L-Train: DESIGN: Week 1 Review

DESIGN: Week 1 Review

 

I had a very different understanding of design when I joined Parsons. For me, design meant creation – open a software and create something which pleases the user and solves some problem. For the most part, there was not a lot of thought involved in my design process.

 

I don’t have a professional degree in design, so, I did not know how the design process worked. Hence, my initial expectation from the Bootcamp’s design class was that we would be exposed to design software and would see its use from scratch.

 

Contrary to that thought, one week has passed and we did not use any software (which is good). My initial understanding of “creation” has now expanded to – Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation. I am starting to realize that there is so much more to design, and that people miss out on the key aspects of “preparation”, and just end up creating products/ services which aren’t that user-centric.

 

Through my lens, the central theme of the design class has been to identify the problem. Through different approaches like brainstorming, mind-mapping, presentations, design statement formulation, storyboarding among others that were taught to us, we tried to dig deeper into the problems we face, and the way we can solve them.

 

In one of those activities, we systematically broke down our old project and presented it in the form of a design flow from start to finish. For me, such activities have been working well as they now allow me to introspect my design approach and hence, optimize it. Here is a gallery of the presentation slides I presented on my GST awareness project I had done in India in 2016.

 

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I am learning a lot from the class, especially because of its structure. Having these design tools is handy, as it now allows me to think about a problem and not miss out on a critical aspect of it.