stage 6 communication

The main responsibility of a designer is to be able to clearly communicate an idea or a design. To be a successful designer one must be able to communicate to different types of clients. There are many different modes of communication that can be used depending on who you are trying to communicate with.
- corporations
-manufacturing
- associates

When presenting a design there are four different levels on which the information you deal with can be:

 statement- who, what, where and why
 concept- concept boards and sketches to flesh out ideas
 detail- turning the idea into a physical object
 planning- directing information about design into the future

The methods, media and presentation style chosen by a designer to communicate to a client are very important and a designer needs to be well prepared in order to know what they are talking about and believe in their work 100%. Presentation is key.

MAY 25

Today Jimmy gave us the opportunity to work on our final projects. He gave us the choice of staying in class or working on it outside of class. I along with a few other classmates chose to stay in class and work on my project. I am having a hard time deciding how I want to film my final project so hopefully with a little bit of research and some inspiration I will be able to figure it out this weekend and start working on it. I cant believe the quarter is just about over.

a what? a who?

class today was pretty exciting. We played a game that focused on paying attention and communication between each other. The object of the game was to pass around an object and ask the person next to us what it was. They key was to go slowly and use a certain tone in our voices when asking and answering the questions. We surprisingly did pretty well with the game at first but as it got more difficult we had a harder time. The game was fun and i think that most of the class had a good time playing it based on all the laughter during the game.

The second part of the class we watched a talk by Sir Ken Robinson. I liked what he had to say, he was pretty funny and interesting. One of Robinson's main points was to make sure you are doing what you love. Personally I am so happy that I chose to follow my gut and change my major to art. Growing up I always took art classes and enjoyed painting but when college came around I felt like I needed to do something more then just art. At first I had no idea what I wanted to do and slowly I started to get into psychology and social work. My first year at CSULA was spent majoring in social work until one day I realized that there was nothing more I wanted to do then create art. I realized that this hobby I loved could be much more then a hobby and that I should take a chance and do something that I was really in love with. So with that being said I am so happy that I am doing what I really want to be doing. No money or degree in the world could ever change that.

DREAMS- Akira Kurosawa

Today in class we watched the film Dreams. The film was compiled of 8 short films. Each short story contained some of the same reoccurring characters but each one was a separate dream. I really enjoyed the one where the man sets out to meet Vincent Van Gogh. It starts off in an art museum where he is sucked into one of Van Gogh's paintings. As he travels through the painting he encounters a group of people who tell him where he can find Van Gogh but they warn that he has gone mad. The man travels through a field where he finally encounters Van Gogh. Van Gogh speaks to him and tells him that he must continue painting. Throughout the remainder of the film the young man travels through all of Van Gogh's paintings as if he is a part of them. That was my favorite part of this film. I thought the way they made him look like he was part of the painting was amazing and looked great. I think that the film as a whole was very interesting because is mixed art with drama and fantasy. It showed different types of dreams that we have all had and how strange, beautiful and mystifying it is to drift into a semi-concious state. Our homework for tonight and tomorrow night is to plant the ideas of our creative process into our minds before falling asleep and see if we can dream about it. I guess we shall see what happens.....

John Coy

On Thursday evening I attended the seminar put on by AIGA on campus. The guest speaker was a designer known as John Coy. The seminar started a  late because they were having technical difficulties with the projector so we had to wait around outside for a little longer then planned. Once we were inside John Coy talked to us about his life as a designer and showed us slides of many designs he did throughout his life. I thought the talk was interesting and I liked when he spoke about finding our own inspiration and motivation. He said that when we find something we love to do we know it instantly and without a doubt.  If we put out a certain amount of energy into the world we will begin to receive what we are looking for. I thought this was very interesting and related it back to a book I read called The Secret. The Secret is a book that talks about the power of the mind and the power we have inside of us to make everything in life good.  John Coy showed us many slides of his work and things he had designed. My favorite was the invitation for UCLA that had all these paper cutout and looked very detailed and precise. Overall I think that John Coy's message was an inspiring one and that many people felt like they benefited from listening to the challenges he went through to get to where he is today.

JIMMY WHERE ARE YOU!?

Todays class was interesting because we had no professor. Jimmy was out sick so Dustin ran the show. We discussed our creative briefs and threw out ideas on what they should say. We all decided on a few key points as far as the length of the video and the audience, the goal was left to our own interpretation. It was actually pretty funny that with no Jimmy there we still stayed and worked on our briefs instead of leaving after 5 minutes. Tomorrow evening we will all be attending the talk in the music hall with John Coy so maybe we will see Jimmy there.

