My Past Projects - Part 1

 I think while it is important to look at how I actually design something, it is also important to look at how I come to design something. To do this I want to look at some of past projects from university and work out how I get to the designing stage, which includes the research stage, ideation, and the lead-up to the final piece. Even me writing this part about what bits I want to look at is a look into my design process stating with research trying to get a base of knowledge about something and then starting to think about how I will take this knowledge and apply it to my designs.

I decided to start with a project that personally I am very proud of, in the latter half of the second year we had a project called " live design brief" we were given the choice to pick a brief from a set of competitions being held that year and while I may not have won anything I still feel this project was where my research and designs shined however looking deeper into this project may show to me some areas I could have done better.

Like with most projects I always start by unpacking the brief set before me, the same is true for this project the first few posts of the blog are dedicated to me unpacking the brief (question in this case) and trying to understand what I am meant to be doing. I think this is what helps me to produce my designs without the base understanding of what is being asked I'm not able to produce designs to the level I want. 


One thing I noticed with this project was that I used mindmaps a lot to get my head straight and just throw ideas down onto the page. Even in this project one of the first things I did was create a mindmap trying to dissect the question and better understand it, clearly, this is something that works really well for me and helps otherwise I wouldn't use it all the time. 


 Another thing I use a-lot are lists, much like the mind maps I think I use these lists to get my ideas down onto the page and start to think about them. Because I do this a-lot it must mean i'm not that good at thinking about things in isolation, clearly they need to be added to the lists or mindmaps to start thinking about them.

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