Ideation Sprint
What did you do, in words and pictures? How and why did you do it?
This week’s sprint was on ideation. Making creative designs or being creative has never been my string point. However, I quite enjoyed making the sketches. Since the topic was transportation, I felt my prior experiences with public transport helped in the ideation process.
To start the process, I set the timer to an hour to complete the initial 10 divergent sketches and played some light music. The timer helped me bring my creative juices out, while the music helped me simulate my thoughts. For the first 20 min, I had ideas overflowing in my brain. It was almost like I got one idea and forgot the one I already had. This was kind of frustrating. When I started to run out of ideas, my thought process went more on the fictional side, thinking about reducing congestion by flying like Iron Man and teleportation like Harry Potter.
However, since there were no restrictions, such thoughts helped me complete my 10 sketches with 10 minutes left on the clock. I then went on to label them to make my thoughts project more clearly to the viewer of these designs and picked the teleportation as the “initial most promising” sketch just because I liked the idea a lot. I reset the clock to one hour and went on sketching the 10 converging sketches on the different ways one could teleport from one place to another. Some ideas felt like they could be reality someday, while others felt too fictional. Some of the sketches came out to be decent, while some just average. However, I didn’t try to make amendments to average sketches as I felt that they would hinder the thought process. Overall, this process surprised me as I didn’t know I could do so well in creative thinking.
Reflection
Looking back on this assignment, I feel like I was a little under pressure and stress as I could not devote much time to it due to the coming midterms. If I had a little more time, I would want to come up with more realistic ideas that could be implemented in real life rather than fictional ones. I could have also made the sketches more illustrative and redone them to look more appealing. However, I do feel satisfied with what I did in the short amount of time. I was impressed with myself on not being too skeptical of my drawings and not thinking about perfecting my sketches.
My favorite part of the project was seeing the product of my sketching. I also really liked showing it to others and seeing their reaction and understanding on how I can improve on some of the designs.
Why is this necessary?
Looking back on this sprint, I realize how important it is not to think about quality and just burst out sketches one after the other. This project taught me how to work under time constraints that can be helpful in my future projects, or even something distant as in my job. If I ever take up designing, I would prefer to be in the ideation field as this is the sprint which I have enjoyed to most up until now. Ideation also does help improve user experience, thus it could have helped the microwave get better results in usability testing.