Now that the semester is nearly at a close, I can honestly say that this has been one of the most demanding semesters we have completed at college. At times the On The Job assignment has been completely draining with an almost constant stream of tasks to do, and Culture Vulture has been much harder than I expected too.
Looking back at On The Job, – the professional project working in a team for a live client - has been quite a demanding project and I have learned so many valuable skills and knowledge from just the one assignment; handling clients, handling teammates and just general project management. If I think back to the beginning of the assignment and contemplate that I didn’t have any kind of clue what or how to project manage a team, I can see how much I’ve learned. The experience has been one of the most valuable ones I have had on the course so far, and has come at a perfect time on the course when we are almost ready to go out and find full time creative positions (more on that later in this post).
Handling clients is one thing in my current job that I don’t get much experience of, so this assignment has taught me a lot about customer service skills that I can take away with me and put into practice. Also, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being a project manager for a few months, and I think it would be something I’d love to do in about 10 years time or so. Never for one second have I felt bothered about not getting to do the designing of the website; I’ve just enjoyed being in a more advisory and managerial role for a change. And comments from the client and Craig and Mirhad suggest I haven’t done a bad job at all.
The Culture Vulture assignment however – reverse design process to design a Trexi – has been worlds apart from On The Job. I originally said I wouldn’t find it much of a struggle to come up with new and fresh ideas, and to that extent I don’t think I did. When it came to coming up with good ideas though, I struggled towards the end of the three weeks. On reflection I think it would have been better to have just two weeks of being creative and three weeks building, as I think we all underestimated the size of the feat of creating our products and displaying them on a website.
Even after completing the reverse design process I still struggle to see the merit of being creative towards an unknown finish and then choosing a previously conceived idea once you have been told the product. It isn’t a method you could repeat in a real design situation, and it wasn’t a method of working that I particularly enjoyed. I did gain many things out of the working this way and I think I became more creative as a result of the process, but I just don’t see any practical benefit of working this way in the future. Maybe that was the intended purpose. All that matters is that I have got something worthwhile out of the assignment, and I most certainly have. This assignment has revealed all sorts about my method of working, and most importantly has made me appreciate the usefulness of the sketchbook when designing a lot more than I previously have done.
And finally we come to the realisation that we are fast approaching the end of the course, and ultimately – full time jobs. A scary and exciting prospect all at the same time, but a very real end is fast approaching. I’ll miss the course that we’ve been studying on for 2 years for so many reasons, and the course has taught me so much about design (and essentially fuelled my passion for the design industry to begin with) that it will be sad to see it end. I’ve still yet to decide exactly where I want to go when I’ve finished the course, but this is something I will be seriously considering over the Christmas break. Bring on the final leg.
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