's time to get down to real work. Before any productive work can get under way, brainstorming has to occur. Brainstorming is essential to the successful procurement of a good idea, they just don't come out of nowhere. We learned all about this in the "When Ideas Have Sex" TED talk and it's very true. If we keep bouncing ideas off each other, we'll eventually narrow in on one we can all take in a good direction. 


We continued with the post-it note strategy and came up with a lot of good ideas and some pretty bad. Our list of good ideas has been narrowed down to improving student health, improving the rec, and redesigning the toothbrush. Honestly, I think our list is a little weak right now as health and hygiene are always in need of improvement, but, if I've learned anything in this class is that you need to design for people rather than awards. We could make a really flashy, elaborate design but if it didn't make an impact on improving students on campus can it be seen as a success? Even though improving the rec and student health is a pretty basic idea, it has great potential to branch off into a fantastic one.
The project management plan was easy and straightforward. As a group we all agreed to get our equally divided portions in on the assigned date and we wouldn't have any issues. We're also sharing equal power. We have a group leader but they're more of a figurehead than anything else.

Week 7 Free Response

Something interesting to me that goes generally unnoticed from day to day is the design of language and how words are formed.

First, words that sound like what they're supposed to mean shed an interesting light on how the design of a word makes it easier to convey meaning. For instance, the word "stomp" sounds like the noise made when putting your foot down hard on the ground. 

the design of word association and meaning is also a very interesting topic. For instance, take Red Bull for example. The word "red" is a very intense word. The color red is often associated with aggression and action. In addition, bulls are aggressive, energetic creatures by nature. Thus, the name "Red Bull" for an energy drink is fitting. Someone who drinks energy drinks needs to be aggressive and focused in their studying.

Week 7

 

This week was definitely a nice change from the normal, every day work in SCA 111. Since it was so nice out, we got to do a bit of walking around.  Our job was to go to the alumni hall and take observations about the basement library and its layout, design, etc. We made observations on how many people there were, what attracted students to the location, the formation of tables, and what was displayed in the library. Once we dissected almost every aspect of the design, we drafted the layout of the library (which was my job). From this exercise, I've become more aware of the design of my surroundings which I believe will help me pinpoint some possible problems on campus for our project.
We also designed a problem matrix for our final project that I think definitely narrowed down our choices on possible project problems. With the different categories like scope, relevance, etc. we were really able to prioritize what we wanted to accomplish and what we thought would be a feasible idea. After the matrix, we're still leaning towards improving student health.
 

Week 6 Free Response

As the seasons start to change from a blistering cold Midwest Winter to a well-deserved Spring, one of Miami's most ridiculous fashion items comes back into the fold. 

The Croakies.

Ya know, these things:

 

What bothers me about Croakies is that they look so stupid. When you're wearing your glasses you have 12 inches of fabric poking out of the back of your head just dangling there. When they're off your head and hanging from your neck your glasses are just hanging around your chest looking useless.

From a design standpoint,

They're brilliant.

They're so simple yet the function is incredible. How many times have you put your sunglasses into the neck of your shirt and they've fallen out due to any sort of movement? My guess is countless times. They also save your glasses from getting lost because once they're around your neck they're going nowhere. Also, you don't have to worry about breaking your sunglasses by putting them in your pocket or your purse.

Hats off to whoever invented this simple yet effective design

Still won't be caught dead wearing them though.

Week 6

It was really good meeting my final group project members this week. I think we're going to get along nicely. No one person is dominating the conversations and direction of the discussions. 

We got down to business right away after introducing ourselves and we started generating some really good ideas. For instance, we were faced with the challenge of finding problems on campus and brainstorming some ideas on how to fix them. We started small and thought about some problems that affect our individual living spaces and then we went big and thought about ideas that had a broader range of affect. We came up with a lot of good ideas but none that I thought would be good for the coming project. One idea, which I thought was the best, was shot down by the majority of the group. The idea revolved around personalized TV and was born from the overwhelming amount of channels offered by premium cable. This personalized cable will give a quick survey when set up for the first time and will analyze what types of shows/channels you are most interested in and create a list so you can quickly access programs you'd be most interested in. My group wasn't really enthusiastic about the idea but I will pitch it again later after some refining.

