EI Workshop reflections

Thijs Schipper - 1311379

Initial interactions workshop

I think the workshop at the start of the course was very effective in setting the tone and making clear what this course was about. I would not necessarily say I learned anything new during the workshop (other than the fact that I am a bad actor, as are most other IO students), but it was a nice push in the right direction get you thinking in terms of interactions, separated from functionality, technical aspects or ergonomics. I had not previously thought of interactions as a way of defining a project. It was always this thing that you started working on after problem definition, ideas/directions and a a functional analysis had been done. To approach interactions as a separate and integral part of a product (not an afterthought or detail) is a new way of thinking for me and this workshop was instrumental in making it clear.

Design Goal workshop

This workshop was most useful in terms of giving a better idea of what we were actually supposed to be doing. As I described above, the term Design Goal erroneously associates with things like functionality or branding, and I doubt that a lecture or separate assignment would have driven the point home as effectively as this workshop did. Practicing on a completely unrelated topic and goal helped give first-hand experience with the nuances of defining a good design goal. In particular, the need to make a goal specific enough (to make it a useful guideline and to allow for interesting, focused solutions) while still keeping things broad enough to not already specify solutions or concepts, is something that would have caused lots of headaches if we had to first apply this on our actual project. The only thing I didnt particularly like was that we had to show our final Design Goal so soon after the workshop. It is a concept that takes a while to settle properly, and I doubt many people got it right during the workshop itself. With so many other courses going on in parallel and then the need to hand in a final design goal one workday later, it was a bit stressing. (Even though we already knew we could make changes to the design goal when needed.)

Design Vision workshop

While this workshop was fun to do, I dont really feel like I learned a lot from it. Yes, we got to practice one medium in defining a design vision, but the concept itself is not that complicated and I ended up going for a graphic representation of my vision instead of the 3d form I practiced with. It might have just been the medium that we worked with, but I found it quite hard to properly express something as semantic and implicit as interaction qualities using only a bunch of random objects.

I did like the movie approach a lot, however, because (assuming you have some semi-decent actors around) it is a very direct and intuitive way of shaping reality it communicates with the viewers very well. While expressing something like awkward in a 3d object can be quite complex, in a movie such a thing is effortless. I am definitely going to use this technique some time during this or another project.