Research

One of the difficulties of presenting unfinished design work or a part of the design process is that it is not easy to make it 'aesthetically' pleasing and it does not make sense to a non designer's perspective. I did some research to gain some inspirations of possible ways we can layout our process and I found a book called Please Make This Look Nice by Peter Ahlberg. This book contains a collection of unfinished design work including sketches, screenshots and multiple iterations.

 
 

 

I like how the photo above shows an actual working space yet works as a gallery space for the objects by adding wall text about the work and the combination of the white walls with he lights. This work displays a neat way of trying to show the messy process of design. 

Another example of an exhibition that displays the working process is called “Exploding Footnotes: Design Research in Action” by Department of Design Research, Writing & Criticism School of Visual Arts at 136 West 21 Street, Second Floor, New York, NY. This work focused on the research and writing part of their process. They displayed their notes chronologically on long wall. It was a good way of showing the pattern of thought for their work. The colours and the layout make the work as a whole object rather than separate notes. 

I liked the idea of showing the research part of the design process and since my initial idea of showing the research process is not ready I decided to try this out with my own work. One of the problems that I had was That I was not able to layout the work in a neat way like the exemplars that I looked at. I attempted to layout my work outside the space and at the actual space but it was still not quite looking right and does not sit well with the rest of the work. I decided to create a backup video loop of me going through my user journeys on adobe xd to show the process of creating the app design digitally. After Bryce's last critique with our layout, Nicole helped layout the the end display and we decided on simplifying the whole thing by adding already printed pages about my user personas and the problem that my project is looking at. 

playing around with the layout of showing design research

Iteration 2

      

finished display and video 

Wall text 

Ally 

Ally is a digital platform that aims to connect refugee background youth with volunteer mentors in New Zealand to provide them assistance in their education or to mentor them in a particular skill they are interested in. Ally also aims to be interactive and contain tutorials and other resources for the youth to use. By providing a space where users can meet people of similar interest and similar situations we can provide them a gateway to a support system that will help them build resilience in times of stress. 

The conception of Ally was formed after I wrote my thesis, Refugee Youth as Agents of Change. After a thorough research on my target audience I conducted a couple of ideations and brainstorms in my quest to find the answer on how can design help. I believe by helping the refugee background youth in New Zealand we can contribute to the bigger issue of the refugee crisis by doing a small act in the hopes for a bigger impact in the future.

Sometimes the tricky thing with the design process is as a designer we have to remember that we cannot always try to fix the big stuff but if we look close enough we find certain things that we are able to tackle giving us the ‘aha’ moment and drive to create something that will create a small change adding to the big change that we are aiming for.

Draft for exhibition wall text A2 poster

Design is often viewed as beautiful and people only see the final product. We believe that there is a beauty in the process itself. The Wireframe exhibition presents the behind the scenes of five Visual Communication Designers.

The name wireframe stands for the idea of having the process as the bones of the project. The term wireframe is often associated with a set of images which displays the functional elements of a website or page, typically used for planning the structure and functionality. It is part of the design process that is often the key to creating a great project.