Week 5 Free Response

One thing that made a lasting impression on me this week was something that occurred in a different class yet still has some interesting design implications. 

In IDS 159, Strength Through Cultural Diversity, we were talking about how different cultures view beauty. Living in our Western culture, we naturally think that everyone has the same idea about what are some attractive qualities to have. The fact of the matter is that beauty changes from culture to culture. Yet human beings of all cultures still strive to attain those qualities through artificial means.

And that's where the design of the human body comes into play.



Take the ancient Chinese cultural practice of shrinking the feet of young girls. In the ancient Chinese culture, small feet were considered a sign of beauty reserved for nobility. Some of these lady's feet get so small they literally can't walk by themselves yet they suffer this torture to reflect the design of beauty.

Now in our Western culture we look at that and think that's appalling. But who are we to judge? Women will cut open their chest and insert bags of silicon in their breasts to make them bigger. Others will literally cut their face and stretch their skin to make themselves younger. 


 Young girls will see models who have gone through reconstruction and think that's normal potentially causing them to have lower self-esteem. Design has done a lot of good in our world but being able to design one's own body might have opened up a can of worms. 

Week 5

First off, I would like to say I thought the speech on paradigm shifts was very interesting. I didn't really know what a paradigm shift was and the implications an event like that can cause. The most interesting part about the presentation was when the speaker talked about Pablo Picasso and how he revolutionized art. Picasso started the cubist movement and took painting from something that was meant to be realistic in image and turned it completely upside down. His cubist style of art projects the same emotions that a "normal" painting would yet it is presented in an entirely different way. To me, that is the definition of a paradigm shift; when you can keep something's core value in tact while completely redesigning it.

 

Another thing I really liked this week was the Thoughtless Acts  presentation. I think the psychology behind the subconcious mind is fascinating. One's subconcious is as much a part of one's identity as there concious thoughts. In fact, I would say that someone's subconcious is responsible for more decisions than they actually think. Anyway, it was interesting seeing our own thoughtless acts after the presentation. Like for instance, at dinner yesterday, my appetizer plate was removed from the dinner table leaving me nowhere to rest my fork and knife I wanted to continue to use. In order to solve my problem, I laid the fork down with just the tips resting on the table and then rested the knife along the fork. 

Week 4 Free Response

 

So I was surfing the web the other day and I came across an article on the New York Times Website about the latest Chanel fashion show held in Paris. 

It was held in a supermarket.

Um.

What?

Apparently high-fashion is too high-fashion for an actual fashion show. The fact that these models are wearing thousand dollar pieces while strutting past cans of cat food is utterly ridiculous. The juxtaposition is hysterical.

The whole design of high-fashion is just so stupid. I understand that high-fashion is considered more art than functional wear, I get that. But, the lack of functionality is allowing high-fashion to go unchecked. It's now less about design and more about being edgy, avant-garde, and in Chanel's case; utterly random. 

Week 4

I had a lot of fun this week working in our groups trying to find a solution to a problem here on campus. I think analyzing problems in a place as important to our development as our University is a vital process. If we, as students, don't proactively pursue finding problems on our campus, we're sort of failing as students. It's our job to expect the best from our University and demand change when we see benefit.
Anyway, our group decided to reform the student scheduling process which I'm sure everyone has a problem with. My two favorite tools that DARs 2.0 (props for creativity) contains is the random schedulizer and the suggested schedule. The random schedulizer gives you options for your schedule based on remaining classes so you can get an idea of what you want before you tailor the schedule to your liking. The suggested schedule is my favorite of the two (not because I thought of it) but because it's something I wish I had when I was a freshman scheduling my classes. Freshman year I was eager to start my business courses and I killed myself with a semester of only business courses. The random schedule would have helped me realize that patience was better by suggesting a blend of Miami Plan and business courses.

Week 3- Free Response

 

Are you kidding? It's 2014 and we still have the same dangling chip bag problem we've been having since like 1960. How has no on designed a system that ensures you get your chips every time? Luckily i have. If we place the bag of chips at a slope with little gates in between them, then when you order a bag of chips, the gate retracts and the bag slides down the slope and drops down into a containing area. There is literally no way the chips wont come down due to the gates and the force of gravity.