Day Forty-One : Finishing It Off

Monday 9th December 2019

I can't believe it's already December. Today we were tasked with updating our blogs. We also had to finish our Final Evaluations before the end of today. Here's mine below:

For Stage 2, we were tasked with creating a hand-held portable device in a team. This was unusually challenging for me, usually I am able to effectively work in a team. I found it difficult to communicate with our leader in many ways, I felt that my ideas weren’t being listened to and that I was not given stimulating enough work. I believe this is something I need to reflect on because it may be that I need to improve my communication skills and be less passive in a group. During this group project I just did what I was told and rarely asked for other tasks to do because when I did, I wasn’t really given anything more to do. I believe that the reason that I may have only been given the job to take care of the presentation was because this was one of the few things I was better at than most in my group. I believe that so that I won’t face this problem in future what I really need to do is increase my editing and videoing skills. One thing that I think would be the first thing to improve is my drawing skill, this is because this skill could be used in every part of the course. I did do some drawings for the team concept but they were not good enough to be used or kept. I documented most of the things that happened on my blog but I had also decided to make a document that summarised what had happened during the weeks of working together.

While I took care of the words, presentation, order and other things relating to the PowerPoint, one thing that I did not do was the background as I worked with another teammate to complete the presentation. We had initially put music into the presentation but had later thought of it as unprofessional and removed it. Working in smaller groups within the team was something we did often and I think that this tactic is quite useful and helpful while working in a team setting and I think this is something that I hadn’t really considered before when working in a team and it is something I will consider when next working in a team setting.

One of the parts I enjoyed most while working in the team was researching, especially looking for products that may be similar to our ideas. It was really interesting looking at current products and seeing the latest innovations and how much mainstream technology has been pushed and also seeing non-successful products that were similar to our idea and thinking about how we could improve our product so that it would not encounter similar problems.

Our product was a pair of clay pigeon shooting glasses that had amazing added functions, I thought that this idea was very unique and it was a good idea to follow compared to our other ideas, it kept the main thread of glasses/goggles that we had originally started with but it was more than that. Although I had not come up with the idea, I was really happy to help make the idea a reality as much as I could. We collectively thought about the UI and UX designs though not all were thought of at the same time.

I didn’t think that the life drawing workshop really had any input into my work but I think the skeleton drawing workshop helped me when I was trying to come up with possible ideas for our group. I felt that the lectures didn't assist me with the project, personally which would encourage me to do my own research, however, I found the talk by Bashir Mahkoul to be very inspiring. At the end of the project we were able to have a website, two posters, an advert and social media accounts. I think that this made us feel like we were an actual company.