Farewell, 318!

Another semester almost nearing its end, and time to bid my farewell to my courses. CSC318 has definitely not been one of the most unconventional Computer Science courses I have taken in the university, and I loved it! I have always been into designing and aesthetics; from creating a poster for a school club, to designing a website for some student project, I have always ensured my product looks appealing at the least. Probably, this nature of mine made me love the course even a tat more.

Of the prompts given by the Professor, I would like to touch a few here [I hope that’s okay!]. Starting with the aspects I found compelling yet fun at the same time, I had a great time working on Assignment 1: Project Jacquard. I enjoyed the fact that it was a very open-ended assignment, on a relatively newer concept. With bare resources available online, we were forced to think out-of-the box and come up with a unique solution to improve a human activity by embedding the Jacquard conductive threads into fabric. Rarely in CS courses, you are given this much artistic freedom in an assignment to express your thoughts about a concept.

Similarly, these blogs were another great way to articulate what we had been covering in the course into something we could co-relate to. To be really honest, I strongly disliked the bi-weekly blogs, because it just added to the big pool of assignments you already had. But then I was sitting one day thinking about a topic for my first blog, and apparently got a Snapchat from a friend. I clicked the notification to open it, and the sluggishness of the application gave me a wonderful topic to research upon, and write my first blog. And so, the trend followed. Eventually, I had a good set of topics and been able to express my views on the interface and experience of the product with the knowledge gained in the course (Woohoo!).

I would like to thank administration of the course for giving those bonus 1% for the TUX Talk. I accept that I would have never attended any of the talks, if it was not for the 1%. Yet, I ended up attending two talks, and literally loved both of them. Especially, the talk by Lennart Nacke on The Science Behind Gamification and Games User Research has been so useful that I had been able to correspond the topics in the talk with day-to-day experiences, which would have never struck to my mind, if not for this talk.

This course covered a lot of different aspects, including giving me chance to work on Invision (and also a free membership!) and off-course the 10-phased project. Personally, only not-so-lovely portions of the course for me were the initial phases of the group project. Coming from a technical, and not a very language-sound background, I found the lit-review and related phases little challenging. Again, I know its an important subject, and this just a personal problem I faced. Further, I remember phase 5 (Research summary and interpretation) demanded a lot of work with doing interviews and drafting ideas into formal writings, and fell directly in the midterm season. I felt maybe it could have been divided into different phases to ease out some work.

I had fun going through the usability, layout, colour and typography lectures at the later end of the course, as I had been following these topics in my years of freelance graphic designing. To add, I felt like we could have spend some time covering how the design pattern have changed through out the years, and looked at current trends and to implement them in our projects. We all know how the responsive web and minimalist design has come into play in recent past, and similarly Google has taken it into Material design with card layouts. Further, we have much richer animations with overflowing slideshows and cute loading symbols, and even an interactive portal rather than just plain old flatly-designed UI. This would have given a better chance to go one step further and implement the knowledge gained into our personal projects keeping up with the current trends, and using the historical knowledge to try build improvements for the future.

None-the-less, it has been a fantastic course; much different what would have been imagined out of a third year CS course (in all the good means). Thanks to the Professor and TAs for making this course a great learning experience, and fun at the same time!