I signed up for this class because I wanted to take something that was outside my “comfort zone.” But it turns out that a course in industrial design (I thought it was just general design) was too far outside of that zone– I am not really a “materials” person. I don’t have a woodshop; I don’t sew or build things. I do ceramics, but for me ceramics is about art, not design. Plus, I’m not good enough to create genuinely new kinds of functional objects.

Mostly I work with words and ideas, and as the daughter and sister of graphic designers, I do like to work with images and text on a a page or screen.

I began this class identifying a “gap” that I thought to be both whimsical and real: a birdfeeder that cannot be destroyed or subverted by squirrels. But I had no idea how to create even a rough prototype. Sure, my husband does stuff like this all the time. Our house is full of Rube Goldberg contraptions. But this is a project I wanted to take on myself. So I switched my project to something I happened to be working on concurrently: a design for incorporating book reviews into a magazine website. No longer out of my comfort zone– but at least now I could do the assignments.

What I found most useful about the class was that it gave me a structure for thinking about ideas that I already understood intuitively. I did all of the matrices and other exercises, and the end result was always the same as what I would have done anyway, without going through the process. But I found it useful to have the tools to validate my own choices and ideas. As Professor Ulrich pointed out in one of his lectures, it’s often useful to be able to supply this supportive material to a committee.

I took pages of notes on every lecture (and screenshots of the illustrations.) I don’t know if I will refer to them in the future, but I think I’ll put them up on this site for reference if I can figure out how to translate the files from the Apple Notes application I used.

One other thing– although these assignments were graded by peer review, not instructors, I was surprised by how invested I got in the feedback. My scores (I think) are near perfect (early on, I was rightfully docked a point for a sub-par birdfeeder photo.)

Here is the review I posted of the class on courseratalk.org.

According to the course notes, this was to be a short week because of the Memorial Day holiday. And I guess that’s good because– how is it already Thursday?

I stayed up last night to do the student evaluations. The rubrics are getting harder to juggle, and the scale, well at least last week, was wider. In general, I was very impressed by the projects I evaluated.

One designer simply did not complete the assignment– he only uploaded the images that were carried over from the previous week. There was a note asking for the evaluator to give him until Wednesday, but since it was after midnight I felt I could only give him partial credit set-up of the assignment.

Another did what we used to call a snow job. A ridiculously generic set of user needs and a matrix that could serve as a cartoon example. But really: what is the point of trying to bluff your way through a noncredit course?

For the most part, however, the projects I saw demonstrated skill, thought, innovation, and an investment in time. I’m not sure I would actually want any of their products. The silliest was some kind of chairlike structure to fit inside a hammock so you can work on a laptop. Seems like there would not be much of a market for that one. But, even so, this designer and others did a great job creating thoughtful matrices and impressively crafted prototypes.

I have to remind myself that even though I am now working on a project to do with a website, which is something I already know how to do, I am still learning a lot about the process of development of ideas and products, and how ideas are brought into society. I really wish I had the tools and experience to go forward with a squirrel-proof-birdfeeder, but if I’d kept on in that direction I would have been stuck.

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.