Having spent many hours in
lectures filled with little class involvement or interaction, I really appreciated this classes
take on “hand's on” activity based learning. There was a perfect balance of introductory
lecture that would segway into an interesting activity which made the learning process
much easier and more exciting. Obviously the overlaying topic of the two day
course was on the varying aspects of design and steps within the design process.
I
enjoyed learning about how the design process is a structured approach to generate and evolve
new ideas. Where as previously I thought of design as something more simple and with
less applicative steps, I was very interested in the breaking down of the design
process into five steps. I learned that while it is relatively easy to skip over the first few
steps, it is in fact the first few that build the foundation of the problem and provide a
structure to begin ideation leading to prototypes to solve that problem. It may seem easier to
skip over certain parts of the design process, but each one is necessary and important to the
process as a whole. One thing that I had not really put much thought into before but
realized the important difference after a small exercise was the difference between
observations and interpretations. It is very easy to interpret something without considering the
list of observations beforehand. Interpretation is making sense of data where is
observations are much simpler and easy to make overly complex.
I will admit that the
most exciting part of the course was the hands on action of prototyping. When you get past
the idea of a need for an intricate or complicated prototype and realize how simple
and function oriented it needs to be, I found it very easy to add on to previous ideas or to
scrap them all together and build a new one without much difficulty at all. This
obviously payed off as our team were chosen as victors and prototype held in the highest
position. Thank you for the opportunity to take this course and for taking the time to teach
us. It was a great experience and the knowledge I've gained I will surely take back home with me.
Zac Cordner, USA, Texas
