CMCI Studio Retrospective
It’s been a year already
Reading the personal statement I wrote to apply for this program, I can see a shortlist of reasons I was excited about joining the CMCI Studio. The first one is the future-oriented curriculum, the program’s direction to explore possibilities of future design and bring innovation. It is quite embarrassing to read how excited I was as I am preparing my future in design with forthcoming new learnings and the opportunity to deepen knowledge. I also talk a lot about emerging technologies like voice, augmented reality, and virtual reality which I expected to be the next generation of user interaction design. The last thing that I wrote was the opportunity to work with real-world clients during the Design Sprint. Joining this program, my goal was to learn future-oriented design skills and tools, partner up with real-industries, build a compelling portfolio, and get a job at a decent company that pays well. Looking back at the past 11 months in CMCI Studio and now, I couldn’t achieve most of them. In this post, I am going to reflect on my perspective on why that might happen.
Future-Oriented Curriculum
I can’t help but question myself what was future-oriented about this program? The closest thing would be the Critical Making class. In the first Critical Making series, we spent the whole three months working on the 3D design, rendering, and working with Arduino which all are great skills and tools for designers to possess. But I had a very hard time adapting the class orientation that teaches one small thing by only spent the last month to create a final project leveraging whatever tools we liked over the past classes. I think I could end up creating a much better-polished project if the class was more dedicated to a single capstone project from the beginning. If I could set a goal at the beginning of the semester and start making it starting day one, the project could have been much more defined and complete. It could be even better if it was a group project from the beginning which would let the instructor spend more time supporting a fewer number of projects instead of having to help 17 different individual projects that had only a month to be completed. I hope the class was more goal-oriented and capstone focused because my goal was to create a project that is portfolio worthy and a month is too short to wrap up my previous learnings and create a cool exciting project. To be a goal-oriented class, I think it is crucial to create a customized learning plan as early as possible. It would be great if I was taught in early-stage what kinds of projects I can create with the lessons that will be covered in the class. Then, divide the class into groups based on topics each student wants to focus on which could range from an art installation project to a web development project, create a learning plan and weekly goal for each group, and spend the three-hour class to do Q&A and solve problems instead of just spending whole three hours looking at other people’s cool work and a little bit of coding. The class is already learn-yourself mode so with the individual learning plan for each group and good online sources for learnings would make the class much goal-focused and worthwhile.
More long-term fun projects
One of the most common problems that the current cohort has is that they don’t have enough projects to fill their portfolios. Many are putting their capstone projects and a few people included their first individual project from the RE class in the fall. A lot of us included sprint projects: On the Snow, The Saga, and The Eldora. These are great projects and we did put a lot of effort and time into these. But to be honest, I feel like one week for a project is too short to do an in-depth UX design process. Moreover, most of the projects we worked on are ski/winter sports-related brands, and not a single company implemented our recommendations which is not unusual but what’s the point of redesigning websites of local companies when our work is not being implemented. Rather, we could do much more meaningful projects that solve a real-world problem while creating unique pieces of work that resonate with the world. I recommend looking out for design challenges happening all over the place. During the time we were working on one of our sprint projects, there was a design competition hosted by IDEO to solve COVID related issues; I don’t remember what exactly the prompt was. There are many meaningful design competitions out there that take place almost every other week and those are great opportunities for us to design students to join the design community, compete, learn, and maybe win a prize. I believe those could be more interesting projects to talk about when we are interviewing for jobs. There are many other points where we could start cool projects. The Design for America at CU Boulder partners up with local companies and CU campus to solve real design problems throughout the semester and implement the solutions. This club is composed of mostly undergraduate students majoring in engineering. For most of them, it’s their first time learning the UX design process, and they champion it. I participated in DFA during the fall semester and sometimes felt they knew more about the UX design than our cohort did. Maye that’s not true but they were more excited because it was a real decent project that they were working on. There are constant meetings with clients and real user interviews, research, and most importantly support from the clients who want to work and brainstorm together with students to solve their design problems. The first semester at CMCI was very loose. I am sure every student agrees with that. At the end of the fall semester, most of the CMCI cohort didn’t have much to put in their portfolio. In the Spring semester, all of us were way too busy doing weekly homework. Because of that, I could not participate in the DFA since then. But ironically we only had one full case study project, On the Snow project, done at the end of the Spring semester. There were just never-ending weekly assignments that are irrelevant to the previous assignments. Every instructor has been saying we can build it up during the summer, but we have a week left in the program and more than 80% of the students haven’t started applying for jobs.
If there is one thing that I didn’t do while other students did, it’s solely depending on this program and its curriculums. Since the beginning of the semester, I had concerns about this program because I didn’t have much information about it. And I really wanted to make sure I was in the right place. Before and right after the program started, I reached out to some of the faculty to make sure to share my vision and goals. But I didn’t get a good answer to that. We had great instructors and intelligent students but I felt something was off. I think students were given too much freedom. Coming into this program, I was so desperate. I was ready to spend most of the day in the studio working with my group all week. But no one else had that mindset. I was just so concerned about the pace of the courses and ended up looking for projects outside of the program. Having only a year to prepare and compete with other distinguished junior designers in the market after I graduate, I needed clear guidance to develop specific skills and projects that appeal to top design companies. Also, too many students want to do different things. Half of the class doesn’t want to do UX. One-third of the class didn’t know what they wanted to do. There were only a few students who had clear ideas of what they wanted to do. All these people with distinctive goals and different levels of design skills were mingled and thrown into the same room. I felt such a system slowed down individual growth and development. On the other hand, I feel like I needed an open mindset. I’ve visited the Counselling and Psychiatric Service on campus twice because I was getting too much stress from the program. I once considered transferring to a different graduate program which ended up not happening. I got two job offers throughout the program and rejected them because I wanted to finish my learnings but I sometimes regret that decision. I feel like all these stress, distrust, and confusion made me a dick or someone that I don’t want to be. I could have a much better relationship with people, especially with the faculty if I opened up myself and reached out more. Even at this moment though, I just feel bad and disappointed by the fact that I failed to fully enjoy the program for so many reasons. We had good faculty, an awesome studio, and great students. I believe that the studio can produce a much better outcome if it really concentrated and everyone in the program is fully dedicated to it. Writing this final retro post, I ended up filling the whole page with complaints, and I am sorry about that. I am not sure who’s going to read this but hope this would give some idea of what this program is like right now. I wanted the program to set a high bar and recommend future students to find extraordinary projects outside of this program because it will never hurt you. Also, I don’t want any response from the faculty regarding this post. I did not intend to offend anyone. This is just one perspective of a student.
