Fourth Year: Week 13 Summary

Week 13. A week where we are well underway into our Phase One (or so we should be) and we have to get all of this done by the time class starts again in January. Now that the dissertation has been handed in, all our focus can be shifted to the main project and try and get something conceivable and believable by the end of it if that is even possible any more with the lack of contact time we have had with our lecturers/tutors. So without further ado here is the summary for week 13:

• Monday: I spent Monday in the studio. I got in early so I could do some filming for the video hand in before anybody else was in and was being noisy. Progress was slow as I attempted to fix the problems that overcame the prototype that had stopped working the previous week. Sitting at my desk in the studio it became apparent that everything was going to be coming together slowly and we will all be rushed at some point very very soon.
• Tuesday: I spent this day in the studio again. Trying once more to fathom out the problems that I was having with the electronics. A few hours later I admitted defeat and considered the electronics broken until further investigation. However I will have to look at the electronics at home because Tuesday was the last day I was allocating to the studio before gathering everything together in order to go home.
• Wednesday: I honestly cannot remember what happened on this day. That is probably bad but I can’t really don’t know.
• Thursday: I didn’t do much today either. The wind was strong and it meant that going anywhere was an effort. I really found that out when I went down to Tesco to do some recycling. Apart from that I spent a good few hours in the library to try and plan what I was going to be doing over the next couple of weeks. It didn’t get very far as it was quite cold…
• Friday: No work was done on today. I was just making sure that I had got everything packed away getting ready to go home. I had managed to get all this done early and was really looking forward to going home once I had gotten picked up in the evening. I was especially looking forward to going home so I could open my new Laptop (will make a post about it soon).

There you go. A very short summary of week 13. Not much happened but I have to reel in all my lost time in the coming weeks so I can get back on track for my Phase 1.

Fourth Year: Week 12 Summary

Week twelve has been and gone along with the last of the proper teaching weeks before January. We still have a couple of hand ins to do though so we can’t go on holiday just yet without tidying up a few loose ends. Overall if was a very boring and poor week in lots of ways. Very disappointing and extremely frustrating, but I’ll let it all come out in the actually summary which is coming up just now.

• Monday: Studio day. It was a long and very uneventful day. The promise of being seen by one of the lecturers did not come to fruition as the even spreading of time between people was not done very well. Along with that, they always seem to start at the other side of the studio leaving me until last since I am in one of the corners. I carried on with some prototyping and was considering writing a post about how the sleep diary was failure, which it has been. The day ended fairly early for me as I could not be bothered waiting to be seen only to be disappointed. Course organisational skills are non-existant at the moment. First thing in the morning, I went and inquired about getting my dissertation printed at the university print unit. The reasonable price and the relatively quick turn around time cemented my choice of where to get it printed. I opted for one with a plain black hardbound cover for the hand in and another black hardback version with gold lettering on the front for to keep good for myself.
• Tuesday: Studio day. This day was one of the most frustrating all week. Luckily (or as it turned out to be, very unluckily) I was seen today by the lecturers and was given feedback. This was the first time I had spoken to either of them for two weeks so any direction I had chosen back then would have been amplified by now. All in all I was shot down with the work I had done. They said I was spreading my resources far too thinly and that I should choose a definite direction for me to be working in. I basically said the sleep diary was a failure and that I would rather be doing prototypes at this moment in time to which I wasn’t really given a complete answer. I spent the rest of the day starting or continuing to make a prototype of the social lamp idea. I was also told that I should narrow down the amount of ideas that I should take forward. I had clearly mentioned that I was going to continue narrowing down from the 5 that I picked out of my 100 ideas but that went unnoticed.
• Wednesday: I can’t really remember what I did fully this day. I had done a little bit of prototyping. I was attempting to create a robust prototype that could, if needed, be implemented into an actual environment and tested by someone to get their opinion. I was also getting bits of video recorded for the video hand in at the end of week 14. My dissertation was ready for pick up today. I headed back to the university print unit and found the results very good indeed. I quickly checked it over and got it handed in a week early. Job done and a massive weight off my mind.
• Thursday: Further prototyping in the morning took place. I headed into the studio early so I could get work done when it was still quiet. Thankfully I also managed to get into the electronics workshop. The last time I tried to get in I couldn’t because I could not remember the code for the door. There was a little too much time spent making new pieces for this prototype because I had slightly underestimated the size of some of the electrical components and had to make it bigger as a result.
• Friday: Not a lot happened. I tried to fit all the electronics into the prototype properly but it didn’t end well. They all fitted but when I went and tried to test them out with the battery. Nothing was working. A rejigging and checking of the wires proved inconclusive of the results and I am still left in a state of unknown about the whole thing. I might put the electronics back into an earlier prototype where they all worked but was powered via a powerpack and not a battery. This might mean that the testing will have to be taken place in the studio rather than in a bedroom just to remain on the safe side of things.

