Week 1
I decided i wanted to learn more about designing with people because i want to understand as an animator what people want to see and what interests them.
Knowing this i can mix this with character designing where i can create the characters personality to give them clothing and objects they would love to use.
I enjoyed the squeeze a lemon challenge we did since it gave me the power to be as crazy as i wanted, being able to put out every idea no matter how crazy they are.
This showed me that as long as i wrote down each idea i could see clearly which ideas would work and which would fail which is important when designing.
The activity were we had to talk to a person we didn’t know within our class was a fun exorcise and really helped us get to know someone new.
Seeing each persons idea only based on looks alone are vastly different the more you get to learn about the person. which helped show that people aren’t as easy to read as some people would assume. And that judging solely on the bare minimum info really wont work in the long run.
Which is why asking for opinions on the people we’re designing for works better since the people will get exactly what they asked for.
The participate in Design video confirms this by showing that they first wanted the area they were designing for to be for both the elderly and the youth. But soon discovered that the elderly were more likely to stop by this area, but that they would prefer to have children in the area.
So they came up with the idea of having a food service as well as benches and swings that could be easily used by both the elderly and youth, this works well so both groups dont feel left out and both can participate in the activities if they wish to.
Week 2
Our first task was to answer the question, product to purpose, “what might you be designing for in 10 years time?” and as an animator i would say id be working more within the entertainment side of product.
This could mean things such as VR (virtual Reality) and working on creating games or movies that you could literally be apart of, be able to move in and maybe even interact with in some way shape or form. People who would mostly use this would be family’s, kids, gamer’s. Id also give a mention to people who would have a disability such as if a person was wheelchair bound they could put on there VR and forget about there disability and enjoy life in the VR world.
“Experts by experience” vs ” The Hybrid designer” an expert would be someone who takes control of the full thing, knows exactly what would look good and how to get it done and will get the best product that would suit the situation but fails to fully give the customers what they wanted since thy never got asked exactly.
While Hybrid’s would be able to work along side with the person so they both can work off each other to get something both the designer and the customer would be happy with. This is why a hybrid designer would be the best choice.
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
Tacit Knowledge – Knowledge that is hard to transfer or pass along through writing or verbalisation.
Explicit Knowledge – Knowledge that is easily shared and transferred through writing or speaking.
Week 3
Had to read the select pages of Designerly Ways of Not Knowing: What Designers Can Learn About Space From People Who Are Blind, written by Ann Heylighen and Jasmien Herssens. the main focus was about a woman named Suzanne who so happen’s to be blind and her travels around a medieval castle.
What was the main argument? and what did they find out?
What i could gather from this text was that the more accustomed a person gets to doing something they’re more likely to have it become second nature.
This is due to if someone is blind for example there other senses would improve to combat this. Hence better sense of hearing, touch, smell and taste.
The other argument to this is how as time has progressed we’ve become more caring with the less abled and we’d make precautions to help them deal with everyday life. An example of this would be how with Suzanne she was unable to fully grasp the surroundings she was in while at the castle due to thee cobble stone being to similar to the draining systems making it harder for her to feel her surroundings, while when she enters a modern toilet built into the castle she easily was able to navigate her surroundings without help.
How are their findings relevant to your subject?
Within the world of animation its difficult to really cater towards fully blind individuals, since animation is pretty much a visual medium, only way’s this could be helped would be through audio description or having interactive elements using smell, touch and sound to bring a deeper connection between the person and the animation.
Other than fully blind, partially blind individuals would find it difficult to watch an animation for many different reasons. If you’re colour blind would an animation showing tons of colours really be as amazing? what if your eyes cant concentrate fast enough to what is happening on screen? would they really want to watch an animation after that?
We then talked about Design thinking, talking about a series of things that go into creating something. Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
Thing is with this idea as an animator we have a different idea on how to create our products. We need to be able to provide ideas of exactly we wanted for our story, testing out ideas and creating prototypes on what the character’s would look like and define there personalities before we could even begin on creating our animations.
Week 4
The idea of today is about empathy and how we can use this within our own subjects. How much do we have to empathise with others to create something that they can use or feel a connection too? honestly within Animation its all down to story and characters.
Reason for this is to tell a good enough story you have to make the characters relateable and interesting to the audience, this can be difficult since there are different people with different backgrounds so having a purely perfect character for only one selected type of person doesn’t work. But to empathise with thee character along there struggle is much easier to follow.
As an example, maybe the character is self conscious and shy, and the story is about a coming of age and seeing this character deal with there problems and becoming a stronger person because of it. This is impactful to people who are shy and are self conscious. but not for other problems.
This isn’t a negative thing however, as the saying goes “to many chefs in the kitchen” the more ingredients added (morals or lessons) to a meal (a movie or animation) can ruin the final dish (Overall feeling a movie goer will have).
Week 5
we managed to watch a video titled ” Personhood Designing for personhood and the self” which explained that a person called Gillian had dementia and she was given this gift box filled with items to help her remember and recall her memories.
She had items such as a house to keep all her items and to put items that felt homelike to her, a branch filled with small notes talking about the people she knew and thought about them. self seeding plants where they added photos and notes to show all the times she’s been with people and important moments in her life. My favourite piece however is the audio box which uses a piece of clothing from one of Gillian’s old dressed which when placed you could record and then listen to past conversations and notes so Gillian would be able to remember talking about them.
Weeks 6, 7 and 8
These weeks were for us to come up with the ideas we wanted to write our essays on.
This was important since i was able to come up with the idea to talk about video games and how they affect people.
But what to talk about? I had the idea of talking about addiction with video games and how people are able to get addicted or why people would get addicted to playing games. But i found that this question has already been fully talked about before and i didn’t want to rehash information.
I then thought about talking about violence within video games. being able to talk about what games would be linked to aggressive behaviour as well as talking about if video games are to blame for violence.
I think this starting off point would be great to research and talk about video games in the media.
I wanted to talk about this topic because as an animator i really enjoy the virtual medium, ether through cartoons, movies and Videogames.
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