Reflecting on Sprints

I really enjoyed working with limited design constraints and set briefs the past couple weeks. I feel like restraints inspire better, more creative design solutions, since just the mere existence of restraints or limited design briefs challenges us to think outside of our instinctual design ideas and helps develop innovative solutions. (This is also more similar to the kind of design process I’m familiar with, so I appreciated this aspect of the sprint exercises.) The time constraints, though - those were a challenge to work with; in the past I’ve struggled with deciding a stopping point for the design process and moving on to further steps, so I feel like I did struggle with that - especially in the second sprint exercise, which was less structured than the first one.

I do feel we lacked user research, especially in the user needs sprint - we made a lot of educated guesses about what our user’s specific needs, abilities, and situation would be. I don’t know how it would be possible, but it would have been nice to have some solid information about particular requirements for our chosen user.

After the sprint, I worked on the main illustration both weeks. Again, I’ve done a fair amount of illustration and 3D modelling before, so this part was familiar to me, and I had fun with it. There was more I wanted to do, but this is another point I felt constrained by the time limits - two days (that included other classes and other assignments) was not enough to do everything that was on my mind. Prioritisation, and deciding what representation was most important to showcase, became crucial.

As a group, I feel like we had very different ideas - which was a good thing, because that meant we could combine them to come up with something innovative, and address multiple facets of each project. I think we got the hang of each other’s processes better by the second week, so the second week was smoother and more efficient.

I really enjoyed getting back into designing properly, especially with the user needs remix. I do feel like the constraints - especially the time constraints - challenged me, but I feel like we were able to hone our ideas better through them. I appreciated seeing and talking about everyone else’s projects; I think the class came up with some innovative stuff, and it was so interesting to see how everyone approached their problems.