Progress Tutorial - 9th March, Monday
My progress tutorial was with Georgia. Showing her my work and and getting her advice is amazing as she always gives me amazing advice.
She told me that she really liked my progression and how I improved over the course. My project proposal was perfect according to her which gave me some satisfaction. She told me that I had developed a variety of different ideas and now I should go into a narrower space. The example that she gave me was that if I'm making a product which would improve the tubes in some way, I should choose a particular direction of improvement. It could be cleanliness, theft, smell etc. After choosing a direction, I could research what all was already going on and then develop new ideas on how to solve problems in that particular chosen direction.
Apart from this advice, she liked my reflective skills which made me happy and she told me that this project is looking fine up until then.
5th March - Workshop Day
The Scamper workshop took place at 11 in the morning. I have to say that by far it has been the best workshop for me. I have the most fun actually doing this workshop.
In this workshop, we had to come up with some ideas first. After that we had to choose a particular idea.
Now, with this chosen idea, we had to step by step make changes to it.
SCAMPER - Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put into another Context, Eliminate, Rearrange
These words each meant some change in our first idea. For eg. Substitute meant that we had to substitute 1 thing from our idea. It could be the function, the colour, the material etc. Like this, we changed our original idea many times, for each of the above words.
This was a great activity as firstly we had to do it under some pressure. That made me quick and focused. The activity helped me generate so many variations of the same idea. I understood then, what could work and what couldn't. It made me think of the same idea in different scenarios, reminding me that an idea can always be changed. After the activity, I had the same idea put in different situations which also led in the making of some new ideas.
In the 2nd half of the day, me and my group (Social Design) did 1 of the workshops that we were supposed to do - Workshop 2 (Recording Ideas)
This workshop's aim was idea generation itself. We thought that we would choose 6 words (descriptors) and 5 ideas per descriptor but only a minute for 1 idea. That means 30 ideas in 30 mins.
The descriptors had to be somewhat related to your theme of your project so that you could make ideas which could be useful for your project.
The descriptors were - Circle, 90o, Intuitive, Simple, Pair, Light.
This exercise also made me work on my toes as there was pressure. As we were making so many ideas, I completed some descriptors but not all. This activity also led to more ideas in the making and more options to think about. I looked at my group and they also had completed some descriptors and not all. It was a great activity over all as all of us had the same adjectives but different approaches.
This is some of my and my group members work -
28th February - 1st March
This was the weekend in which we had to submit our final drafts of the project proposal. On Thursday, I had spoken to Kathleen and I showed her my draft. She said that my draft needed to be narrower than it was already. A few tips were given to me by her like answering questions like What is the problem? How can design help? etc.
I worked on my final draft on the weekend. I edited most of my project description and gave it a narrow path. As I had already recorded my bibliography, it was easy for me to just copy it and paste it in the bibliography section.
Working in my sketchbook was also an important task I did over the weekend. My research had to be put perfectly and thats what I did.
26th February, Wednesday (Workshop Day)
Wednesday was a workshop day and thats why I was really excited. I chose 'Social Design' as my group so thus I had to do all the workshops with my group.
We were supposed to bring 10 images from our research which were to be used for this project. The name of the workshop was 'Research Analysis'.
The first task was to mix up our images and then create as many themes as we could, with respect to social design. We created themes like disability, job sector, age group, social class, gender. These were decided by everyone and were related with social design. Now, with the mixed images, we had to put these images under these themes that we made. This was a very interesting thing as we had not chosen any image for any theme beforehand and these photos were totally random photos from out different projects. After looking at the themes and images, we sorted them out according to their best fit to a theme.
The video has been attached below.
The second activity that we did was also a lot of fun. Now that we had themes, we had to choose 2 themes and put their opposite ends in a form of a graph. We took 2 themes as age group and income-based. Thus, we landed on these ends - young, old, high income, low income.
Now according to these words we had to make a graph of images which would show how different images are actually located on the income-age graph. Now as these were random images, it was a lot of fun to actually compare each one. We had to see which image is for the elderly, which is for low income group etc.
After that we put our names on the graph which showed that which group of people are we actually making a product for in this project.
26th February, Wednesday (Workshop Day)
Research Week
For my final project, I have a lot of time in my hands and because of that I wanted to work really hard on my research. My research week which was a week when no classes were there, was a productive week. I went deep into the theme that I wanted to work with. By researching through a lot of sources, I found a lot of cool products and projects people have worked on and I really felt that I was connecting with what they made.
