dominiquedesignthink

[dominiquedesignthink]

Final thoughts

19th May

A few final thoughts before I submit this…

I think that our class has produced some quality work this semester that has taken a lot of effort and on everyone’s part. Its been such a pleasure working with such a nice group of people and it has made this project really fun and enjoyable. The fact that we have managed to pull this all off during a global pandemic and without actually seeing anyone face to face, is quite an achievement. I think I’ve gained so much confidence in myself throughout this semester and have learned so much about the design thinking process and all of the ups and downs that come with it. I’m really excited for the second semester and especially keen to actually be able to see everyone in real life again.

[dominiquedesignthink]

13th June

I'll just quickly edit this… 8 hours later

I always seem to underestimate just how long it takes me to edit my writing.The proposal key findings ended up taking all day to edit and rewrite, which made me a little stressed out as right now every single second of my time is very precious with a lot of work still needing to be done on my case studies, article reviews and the 505 report. It's going to be a pretty hectic week. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

The Pros and Cons of Procrastination

10th June

I am learning a lot about my work process in this course. I tend to come up with my best ideas at the very last minute when I am doing an assignment. I let the concepts brew in my head for weeks (yes I also procrastinate a lot) and then in the last 24 hours, before my assignment is due, I found myself coming up with all the really best ideas. It's quite frustrating as I have so little time to get them down and put them into a quality piece of writing/work. Sometimes, in desperate times of frustration, I wonder to myself why I didn't start on this assignment weeks ago, but then it also seems like there’s something about that last-minute rush that I need to motivate myself - but sometimes it takes time for ideas to form. If I could get a good balance between the two - the last-minute motivation without the stress/sleeplessness that it brings, that would be ideal. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

When your group members go MIA

2nd June

Unfortunately, as this project is a university course, this means some members are working on top of the project and their work commitments take away from time spent on the project, which is completely understandable, however, it has made communication very difficult and slowed down our groups progress immensely. It was also very unfortunate that the team member putting together our slides seemed to not be aware of the deadline we were working in and was also not responding to messages on teams, which meant we had to start the slides from scratch the night that they were due. When working on big and time-consuming projects such as this one, the project somewhat becomes part of your life, and I have often found myself, working on the project or talking to others at after midnight or on weekends which is perhaps not something that some of my group members for the presentation were up for. I am optimistic that this is not going to be as much of a problem when working on projects outside of uni where everyone can devote their full attention to the project. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Communication Problems

30th May

The communication between group members for the presentation has been really difficult. Between technology problems, members not turning up to the 503 classes, as well as English not being the first language for some members, organising and making sure that we are all on the same page, has been a challenging task. It was also very difficult to spread the workload evenly due to 2 members not being on the 504 and 505 team and therefore not being able to contribute much to the organisation of the key findings content. This is highlighting the importance for all team members to be aware of the greater project and to stay informed in areas that they may not necessarily be working in. However, these struggles may not necessarily be found when working outside of a university context, where (I hope) people in the teams are more engaged in the project and have a much better understanding and interest in the content of the project. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Postgrad versus Undergrad

28th May

It has been a very different experience doing this post-grad course compared to all my undergrad units. Erica mentions over and over again that post-grad is a lot more self-directed which has taken me a bit to adjust to. I’m so used to having set assignments to do and lots of reminders, I think its been a really important thing for me to learn throughout this course is to take initiative with tasks and take it upon myself to step in wherever I can without being told to. I think, in the first half of this semester, I wasn’t stepping up as much as I could to help out with different tasks and felt like I was just waiting for someone to tell me what to do. However, now that we are nearing the end of the semester, I am feeling a lot more confident in myself and think I have been taking a lot more initiated and contributing to the group a lot more. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Presentation Group Work

Tuesday 26th May

This weeks class was dedicated to group work for our presentations. We established roles that everyone could take. It's quite hard to get the members who are not in the other units involved due to their lack of knowledge about what has been happening in the research unit which is where our key findings are coming from. Therefore, the Seb and Amanpreet will mainly be helping out with the graphics of the presentation and myself and Jess will be working on the content. Unfortunately, this will mean that there is an uneven distribution of workload, however, there is no real way to overcome this without compromising the quality of the project.

[dominiquedesignthink]

26th May 

Visualisation of Survey Results

It’s cool to see my ideas for the survey visualisation come to life thanks to Phil. As I'm not a graphic designer and have very little experience in putting graphics together, it's great to still be able to be involved in this process and the conceptualisation part. This is the beauty of having a multidisciplinary team and collaborating. Being able to come up with the ideas without wasting hours trying to figure out how to use graphics software. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

24th May

Today Jess and I undertook the massive task of going through all of the information on the Trello boards from all of our research methods to identify the Key Findings to include in our presentation. We anticipated this would take around 3-4 hours but of course, it ended up taking about 6 hours. The Trello boards had findings from all of the interviews, surveys, as well as background research on children's brain development and learning. We also went through the empathy maps, the stakeholder maps and the brief. We used the affinity diagrams method which involved writing all of the key findings down on sticky notes then putting them up on the wall under the category that they belonged to. We ended up organising, then reorganising, then shuffling again, taking down headings and adding new ones. In this process, I realised how many different ways there are to organize information. By the end we had worked out a way to organise the information in an order that tells a story - starting with the background information then going through each key stakeholder to pinpoint the findings from the interviews than lastly arriving at the new problem statements that we managed to identify. It wasn't until the end of the process that we were able to more clearly see what the real problems were. When writing out the new problem statements we started coming up with ideas that we had never really thought of before, without even intending to, it just started happening naturally. It would have been nice for the whole 503 class to have this information, however, the process of getting to this stage takes so much time that unfortunately, I don't think it could have happened any earlier. 

