anoushasreflections

[anoushasreflections]

The Fifth and the Final Reflection

This course is officially finished and I am going to be very honest, I am going to dreadfully miss it.

Firstly, the experience was amazing. The class and the instructor were one of the most interesting people I've ever met. We were able to communicate each of our ideas across the room easily and were also able to understand them. We understood how to give suggestions upon someone'd ideas and make them more interesting. We learnt to work together and participate in discussions. During the critique, I learnt to both criticize someone's work, give them suggestions and appreciate it in a respectable manner. I learnt to analyze someone's work and understand it as if It was my own. I also learnt to accept the criticism I received and use it to create the next piece more interestingly. I also learnt to accept the appreciation and celebrate it to bring more confidence to myself. Moreover, I learnt to be more confident during presenting my work as well.

Personally, I achieved a lot of goals that I thought I would never achieve but most importantly, I learnt to not hate on my work anymore. Initially, I always hated my work. Every assignment I did, I thought it was very bad. During the critique, I received a lot of positive feedback from the class and I would always blame it either on my luck, or I thought everyone was too nice. But after I started to progress and started to put more effort into my work, I realized I was a bit too harsh on my self. I started to understand my work more, and I started to respect it, rather than to hate on it. I also started to be more confident about my work, which previously didn't existed. I am super grateful to learn to understand my own self throughout the entire semester. Now I am not that shy when it comes to sharing my thoughts or my work in front of anyone.

Academically, I learnt loads of information that I weirdly didn't noticed. Most of the information I learnt through this course was indirectly screaming from the assignments I did, and I was only able to hear that scream while writing down it's reflections in my processes and I realized that that information was already embedded in my brain and I was using it the entire time. I learnt to be more organized. I learnt to plan out my work while ideating processes which helped me achieve my final goals. I learnt to tell stories through my work, which would either be visually or in a written form. I learnt to iterate, abstract and conceptualize different things, whether they are present in a physical form or not and I also learnt to recognize different practices that people do and recognize different types of knowledge. Overall, I learnt a lot of things that I implement in my daily life and in the future.

I am really grateful and confident that this course had built my foundation really strong. I gained a lot of knowledge academically that I will apply in the future and I understood so many things about myself as well.

Here is a short clip of the messy design studio after a long day of critique :) I will miss this class a lot. Good Bye!

[anoushasreflections]

The Fourth Reflection

So, this assignment is interesting. I have to choose a person that I know well, write an essay on them and present them visually. Many people in class said that this assignment requires a lot of conceptual thinking and I agree with them (hence the name duh). I also think representing someone's persona visually is beautiful.

I chose a person that I think is the strongest one alive. I would not like to disclose their name, or their relation with me. But I would just like to mention that I consider them my other half. I consider them very close to me. Our bond is truly one of a kind. I decided to write on their personality. I wrote an essay of around 500 words and I was not able to stop writing. I realized that 500 words were not as much as I thought they would be. Please read the essay, I know you will enjoy it😅.

Anyhow, I wrote my essay. I symbolized the person as different objects that also helped me visualize them. I think I did pretty well on it and this would probably be my one of the favorite assignments since I finally got to write something (I love writing). Then I painted them and named my painting "The Face of Resilience." In the moment, I was heavily influenced by "The Great Wave" and the works of "Sage Barns." In the end, I came up with a work that I was truly satisfied with.

This assignment is very meaningful and beautiful. I believe it taught me to look at someone's personality, rather than their looks. We were advised to not go over their looks at all, and only analyze their persona which was very significant in understanding the actual beauty of the person. I learnt how to analyze a literal person and understand the importance of personality over looks. I also learnt how to relate someone with something for example, I related the 'rising strength' with 'rising waves' which made me understand the importance of symbolism in writing and visual and honestly, I find adding symbolism to anything beautifies it.

In terms of design, I think this assignment was a way to symbolically refer to the importance of something's function, rather than it looks. I think it represents that a user friendly and ugly product is something people look for, rather than it looks. Of course that doesn't means that the looks of a product is not important at all (not relating this to humans) since that is what people look for, but the use and the function comes first. And I learnt how to extract that and show that visually.

One another interesting thing about this assignment was the crit. We did a silent critique for the very first time. I think this was more effective than the verbal one. I got time to view each of the piece separately and with concentration. More over I was able to get and receive honest reviews from my peers and the professor. The professor thought that I should have abstracted a bit more and I think I could have, even though I am still satisfied with my work (hehe).

