Sarah's

I find that I don’t usually specifically think about values when I’m designing. I think that I certainly subconsciously do think about them at work because I work at a Christian school where I design with specific values in mind. I don’t think that we necessarily should or can allow our personal and political values to inform our design. It depends on the project and the ultimate outcome. Are values appropriate or not with the subject or message of the design?

Reflect on your experiences with disruptive wonder, as described by Kelli Anderson in the video “Kelli Anderson: Disruptive Wonder for a Change.” Are you open to creating disruptive wonder? Is the notion new to you?

The idea of creating disruptive wonder is a new concept to me. Kelli Anderson did a great job creating human experiences that pushed normal expectations. I’m open to creating experiences that push expectations. All of her examples were interactive creative ideas that would surprise you. I really enjoyed and was impressed with her foldable card. Rather than expecting to just open it like a normal card you opened certain points that then showed a story of receiving and opening your card. What I didn’t enjoy was her example of a newspaper. I felt that it was a little too much by adding false feel good (to their group) stories masking as real New York Times newspapers. I think it was pushing a quasi socialist agenda and maybe making a maximum salary would make some people happy but not everyone. The happiness was according to that group not necessarily to everyone. I personally would not like to have a maximum salary.

I felt like I was able to do well with Exploration A. I was happy with my final project, however, I would have liked to had a better printer or had been able to print directly onto the plastic. I liked the process of this project but I also wish I had the entire project to help choose the original word in our list of three. I felt like I could have had more to work with if I had not just picked a random every day item. I’m still having difficulty understanding how the mind maps link together. That’s probably my weakest part of the exercise.

I’ve been working on finding inspiration online and around the city. I’ve been trying to think outside of the box and find a way to make brushing teeth and flossing more appealing. I’ve been trying to find inspiration in things like gift card designs, store signs, magazines, flight instructions, etc. I think that I still need to work on waddling down exactly what I want to do. I find that I tend to go down too many rabbit trails and end up waisting time. I wish I could choose a path and stick to it more early on. Hopefully I can start doing that more in all of my projects. Although there is still need to research, brainstorm, and find the best way to present the solution to the problem.

How have “thinking wrong” and confronting your heuristic biases impacted your process of exploration thus far?

I’ve found that I personally do have that strong connection and ideas immediately. I found that in our explorations they came out first. The fact that we went back and forth so much with our lists forced me to think outside of the box more and move past the biases. I think we need to do this more often and I plan to try to move past my wrong thinking and heuristic biases as I continue this project and other work. I’m not sure if I have a procedure to do that but I want to make it a point to push myself farther when collaborating and brainstorming.

Prior to doing the react playground assignments in Project A I was a little stressed out. Sometimes it takes me some reading over instructions a few times to make sure that I understand what to do or remember all of the parts. I didn’t like the idea that we only had 20 minutes in one sitting and had no idea what we were going to do. Once I opened the assignments and saw what we were doing I understood why you wouldn’t give the instructions and I really enjoyed brainstorming with these words. My three words were toothbrush, practitioner, and vivid. I felt like the word practitioner was the most difficult of the three maybe because I don’t tend to use it as often. I use a toothbrush everyday and vivid could be considered a design adjective so it can describe so many things. It became easiest for me to think about synonyms, then association words, and then antonyms last.

On the react part I felt much more at ease since I knew what we were doing. It was little difficult to come up with more words because the ones that were already on the lists were things that popped into my head. Overall, I enjoyed the experiences so far for project A.

Review the models covered in Hugh Dubberly’s “How Do You Design?”. Have you identified any steps that should be added to your own creative process? Please provide justification for your thoughts.

After reviewing Hugh Dubberly’s “How Do You Design?” I think that collecting feedback would be helpful for my creative processes. I tend to only get feedback on copy but I think that once I have brainstormed and have ideas that going back to others for feedback or even once I have pieces sketched for feedback would be helpful. It would be better to do this towards the beginning of the process rather than at the end. I often work on admissions print ads and normally I just use the same idea/campaign and create different similar ads with a variation on the photos used etc. But then when I present it to the admissions director she would want to tweak the copy and tweak the photo etc. I quickly learned that I should go to her for feedback at the start to find out what she thought would best work with that publication. Certain audiences need certain things emphasized. This has helped me quite a bit so that I can start with more feedback rather than re-creating the first ad or creating multiple options. I honestly haven’t incorporated feedback in my other projects but I believe that it would be very helpful and would make my work better and life much easier.

Many of my steps are flexible and tend to overlap into each other as I’ve noted above. I appreciate any time that I can work in a collaborative environment to brainstorm. I think having other creative people around to bounce ideas off of and to offer ideas is my most effective type of environment to work in. I just always don’t have that available. I also think it’s helpful to have people in collaboration who are well organized and who bring different perspectives to the group. Even someone who isn’t “good” at brainstorming can bring insight. Our team has broken into a group of people who like to brainstorm and who don’t like to be included but I’ve found that when everyone is included those people who don’t like to brainstorm bring information about audiences or experiences that they have had. I mostly work in a school setting and we don’t have a lot of research for our target audiences. It’s sad but I’ve found this to be the case in may schools. Our best research seems to be word of mouth and conversations so this can also be a place where unexpected “research” can be done.