Creative Founder Recap

What I thought before this class:

I remember how excited I was to finally have a spot in creative founder. Over the summer I proudly talked to my family and friends about the concept of the class and how cool of an opportunity it would be. The thought of coming up with an idea and taking that from prototype to feasible business in the course of a semester sounder ambitious and exhilarating. However, after the first hour of class on that very first day I was less than thrilled and more so sick to my stomach. Christina said something along the lines of (and i’m paraphrasing but it doesn’t matter) “this class will be hell”. “If you want easy try games for change” we were told. As she laid out the class bare for me I was nauseous. I was seriously doubting if I was going to be able to take on this class in its entirety as a junior. Elissa and I approached Christina and asked her if she thought that was true. Could we really handle this class as junior? The answer she told us then was of course we could. I wasn’t sold but I took a leap of faith. glad we decided to listen to her advice and stay in the class, had I not I would have missed out on this whole incredible experience.

What I did that was particularly useful:

Learning how to work with a group for the longest group project I have ever taken on. There were times when I was furious at my team, times we laughed together and times when we made great stuff together. Christina told us in class once that she thought it was unrealistic that CCA doesn’t have us work in extended group projects like this more often because it is so similar to the working world, I agree. However, if she was going to make us work & stick together she was going to need to teach us the proper tools and techniques to get through it. These lessons came around in the middle of the semester. We spent a whole day working on communicating with all of our team members. What did we love about each other, what did we respect about each other and what needed some hard self reflection. It was honest and candid, and it was tough. We all left that day feeling emotionally drained. Creative founder taught me valuable lessons in how to effectively communicate to a group of your peers.

What I learned:

Creative Founder was one of the most valuable classes I have taken at CCA to date, not just because of the amount of information I learned from this class but the diversity of information I learned. It was a welcome departure from the traditional IxD curriculum we are exposed to a CCA. It was a pleasure to learn the business side of interaction design. I feel like this gives my classmates and I a tremendous leg up when we are seeking employment. Understanding the lessons we learned in Creative Founder will serve us well in the future. One of the most valuable take aways from this class was the idea of the lean startup and lean testing, MVP and Build Test Learn. These concepts have been taught to us before in interaction design but never in this context. We have been taught the importance of prototyping early and showing it to people to gather valuable feedback. Something about learning Build Test Learn in this setting really stuck with me. BuildingBlocks could have used this make a more tangible product and a good one at that. When I go out into the world I can see me falling back on a lot of the lessons I learned in creative founder to help me understand and deconstruct a problem.