As you can probably tell if you have just read all of that, it was a long week. I am at the stage in the course where I just cannot wait to finish and go home. It is filled with annoyances and it just isn’t being run well this year. If we were in last years course we would have already had a month or so of prototyping and will have to have provided a fully working electrical prototype in a week or so’s time. We are a month or so behind last year. I can only hope that things get better here very quick otherwise I do not know what I am going to have to do about it all.

Fourth Year: Week 11 Summary

Here we are, only a couple of weeks from the end for the first semester and things don’t seem to be slowing down. If anything the work balance between the two modules has definitely shifted and it is going to be full steam ahead for the main project now that the dissertation is complete.

• Monday: Studio day. We had a presentation about how to produce a design documentary type video for one of our graded hand in’s for the end of this semester. In all honesty, I am still not one hundred percent sure as to what is required of the video apart from that it has to be a on a deep aspect of the project such as the idea generation rather than a concept video. Additionally, due to the fast approaching deadline of dissertation hand in, we were told there would be no contact time with the lecturers during this week at all instead opting for contact time in one of the weeks in December when we are not timetabled for class at all. I spent the day starting to draw out the ideas I had chosen from the 100 ideas and writing a flowchart on how the product would be used.
• Tuesday: Another studio day. The morning was spent in the studio continuing the drawing of the ideas. Progress was slow and admittedly, a little too detailed so by the end of the day, I had only completed a further one drawing taking the total drawn to two. I went into town in the afternoon but returned to the studio in time to go to the art shop and buy cardboard for prototyping and for making the DSLR iPhone support mentioned in a previous post. I tried to speak to my dissertation advisor regarding my final draft but he still hadn’t read it yet.
• Wednesday. It was an early start for me. I had booked the laser cutter for 9 in the morning and wanted to make the most of the time I had with it. My plan was simple. Make a new keyboard/palmrest protector for my MacBook to try and stop it cracking again like they do. This is even more important now because my brother is getting it in the next month and I am getting a new one but more on that another time. The DSLR iPhone support was also made. In the afternoon I had glued the support together and made minor changes to my dissertation.
• Thursday: If I am brutally honest, I have no idea what happened today during the day. I think I was in the library but I don’t know. I gave my dissertation a read over and didn’t do much else during the day. At night, I had a few final changes to make to it from my dad who had also read it over. Once those changes were made I put it to bed and I am not going to be doing anything else to it. The only thing left to do for it is to be printed.
• Friday: An early start led to me going into town where I bought a new mouse for my iMac (which is at home but it needed a new one anyway). This was followed by going to the studio to pick up my cardboard to go back and try and start prototyping to keep up with my phase one plan. That plan didn’t work but I did manage to draw up the rest of the ideas.

There was my week. It was slow. I really can’t wait to go home for the holidays. However, if I can get my dissertation printed off early in week 12, I will be able to go on and focus on the main project. At the moment my phase one plan is slowly falling by the wayside but it can easily be brought back and on track.

Fourth Year: Week 10 Summary

We are now well underway into Phase 1 and Week 10 was the first proper week of proceedings. Minor annoyances at the start of the week delayed my plans for progress but it wasn’t long before I was back on track. So without further ado, here is the full rundown of the week.