[anoushasreflections]

The Third Reflection

The fifth assignment is basically about formal abstraction, to abstract something from a picture of a space and an object. Before studying about abstract art in this class, I always considered it to be foolish. I thought that abstract art is over rated since it is just random strokes and lines. I realized later, how interesting abstract art can actually be and it is not just some strokes and lines that everybody stereotypically think about. It can reflect a person's personality, tell a story, can and can not have any meanings, or just be based on some person's perspective. It is dramatic and requires a lot of thought process. Each line and each blob of paint in abstract art has a simplistic approach towards a complex object that gives me satisfaction about how the world is such a simple place, but we make it difficult. I find abstract art more beautiful now. I would love to visit an art gallery and admire the classical abstract art over there.

For this assignment, our class was divided into a pair of two. I got partnered with an amazing person: Mahnoor Usmani. We realized that our thinking is actually very alike (I feel like she is my other half now 😁). We made the presentation along with 10 abstractions (inspired by impressionism) together and honestly I feel like we both work very well in pairs. I love doing this with her and it was pretty fun!

This is the FIFTH COLLABORATIVE ASSIGNMENT! Me and Mahnoor took a lot of time to think about this. (An entire day!) I realized to how hard it is to abstract things around us. And after abstracting this all, I realize how simple life is and we make it this complex. I also understood how one can abstract almost anything. Even a very simple object can be abstracted in a way that it's easier to understand. The picture that we chose as an object had a cold feeling and we wanted to abstract it well. The mosque, the clouds and the light bulbs were the things that attracted us the most and I realized how we abstracted the feelings and visuals of each of these by the last abstraction. We went through a process of elimination and selection which helped us understand the significance of only the important things. Moreover, in the space picture, we realized the pathway was drawing us in, and by the fifth abstraction, that is exactly what we conveyed. Such a process may seem very simple in the beginning, but it required a lot of thinking and a lot of elimination and selection thought process. I believe I can use this skill of abstraction to identify the most important information of any complex matter which is hard to understand.

I definitely enjoyed working together with Mahnoor. We both learned to collaborate and accommodate each of our ideas in 10 different abstractions. Moreover, we got great responses from both the class and the instructor. They understood our work well 💕

[anoushasreflections]

The Second Reflection

The fourth assignment is about changing the form of the object (vase). I have to make 10 iterations of the vase now. It is pretty interesting since I have to change the form without changing it’s function + I need to think of a good way to present it as well.

It was absolutely amazing since I learned to think out of the box. I went through a very interesting and creative process. I made a morphological table to organize my ideas and also created little sketches of how I want my iterations to look like. I even wrote the little captions for each iterations as well so that the assignment would be self-explanatory. I divided the vase into 2 parts, i.e the body and the base. I believe dividing the vase into two parts helped me a lot in terms of thinking about it's function, which was to act as a container or to hold something.

Through this assignment, I learnt how to design something interestingly, and more user friendly. I realized that one thing could be used in multiple ways. For example, the bowling pin functions to hold something and it is moveable with wheels. I also learnt to target a specific audience through this with products designed in such ways. For example, the skull and skeleton hand is targeted for people that like spooky item collection and the chemical flask one is for the scientists. I also understood the ways I could make a product more interesting without changing it's primary function. An ordinary vase wouldn't attract someone that much, but a vase with a maze game definitely would.

I got amazing response regarding this as well which made me ecstatic. I am surprised that I came up with these amazing iterations and how creative I can really be. Most importantly, I enjoyed making the little head lines to explain each of my iterations. After the last assignment, I wanted this one to be a bit more self-explanatory, and by making this in a form of a catalogue, I did not had to explain it at all.

The elephant one and the skull one was my personal favorite. As soon as my class opened the elephant iteration's panel, they all gasped! It was the reaction that I wanted and expected, and it also made my work interactable. Over all, the experience of this assignment was by far the best!

[anoushasreflections]

The Very First Reflection

Hello, I am Anousha Irshad from Ideation and Processes D3 and this is both, my very first blog and my very first reflection!

This was my first ever assignment. I made affinity diagrams, mind maps and ontologies based on the things that I own. The sticky notes for mind map mostly represent each of the characteristics of the topic. For eg, ‘things  I’m emotionally attached with’ is represented by heart because these things are close to my heart and 'Gifts' is represented with a Christmas tree etc. Moreover in the affinity diagram, each of the box mainly represent the characteristics of each headings that I made. For example, 'Food' is represented by cheese and 'arts and crafts' have stickers and pens. I made all of these sketches without realizing I was sub-consciously relating them with the headings. I feel like these little illustrations will be useful in identifying each purpose at first glance, without actually reading it's content.

Overall, I enjoyed working on this assignment since it would help me make my processes more clearer and organized. Moreover, I learned to draw connections between different ontologies. This would help me recognize any sorts of repetitions or important connections that might go unnoticed. I never realized how organized I was before this assignment and surely I would be more organized in future.