During the research week, I found out a lot about London Transportation History. How the tubes started and how the design of the tube map was evolved. My interviews with people my own age were great as I got to know what people think about the underground and also what Indians think about the tube while comparing it to the Delhi Metro.
Products made by designers were really popular in my research. I found out about a lot of cool products which could be using while going around places or while going in the tube and bus particularly. Some products were related with transportation of ideas and information which I thought were very clever.
My visits to the Design Museum and the Science Museum made me learn about the history of transportation and how the future of transportation looks like. I found out about projects about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and saw how AI would work with cars and how there would be a world without the need for drivers.
As my topic is Public Transport in London, I gathered information on what people like and dislike about the transportation system, how the transportation system can be upgraded, how the people could travel more comfortably.
Most of my research was done between 17th - 23rd February.
6th - 8th March
As I had my progress tutorial on 9th March, I started working on updating and reviewing my work over the weekend. I finished all the remaining parts in my sketchbook and updated my workflow. I also worked on my Proposal for Unit 4. I had received some feedback from Georgia and thus worked on that.
2nd March (Workshop Day)
Today's workshop was the miniatures only workshop. The workshop started with some idea generation. Kathleen gave us some key words and we had to come up with ideas for them in under a minute. For eg. She gave a keyword simple, so we had to make something simple related to our project themes.
I have always loved exercises like these throughout the course. I think these exercises make you sharp and give you pressure and thats when actual ideas come out.
After 10 or so words, when I had 8-10 designs, we stopped.
Now, we had to choose 1 design and make a small model out of it. The design had to be presented in our sketchbook in various angles so that the viewer understands. This was not supposed to be our final design for the project but just something to work with and experiment for this workshop.
My design was of a moving stool. In the underground stations, sometimes little kids or very old people have trouble getting on the tube. Some people are physically challenged and thus they too have some problems. I designed a stool which could move on the platform surface with the help of a network of lines. These lines can be situated in the platform and they would facilitate the movement of the stool. The stool comes in different sizes for different heights of people. This stool can be automatically moved or pushed by people to actually help others.
The point is that if a person cannot come up on the train, the stool is brought near to that person and thus they get up with the help of the stool. The stool can then again be moved back or to another place where someone else needs help.
27th February, Thursday (Workshop Day)
Today we had another workshop called the 'Materials Wall' workshop. This was a very interesting and abstract kind of a workshop which allowed me to express what I feel of certain words and what certain words mean to me.
In the workshop, I chose 3 words which best described my project - share, comfort, move.
Now these 3 words have a certain meaning to me. For this workshop, we were supposed to make something in 5 minutes for each of these words. I also made 3 drawings which showed how I feel about these 3 words.
Share -
I made a drawing of the Earth because Earth is the biggest thing that we all share. It is a planet which does not favour 1 over the other. Earth is a symbol of sharing.
Comfort -
I made this because comfort to me is minimalistic, simple, neat.
Move -
Move represents movement of ideas, of people, of objects. Everything in the world moves in one way or the other. It could be movement in the object or movement of the object.
Now, we had to create products which would describe these words.
I only made 2 because of lack of time.
Share -
This is what I made for share. The metal in the middle acts as a body which has to be shared. The different cut wooden shapes represent different people. Thus, the idea is that the different wooden blocks have to share the single metal wire frame.
Comfort -
Comfort for me is represented by neatness, by straight lines, by minimal structures. I used transparent plastic which shows that I'm comfortable with people who are the same as with me and behind me, people who are transparent, who do not change depending upon the situation.
25th February, Tuesday
This was my first teaching day in class for Unit 4. At this stage, my research was very broad, as it should have been but I wanted to ask Tom (professor) about things I could research more about, things which would fall under my topic, things which would make my research stronger. Me and Tom had a small chat and he told me to look at the details of the public transport journey which could be upgraded and which in turn would make the journey better.
As I come from a country which has upgraded it's public transportation system to a good level, I already had some ideas with me and did some research about that. I learnt about a new train which the tfl rail wants to launch in 2020. The underground train will be replaced with a new train which is a much better upgrade of the current one.
The new train would have wifi, more space, air conditioning and would be a single component which is better as it would allow a balance of people in different sections of the train.
Apart from this, I also got to know about new buses that are gonna be launched in London. The design of the buses seems amazing. Although, I did not get to know much about the features of the bus, I did figure out that it is gonna be really updated with technology and will have a modern glassy look.
Like these, I looked at a lot of things which could improve the status of the tube and the buses and would make a lot of difference on the travellers journey.