• Monday: Studio day. Slow to start off with, we were given a small briefing about what was expected of us in this phase. Planning also started for the sleep diary and trying to find people to participate in it. So far, from what I can tell, it has been a complete and utter failure, which I suppose shouldn’t really be a surprise to me. I spent most of the morning adding images to my dissertation too in order for it to get finished.
• Tuesday: Further development of the sleep diary and the posting of it onto the blog was done. Additionally, a one to one tutorial with the lecturer/tutor/guy/man/person meant that I had to rewrite most of the first half of my plan for phase one. I didn’t do that on that day, it was done later on. In the afternoon we were all to go upstairs to the IMD computer room and set up a dedicated blog for fourth year. There was more than one person who did not want to do this. Why we couldn’t use our existing blog I have no idea, but it is done and I am putting selected posts onto it linking them back to here for the full post.
• Wednesday: A really boring day. I spent the morning doing dissertation work and whilst waiting for my dissertation advisor to appear, I didn’t really get much done overall. By the time I got to see him at 4PM, I had already been in the studio since 11 waiting for him and he didn’t have anything to say to me which meant I had wasted the day.
• Thursday: The morning was taken off and in the afternoon I headed home on the bus. I don’t really think I got anything done after that apart from mild editing of my dissertation, but the big part was to come after that.
• Friday: After a brief trip down the street to the post office, the afternoon was spent doing dissertation, updating the phase one plan and uploading them, and finishing the 100 ideas. The ideas were then put out onto post it notes and rolled up on the big piece of paper until the Saturday when I sorted them out.
• The Weekend: A lot was achieved. I sorted out the 100 ideas and quickly narrowed them down to the five I am taking forward for further development. The dissertation was also finished. Though I am still waiting on feedback on my last draft from my dissertation advisor, I am hoping that I will have minimal changes to make.

There you go then. Week 10. I am knackered after it. The next week will be massively important too and just as busy. I will hopefully get my dissertation printed by the end of it which will be a massive weight lifted from my shoulders.

Fourth Year: Week 8 Summary

Week 8, the last week in Phase 0 and the week that the previous 7 have been leading up to at this point in the project. The main focus was Ideas Day on the 1st of November (the Tuesday) but I shall leave all the main points to the summary itself.

• Monday: Studio day. We had to have everything ready for this day such as presentation boards for the Tuesday so we would not be under pressure to get things completed. Despite having this deadline, the remainder of the day was spent sitting around if we weren’t tweaking what we had done or getting them printed. In the afternoon we all went upstairs to get the room set up for the following day.
• Tuesday: IDEA’s DAY. The extensive write up of the day is here
• Wednesday: After the long day of the Tuesday, Wednesday was a day spent reflecting on what had happened the day before and attempting to get my head around what was said. I wrote the blog post about the day and was in the library for the majority of the day too. As the day wore on, my attention span shortened and I began looking up presents for people for next month, but that is neither here nor there for the moment.
• Thursday: Today and Friday are a bit of a blur for me. On Thursday, I think I spent a good few hours in the library once again working on my dissertation. I had originally wanted to get changes made to the third draft once I had got feedback on it, but I am still waiting on that and I wanted to get on with something since I had come to the conclusion of what direction I want to head in for my main project. A dying battery in my laptop hindered the amount of time I could spend in the library but I had made a good start to referencing the images.
• Friday: Not a lot of work was done today but a trip into town and a brief visit to the recycling centre were done. In the recycling centre there was something of great temptation! Another Power Mac G5 like the one I bought at the start of the year and it has the same specs. I don’t know why I want it but I’m not getting it, a new Laptop is beckoning sometime next month…

There we have it. Week 8. The next summary I will be doing will be the start of Phase 1 and beginning to cement the direction that I want my project to go in…

Fourth Year: Week 7 Summary

Each time I write one of these summary posts I have to check and see what week number it is, not because I am forgetting, but because it seems to be going quite fast and I am tempted to put a lower number. Anyways, this week was the last week before Ideas Day so preparations were in full swing (to a certain extent) and dissertation work took a big leap forward. So without further ado, here is the week summary for the seventh week:

• Monday: Studio day. Yet again not much happened. It really was the final checks for the presentation boards that showed the three briefs that we were going to be taking forward. I got my boards read over and was told that part of it contradicted another part, so that was quite easily changed. The layout of the boards didn’t really change much since the initial ones that were created, which was fine as I quite liked them the way they are.
• Tuesday: Second studio day of the week and the last day we would see the tutors before the following week (unless we went and found them to speak to them) As always, not much happened. The tutors went round the class just giving last thoughts on the boards and some things to think about for the following week. No further changes were made on this day but it all ended up for the best. After class, there was a talk by Brian Loudon, a designer, who talked about various different forms of sketching. The number of people there was quite small, with the number attending being less than ten and only two of those were fourth years. The talk was good if a little short but informative none the less.
• Wednesday: From what I can remember I spent the morning in my room finishing off the in text referencing of my dissertation and in the afternoon I went to the art school library to get them finished. I didn’t, but because I was on a roll, at about 7 in the evening, I went to the main library in order to get them finished and was there until just after 10. During the day I also bought some bits of board so I could mount my presentation boards on them for the following week.
• Thursday: Not a lot happened on this day. The morning was spent helping someone in the photography studio. This took a couple of hours. From 1 until about half 1 I was in one of the IT suites in the Tower Building getting introduced to the Dundee Graduate Skills Award and how to get it. This is an optional thing and it something that is probably worth getting or considering. It should help make me more employable come the time I have graduated. In the afternoon, I headed back to the studio in order to get one last piece of feedback from the tutor who had not spoken to the side of the class I am on for about three weeks. The minor changes meant I was not able to get the boards printed off in the afternoon and instead had to wait.
• Friday: Pretty much as soon as I had woken up, I legged it into town to the print shop to get my presentation boards printed. No sooner than I had made it back to the flat, I was getting a lift back home to spend the weekend there.

