I’m a little discouraged. Throughout the week I’ve tried to imagine how to approach the assignment of  exploring ten concepts of user needs in graphic drawings. While I can imagine these things, I really can’t draw them– I just don’t have the facility. Even the 2-point perspective chair assignment seems daunting. I think I would need a whole week on the chair alone, or more, to do a really good job.

I meditated about this problem while driving up to New York to bring my daughter back from college. Then it occurred to me that, in other areas of my life, I do go through the same steps and iterations described by Professor Ulrich– I just don’t create graphical representations.

This week I had a project to incorporate book reviews into the literary magazine I edit. I had some review content, and the problem was how to best place it into the magazine so that readers would be able to find it, and so that authors (of both the reviews and the books being reviewed) would be able to link to it. Without going into detail, I could easily come up with a list of 20-30 user needs. I spent the better part of the day creating different designs and iterations before coming up with the version I decided to use. Although I did not make sketches, I did everything else in Professor Ulrich’s process. So my questions are

1. Is the takeaway that I should be making sketches while I work through problems, as a way of keeping a physical document? I have tried making sketches and notes, but they slow me down– I get very bogged down as I try out one concept, than another, and I lose my forward thoughts while recording present thoughts.
2. Is there any point in recording a process that I am already doing? I don’t just want to throw in something from my present life, just for the sake of continuing the course.