Reflective report Specialism in an Interdisciplinary World

May 2021 MFA Product Design making

Reflective Report Design Specialism in an Interdisciplinary World

María Morales Die

INTRODUCTION This document includes the reflection on the activities carried out and the knowledge acquired in the module design specialism in an interdisciplinary world throughout this academic year with a special interest in analysing new skills acquired in comparison to previous knowledge.

Application This section analyses the skills applied in the different projects that make up this module that does not strictly belong to the speciality of product design.

D&AD This project is the furthest removed from the product design of the ones I have done during this course. It is a visual branding design for a fictional audiobook that requires skills related to graphic design, and in particular, in my case, I decided to take it as a challenge to my illustrative and pictorial skills. Drawing and illustration is an area that has always attracted me a lot but the truth is that due to other issues and studies I haven't developed this skill as much as I would like to. With this project, I decided to force myself to make an illustration by hand to exploit this skill. The final result does not fully represent my intentions although I revised and readapted it but, this process indeed took me more time than I had planned to spend on that aspect of the project so I decided to leave it as the final result that you can see now in the final project.

RSA Material World This project has more to do with product design than the previous one, yet it explores a field in which I have no experience such as fashion and clothing manufacturing. Being one of the first projects of the course I remember that not having much idea of what was PAGE 2

required, I did extensive secondary research on the subject until I decided on an approach, leaving the design process part significantly less developed also because I proposed a type of material that I didn't know how it physically simulates and my lack of experience prototyping pieces of clothing. Even so, I consider it an interesting proposal that combines different fields of design and requires different skills, such as textile design and experimentation with new materials.

Making as thinking The skills applied in this block that do not belong to the field of product design are discussed more extensively in the course report, but to sum up, thanks to this block I gained skills and knowledge in areas related to programming, electronics and components and graphic design, as well as applying a way of learning about manufacturing methods that I had not experienced in my previous studies, more experimental and without too many restrictions.

Complimentary learning This block consists entirely of learning skills not related to one's speciality. In my case, I attended two of the blocks belonging to interaction design, intangible interactions and tangible interactions, which gave me the knowledge and initiation in programming and assembly of simple electronic circuits that I have been applying in other projects.

Minor Project From the beginning, for my minor project, I wanted to create a design with interactive capabilities. I struggled to determine the purpose of the project at the beginning because my approach was unspecific, which overlapped with time spent on specifying the design process. Even so, I was able to apply some of the skills I had acquired in further learning by experimenting with Arduino. I would like to see more time spent on this part of the project and experiment with more mechanisms myself.

Shadow and Shade This project is also discussed in more detail in the course report, but in general, it was necessary to apply skills related to lighting design, electronics and graphic and packaging design.

Skills To sum up in general the new skills that I have acquired during this module are grouped into electronics and programming, lighting design, graphic design and also other skills related to the representation of information such as web design and video editing of which I had almost no previous experience. This has been one of the points in which my design process has changed the most concerning before taking this master's degree, I have found it necessary to learn new software because of the online nature of this course, which I had not considered learning before. Another interesting part of the interdisciplinary process is that I have applied knowledge gained from previous experiences such as my knowledge of electricity based on my previous studies or even graphic design or drawing.

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These new skills have allowed me to experiment more in my projects and to approach them from a more open point of view, although in some respects I would have liked to experiment more in a more physical way, which has been more difficult this term.

General As the name of the module indicates, the work for this course requires the student to delve into other fields of design that are not their chosen speciality or discipline, which opens the door for exploration and the expansion of your vision as a designer and allows discovering new assets to add to our own. On the other hand, sometimes working with disciplines you are not that familiar with can give a feeling of uncertainty in regards to how well the projects develop.

Given that these trimesters we have been attending the course in unusual circumstances, the interdisciplinary learning has been affected due to not being able to meet up in person in some cases, making a different knowledge learned in the different blocks difficult to connect and expand the relationship between disciplines. But, overall it was possible to see the usefulness of the new skills acquired and how they could be integrated into our set of skills for future projects. This also was made more obvious in the projects of the second term were having already interiorized the knowledge acquired during the first term it was easier to apply interdisciplinary skills to the different projects.