That was the week. And I am a bit annoyed at myself that I didn’t write a couple more posts during the week, but I am thinking that week 8 will be much more interesting and I should get some interesting pictures from Ideas Day along with feedback from the visitors to the department.

Fourth Year: Week 6 Summary

So here we are at the end of week 6. November, and therefore ideas day, is frightfully close and there are only about 7 months left until the end of the project. That still seems like a long time, but the way things are currently going, it doesn’t quite seem like it is going to be enough at the speed that we are going at. So without further ado, here is what happened in week 6.

• Monday: A studio day where our main tutor was still absent. He was off the previous Tuesday because of some sort of illness, and he was still off with it all of this week. Our workload seemed to drastically plummet and yet again we still do not know for certain what we were to have achieved for that day specifically. We went over the three briefs that we had created for the Monday. Luckily, my three were alright with minimal changes needing to be made. The big question of whether or not light and colour was going to remain a part in my project became very apparent after the big decision to exclude that theory from the three briefs at the moment. The way I am tackling it is that I am going to step back from light and colour at the moment, but go ahead and try and incorporate it once again when I have done some more idea generation/development… hopefully. A chunk of the time in the studio was spent making the Dan Wheldon picture I have already posted.
• Tuesday. Another studio day. After the one to one tutorials we had the day before we were given another thing to think about with the briefs. We had to think of our values as a designer and determine what the values of the three briefs were and try and match the design language used to our design values. Now, design values were something we had gone over in second year and it was confusing, and yet again, two years later they are still very confusing. I am not the only person to think they were confusing though. Most people didn’t have much idea of what to do and have elected not to make any changes for the following week. I am undecided what I am going to do, I made my brief boards in a style that I think reflected my values as a designer, making them simple and clean without too much information, and the ideas that they are portraying. What I have decided that I am going to do for the following week is to just spend some time fine tuning them and just generally tidying them up. The afternoon was spent doing the Aston Martin DBR9 that I have already posted. Just after I had left the studio, I had received an email that would drastically shape what I did on the Wednesday.
• Wednesday. This non studio day was originally meant to be spent doing my dissertation in a final last push to get the third draft finished so it can be checked over and bound early enough so I wasn’t getting overly stressed by the 7th of December. However, the day before I got an email that changed my plans quite drastically, but I can’t say too much about it. I got an email to do some more work for Top Gear magazine, but it had to be done by 3PM on the Wednesday. I accepted the challenge and spent from 9 in the morning until 3 working on it. I cannot tell you what it was I was doing though (just yet)
• Thursday & Friday. Thursday and Friday have just merged into one really. I sort of did the same thing on each day, and that was spending time sorting out my third draft of my dissertation. I seem to have no motivation to get my work done this year but this is apparent amongst quite a few other people in the class. It doesn’t mean to say that I am not trying, I have been throwing myself at it and somehow never really seem to have too much time off, I have been going to the library for a couple of hours in the evening when I have felt as though I have needed to, but just don’t really seem to be making progress that quickly at all. That is probably because of a number of annoyances that I have had from other people but this is neither the time or the place to discuss that.

So there you have it, week 6. Despite it being a reading week we still had class and seemed to be the only course that was in. There are days that fly by and there are other days that trail on very slowly and I still wish that I had considered doing a different course to begin with. Ah well then!