Creative Briefs

Class this morning started with us re-arranging ourselves in order from shortest to tallest. After we figured that one out ( which didn't take very long) Jimmy talked to us about professional creative briefs. He read out a few examples that he had. Some were long (3 pages) others were shorter (1 page) but they all presented the same ideas. We then briefly discussed our creative briefs for our final project. Our homework is to come up with our own creative briefs based on what we think our final project should be about and then discuss in class with our classmates so that we can come up with one brief that we will all follow.

Stage 5 Modeling

Chapter 5 is called Definition/Modeling. In this chapter we learn the hierarchy of needs  for design and the steps we need to take in order to meet those needs. The hierarchy of design needs is as follows:

Level 1: Functionality- does your design do what it is suppose to do?
Level 2: Reliability- Is it consistent in its performance?
Level 3: Usability- How easy is it for others to use your design?
Level 4: Proficiency- Is the user's experience improved, allowing things to be done better then before?
Level 5: Creativity- Design at its most creative level crosses disciplines and changes peoples perceptions and experiences.

It is very important to look at the anatomy of an idea to understand how it functions. By breaking something into parts it will be much easier to explain to potential clients, manufactures and others. Details and the correct treatment of details along with creating models and samples is a huge part of modeling a design. Modeling is just another way of sketching out an idea, a different way that will bring out new exploration of your design. Personally, I would much rather make a model or a mock up of a design as opposed to a simple sketch because that way it is much easier for me to see and understand what I am actually making and see what type of issues may come up as far as functionality and construction.

When creating a model it is important to keep in mind that the model is real but it is not the REAL thing. When presenting a mock up it is important that your meaning is clear. What exactly are you presenting. Is it a part of the design? The entire thing, an idea? Make sure this is stated to the client in the begining so that there is no confusion. Other factors in creating models and mock-ups include figuring out the problems that go along with scaling a model and how to fix them. Another important thing is to not get too obsessed with the model, trying to make it absolutely perfect because then the design will fall behind. As long as the hierarchy is understood and followed as best as possible then your priorities should be in order.

The last part of this chapter talks about strategies and time management. I really liked the perspective piece on Ian Cunningham. His story about how he "came in through the side door" without really knowing too much about industrial design and worked his way up is extremely inspiring to me and makes me realize that there are so many possibilities at my fingertips.

May 4, 2011-

Today in class we discussed our ideas for games that we came up with. First Jimmy talked about the actual presentation of the boards. He wanted us to look at how they all looked as far as how professional they were. Some of them were hand drawn, other printed using computer programs, some were mounted really neatly and looked very clean, others had issues with placement, glue and tape. For the most part I would say that about less then half of the boards looked presentable. We then discussed the time management part and Jimmy told us that we must always make things look as professional as possible because in the real working world we are going to have strict time constraints and so if we know how to organize our ideas and prioritize our to do lists we will be more successful. One key thing I learned in class today was the right way to put your name and contact info on a presentation. It must be on a small white tag with everything printed on it. This was something that I didn't know until today.

After we talked about the presentation part of the boards a couple of us got to go up in front of the class and pitch our games. I was feeling pretty confident until I actually got up there and forgot everything I was going to say. With 25 people looking at you sometimes it's difficult to get the right words out. After each person presented we talked about their body language and what it portrayed. Some of us crossed our arms, or put our hands in our pockets, others danced around or didn't make eye contact. All of these things are very important when it comes to presenting an idea to a group of people. In order to get people to listen and pay attention to what you are saying, your body language must be inviting as well as the way you look, speak and interact with the people you are talking to.

The last thing we did was watch a 9 minute movie called The Power of Ten. Our homework for next Monday is to create 2 creative briefs, one for the movie and another for our games. This should be interesting.

April 27, 2011- MAD GAB!

Today we spent the majority of class time playing games in different groups. The idea of this was so that we could see how different games work and begin to develop ideas on games. The first game I played was hangman. I played that with 2 other people. The game itself was ok but not too exciting. On the second round of games I played Mad Gab with different people. I was on a team with Astrid and Pen. This game was very exciting. It was a competition, one team against the other. The object of the game was to read out words and have your teammates guess the phrase. The hard part was figuring out what they were saying. This game was easy to understand and fun so it made it enjoyable. We were able to laugh at each other and make fools out ourselves. Our homework is to now create 9 of our own games and bring them to class on Monday.