I enjoyed this process and due to my background in psychology, my experience in sorting through research and organising it into reports has been useful for this part of the process. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Surveys

23rd May

I have been going through all of the results from the surveys which has been quite an interesting process. Michelle and I put together the questions for the parent survey which involved a lot of tweaking and editing to get to the final product. After analysing all of the results, however, I can see that a lot of the questions were not that relevant, and I don’t think we ended up getting nearly as much information from them as we could have. As it is my job to go through all of the surveys to find the most important bits of information and it turns out that a lot of the questions don’t seem that relevant to include At first I thought it was hard being limited to just 10 questions but, now I think that 10 questions should be all you need to get the most critical information. Although it is easy to reflect in hindsight, it was impossible to see this during the process of creation and, creating good questions is something that can only really come about from practice and experience. So hopefully the more I do this, the better I get. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Article Reviews

22nd May

Coming from a psychology background, I’m used to reading textbooks with a very set structure of ideas to explore. This is quite a contrast to the field of Design Thinking which is such a new field of study that it does not yet have much structure to its different areas. In the early years of its conception, a lot of the academics using the process were not operating under the term of design thinning yet which also adds to the complications of reading literature in this field. I am enjoying the process of finding and connecting the information and ideas through reading different articles rather than just reading out of a textbook which can be very dry. I’m also finding it interesting to see how much this field has evolved in recent years and wonder where it will go in the future. The more I read about design thinking, the more potential I realise it has. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

The Pointy End

22nd May 

I feel like now that we are at the end of the research phase of this project, I feel like we are emerging out of the mess and onto the other side with the endpoint now insight. As I am part of the Key Findings group for the presentation, it has been a little bit overwhelming to think about the huge amount of research (which probably isn’t even that big in relation to other projects) that we need to go through. Just from my interviews alone, I have gained so many insights and to think that we need to combine everyone's insights to come up with the key ones to present in just 15 minutes… this is going to be a bit of a mission. In saying this, I’m excited to see what we come up with in the end and tie all of those loose strands together. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

19th May

Group Presentations

In today's session, we split up into our groups for the presentation. My group is working on the key findings which I am happy about as this is probably the part of the project that interests me the most.  It is going to be a bit of a mission to sort through all of our findings that we have from our research to identify which ones are the most important but it will be a really useful process to learn how to do. In our groups' meeting, we started by identifying all of the research methods that have been used so far and listed some of the key findings from my interviews. Unfortunately one of my group members wasn’t able to use her microphone which made communication quite difficult but using the chat box helped.

[dominiquedesignthink]

11th May

This week I have been sketching out ideas for the Discoverland exhibition. I have never done much illustrating or visualising before so this is a new process for me and I am enjoying it more than I thought I would. I started with a list of some ideas/concepts that I had in my head which I then narrowed down to what I thought were the best ideas, and started drawing them out. At first, I started with some very vague concepts but I have found that each time I sketched it out, the idea evolved and until it became a lot more comprehensive. When I got into the zone, lots of ideas started flowing and I began to think of concepts that I hadn’t even contemplated at first. After posting these up onto the Teams forum it's actually quite interesting to see how everyone’s ideas seem to be revolving around the same themes

[dominiquedesignthink]

Tuesday 12th May: 

I had a go and drawing up a service blueprint for SciTech. It was an interesting exercise to do as it made me realise how many different aspects there are to a service and all of the things that go on behind the scenes which customers are unaware of. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Online Collaboration

Although I do think that working in an online space and using blackboard collaboration for classes has actually been working out ok (better than I expected it to) it is still very frustrating not being able to do this group work in person, with face to face contact. I have been reading the book “the art of design” by IDEO’s Tim Brown and the chapter on brainstorming highlighted how important it is for collaboration when coming up with ideas. No idea is formed by just one person - one person may come up with an idea, then this makes someone else think of another idea - and you get a natural flow of ideas, thoughts and innovations to each other's ideas - before you come to a final product. So no one idea can ever just be coined by one person. Although this has been happening to a certain extent on blackboard collaborate, or maybe in a more delayed fashion, than the immediacy of all sitting around a table and bouncing ideas off of each other - it is becoming apparent that there really is no replacement for sitting around a table and brainstorming. After COVID i am going to have a whole new appreciation for class time and being able to see real-life people in the flesh again. Hopefully, it will all be back in the classroom for semester 2. 

[dominiquedesignthink]

Tuesday 28th April

In this weeks class, we sorted through some of the concepts that we came up with from the word association game and tried to rank them. I actually thought this exercise wasn’t that helpful and simply ranking the concepts didn’t really help us achieve anything. Our time would probably have been better spent ideating around the concepts that we liked. 

We also did an ideation activity on how we use play to learn.