I consider I was lucky enough to be able to attend in-person classes during the first term on campus and engage more with a more practical approach to learning than I was used to. For the product design masters, we got to use the workshop facilities to learn new manufacturing and prototyping techniques by jumping ahead and experimenting with a first concept idea that changes and develops as you learn the capabilities and disadvantages of different method and tools. Is a learning methodology that I had not experienced until now, and I found that is quite freeing to being able to work with only the physical constraints of the methods applied and the materials, without being afraid of the failure of the outcome, as it becomes part of the process of the design and allows you to improve or to change direction and try new things. The only difficulty was to connect what we learned with the other blocks of the course. I was able to apply some of the new techniques learned in this block to the multidisciplinary design projects, but I feel I did not exploit that possibility enough. The rest of the blocks I engaged with proved to pick my interest and curiosity. For my additional blocks, I attended the Tangible Interaction block and the Intangible interaction block from which we learnt applications in software and hardware. But it also made me consider that I don’t think that often of the different ways that people could interact with my designs, being always more focused on viability as a product designer. I wish I had taken more advantage of the skills acquired in these blocks and applied them to other projects, I considered this for the lamp building task but I didn’t feel accomplished enough in my capabilities to finish the project in time without breaking something. Still, I want to expand more of my skills in this area because I think it could bring interesting outcomes in the future. I tried this approach on more projects during the second term, but unfortunately, the learning conditions had shifted to be completely remote which took away access to resources and implied certain communication issues. Either way, the projects developed during this period applied multidisciplinary skills in the way that was possible to do.

Design research is not an area I was familiarized with, and I think is good that we acquire new methodology and approaches to it. It still feels too broad of a field in my personal experience and still has to get familiar with this area and applying the methods PAGE 4

to help develop my project. Again, I failed to make the connection between the material taught in each block until the end of the first trimester where I feel I understand better but I still need to learn how to look and apply this method correctly. I still think this is because we cannot meet in person so the contents of each block feel like they belong to their bubbles. During the second term, I made an effort to develop my skills in this area and I think I managed to succeed partly at least having a better understanding of them, although I recognize I still have to work on them.

The multidisciplinary design projects were the most challenging aspect of this course, but also eye-opening in a way. This is because to meet the brief requirements and also find a way to represent your work digitally forces you to learn things you didn’t think of, like video editing or graphic design. They also brought the chance to work with other disciplines and try to see the different ways the same brief can be approached from different perspectives.

First-term projects: The firsts projects were difficult to approach because, in my case, I did not know if the approach I was taking was the correct one and I fell into working more towards the research to prove that my idea was somewhat viable than developing the actual final product.

The second one, the contactless brief, I had more struggle trying to represent the idea and overexplaining myself and the concept. I found myself a bit overwhelmed over how to communicate my idea properly and wanting to know more about different media.

And recall what I already was supposed to know from previous experience.

During the third project, which was a group project with people from other disciplines we got to combine skills from our respective fields, and I feel this time was the closest we got to work in an interdisciplinary setting. Part of this was possible because some of us were able to meet up in person which helped to communicate better with each other and come to agreements.

The final project is the one where I went further from my discipline. It is a graphic design project that I undertook as designing a product(image) for a specific audience. I applied different skills like illustration reminding me of the great variety of tools and skills I have at my hands that I normally don’t consider.

Thinking back on all these different project one realizes the number of different skills and knowledge used and how being more versatile and open can help develop ideas further. Even though it can become frustrating in some cases because of the feeling that what you know about a subject or your capability with a certain skill is not deep or good enough.

Second term projects: The development of the projects in the second term was affected by the new circumstances of online learning. Nonetheless, it was possible to develop design concept and model applying interdisciplinary skills, but I have to add that the experience of doing projects completely remotely and during confinement affected my creative process somewhat and I noticed that it was easier to get stuck at certain stages of the projects or to lose concentration, which in some cases became frustrating.

This course has opened up the way I view design which sometimes I recognize can be a constraint due to my previous academic experience. Now I’m more open to integrated PAGE 5

different aspects of new and old learned concepts in my work, but I still to learn how to connect different aspects and disciplines and blend them correctly. It is been a very interesting and different type of learning, because of the practical approach and also because of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. But, overall I learned many new things and I see the practical use of having some knowledge in different disciplines added on to the one of our choosing. Even if at some points the design process for my projects suffered due to the current circumstances, I take it as a learning experience on how I process my work and in which conditions I can work better.

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