Reflection — Advanced Programming
When I decided to take up the basic programming in semester three, I was really not hoping to thoroughly enjoy that class. It’s likely it is because of the people that were in my class or the facilitator, but I believe that it was the ability to use programming in a different field that made me enjoy it so much. I was always used to doing coding for very specific things, such as writing code to sort numbers or write a code to calculate area, etc, but never was I told to design something and code.
In our basic programming class, we were able to code a conversational agent which would help many people in campus to navigate within. We identified problems, devised solutions and then used our experience in coding to help devise a solution. Apart from it being a success, I understood how I could use my ability to code and also the understanding I have into something apart from the mainstream. I took advanced programming and there was no doubt in my mind that this class would fail to amaze me. We started out with familiarising ourselves with the language that we would use to code. I was really nervous going into doing javascript because it is a language that I am not that familiar with. I also wasn’t a very big fan of the interface that we had to code on, so initially, it was quite a bit of a struggle. We spent the first two weeks teaching the class various functions and also this was really helpful because we got to see a live demo of the students doing the functions and we got to see how it actually works which was better than if we were to just learn it on our own.
The topic E-Governance was really interesting because it was a topic that hasn’t been brought up before in any of my classes. My group mate and I took a while to understand the topic fully because we were so unfamiliar with it. We spent a lot of time reading ourselves and understanding before we got together and discussed so that we both would understand in our own words. We did get stuck in choosing a challenge to take forward because it took us a while for us to understand what we really wanted to do. some of our choices and options were divided because we wanted to do slightly different things.
Finally making wireframes, class diagrams and finally, coding was a great relief because we finally saw our ideas coming to life. We initially didn’t know where to start because it was hard to determine the starting point to the futuristic design that we came up with. We had a lot of fun while coming up with the idea because we got to experiment as much as we felt like, although we had to ideate a lot because we were coming up with our own scenario.
I think designers should code because it gives designers a different playground to experiment with. I think many people do not understand the possibilities that you could do with code because they are scared of it or think that it is hard. I think coding can really help designers because whatever field you are in coding can really help you excess at certain software and be able to gel the ideas with execution. Designers can use the knowledge in programming to understand how their products, or illustrations, etc would work. In the real world, designers being able to code can also help the designers and developers work hand in hand, creating and understanding the final output. I think that if people start with the basics of programming and are taught to understand the basics in a really fun way as we did in our workshop where we understand how to make prototypes using color and animation with shapes, it will be a real eye-opener for people who are scared of programming. I think by going step by step and improving the topics that are used for the class would also help.
Advanced programming might be scary for some people, but as mentioned before, by increasing topics and also having workshops or classes where students would have fun by engaging the different methods of applying programming to their field in design. By hosting exhibitions where students can see projects by other guys can also help people understand what is achievable by coding.
The relevance of object-oriented paradigm is that we as designers are able to use this to build a problem-solving analysis to building solutions for complex problems. Just like how object-oriented programming has concepts which are classes, attributes, and methods to associate and relate classes and objects, we similarly have designing thinking concepts which are to empathasize, define, ideate and prototype. The OOP paradigm helps us minimize difficulties and also apprehend problem analysis and also skills to efficiently solve problems. It helps us visualize situations close to the real world scenarios.
In the interview with David Kelley, he talks about the difference in problem-solving between engineers and designers. He speaks about how engineers are taught to follow a certain way of problem-solving which is to solve problems by the looking at the right solutions whereas, as designers, we look at solving problems with solutions that is trusted upon our intuition. He says that engineering students have a structured way of thinking and they are not messy, which I think is very true. We as designers are prone to thinking all over the place. I like to add to his point by saying that I think engineers have a convergent way of thinking whereas designers have a divergent way of thinking. I really liked his analogy of the toaster, where he explains the difference between a designers way of thinking and an engineer’s. He also speaks about the word design is misleading and how it is used in a very broad context. He talks about how designers and engineers don’t have to be different and how everyone has the ability to be creative, where someone with enough confidence can excel at anything. I really appreciated when he said that a designer who has had experience knows what design means. This was very true to me because I have a lot of friends that are in engineering and they do not take my course seriously and constantly try to derail my confidence, by telling me what I am doing isn’t worth it. This article really shows that as designers and engineers, we are only different by the way we are inclined to think. He also talks about how it's really hard for engineers to think the way we do because they don’t have to experience field and lack experience in the physical phenomena. I think based on this article that engineering students should also be trained to use creativity. I agree with the statement that David Kelley said that engineers work with a set of rules and solve for the context given. I can really relate to this interview because my father is an engineer as well and because of which I see a difference in the way we think. Designers are more open-minded and are not open-ended. By exploring different ways engineers can explore this method of thinking, I believe the industry would be very different.