Fourth Year: Week 5 Summary

Where are the weeks going? Just now I am on the verge of starting week 6 and things are only just starting to get together but very slowly. I am still not 100% certain whether or not this direction is going to take me on a path that will lead to an outcome that I feel comfortable with at the end of it. This is an even more daunting prospect when I think that I have signed up to go to New Designers next July and it is putting my work in front of many potential employers. Anyway, this is what happened in Week 5:

• Monday. On this studio day, once again I can’t really remember what happened. We were briefly given a talk in the morning about what was to come in the next phase of the project. It was either that or it was showing an industry example of the phase that we are in just now. In the afternoon we got one of the IMD tutors in and was supposed to talk to us about prototyping. Instead all that happened was we were told that if we wanted to talk to him about prototyping our ideas we were to go and see him, but in the 3 hours of the afternoon he saw about 8 people…. of over 30 and we never saw him at all for the rest of the week. Thankfully, unlike other weeks, we were not given something to do for the next day and that always raises stress levels and sleep levels plummet.
• Tuesday: Our main tutor was not there that day for an unknown reason so his ‘assistant’ as it were, took over. He showed us/told us what he wanted us to do in preparation for Ideas day at the start of November. A day that, in previous years for product design, shows off all the ideas that we had come up with to a number of people from large companies such as IDEO or Microsoft and they provide crucial feedback. This time because we are basically being run by the IMD course, we are not doing 100 ideas and we are to produce between 3 and 6 briefs that dictate the direction that we want to go, but the strange thing is, the briefs were built upon our best ideas from the ones we produced a few weeks ago. The complete lack of guidance has left us not knowing properly what was to be included in the brief boards, how they were to look or any other detail. Yes this is to give us more control over the appearance and content but we are getting told very vague things and my energy for this course is depleting very rapidly.
• Wednesday: A non studio day and most of the time was spent trying originally trying to do do some dissertation that desperately needs done. Instead, a small amount of time was spent in the studio (it was a non teaching day) starting to think about the presentation boards that we had to do for the briefs for the following week.
• Thursday: This day was very similar to that of the Wednesday but because of quite a few annoying and loud people in the studio, I can’t really work there very well, so I spent most of the afternoon in the Library getting more bits of the presentation boards done. I focussed mainly on answering the questions that had to be included in them. As always though, motivation doesn’t seem to be very high at the moment and my mind kept on wandering away from the task in hand.
• Friday: I attempted to work in the studio again, but that was only because I was meant to be doing some laser cutting with someone and I was just waiting for them. It was fine for a couple of hours thanks to only a small number of people being in the studio at the time, but as the morning drew on, a handful of other people made an appearance and started to make noise, so just after lunchtime I called it quits in the studio and left. But luckily, I had the layout of the boards nailed and all I had to think about was the images I wanted to use in them. Friday afternoon was spent installing a new hard drive in my MacBook and putting everything I had on the old one onto the new one, so now I am running a full 200GB more… if that makes sense. So I have a total of 320GB instead of 120GB, not a big difference I’ll admit but it is big enough for what I need since I do not have my iMac up with me.

So that was my week. The Saturday was spent taking the few photos I needed for the presentation boards and doing a bit of fine tuning of what I had written on them. Apart from that, I made a few notes about some areas of research I should look into for this project, and other times were spent thinking about doing dissertation work since I am very close to finishing it, but hopefully with Week 6 technically being a reading week, I should be able to sit down in the library and get the third draft done and dusted. I do feel as though we have very little time to ourselves this year as they just seem to be piling on the work without cause or care, but that is fourth year I suppose.

Fourth Year: Week 4 Summary

Week 4. Yeah the weeks seem to be going by very quickly and Ideas day will definitely be on top of us before we know it. But anyways, here is the fourth week of fourth year, or what I can remember of it.

• Monday: After the usual rush to have gotten all the work done for the monday, yet again not a lot of attention was paid to the work we had done. Mid way through the day, we were given the daunting task of doing 100 ideas in 24 hours. A long day and evening were in store.
• Tuesday: We had all morning still to work on the 100 ideas but everyone had come to a grinding halt. I got stuck at 80 and called it a day so spent the rest of the time adding colour to the A1 sheet. In the afternoon, we were to pick one idea that we liked, one we didn’t like and one we weren’t sure on. I will post another post soon with more specifics on the ideas that I chose.
• Wednesday: In all honesty I can’t really remember what I did on this day. I think I started to develop the idea I liked the most a little bit in preparation for finding out what we were to do for the start of week 5.
• Thursday: I didn’t do much this day, but we were finally told what we had to do for the following week. I also went home on the Thursday for a long weekend, but that isn’t quite relevant, but it did mean I didn’t do much work, but there wasn’t much work to be done anyway.
• Friday: Again, as per the Thursday, not much work was done on the friday, but I did go over the specified work we had to do or have looked over for the Monday and wrote a good couple of pages worth in my notebook. I spent an hour or so looking at it all.

And finally, since I can’t find a picture that I took relating to the third week, here is a doodle of a penguin.