Des303 - Week 1

This week, I had my first design studio lesson in two years. Needless to say, I was shitting myself. New peers, new teachers, new space; everything felt unfamiliar to me. I spent most of the first hour feeling nervous and found it hard to concentrate on what was being taught. As it is my first time back at university in a while, I was overwhelmed at the mention of grades and assignments already. What brought me back was once we got stuck into the beginning of our new project and I could begin ideating and exploring, I remembered why I love design! I left feeling excited and hopeful for our latest assignment which is to present a 'tech demo', a demonstration of a skill.

I spent this first class and week on reflecting on some of my previous work in design, my passions, making a love/hate list and extracting potential skills from them.

I got excited about doing something with crochet or makeup as I'm currently really interested in both and exploring the boundaries of them. Also, due to the limited time restraint, I feel it wise to choose something I am already confident in.

Most of my ideation phase tends to be a jumble of half formed sentences as I go from one thing to the next, but I find it helpful to write down as much as possible so that I can come back later to ideas I may want to work on further.

I was initially set on teaching something with makeup, as I feel it is a unique skill in my design class and it would be really fun to be able to play around with some techniques and textures during the demo. However, I spent a couple of days to sit with this idea, and felt that I would have to put in a lot of extra work to make it mould to the criteria of being a 'design skill'. I also realised that what I was really interested in was TEXTURE.

I feel that using crochet as a medium to explore fibres could be intriguing to people and extremely useful to anyone interested in working with fibres / creating fibre art. I reached out to my lecturer to check in with how this could work as a teachable skill and he gave me some things to reflect upon heading into the next week.

To focus on this week:

• Sit with this idea for a few days and continue to reflect upon whether it is achievable

• Refine my idea, how is this useful to my peers? How can it be applied? Gather resources

• Do some research into fibre compositions to back up my learned skill

• Think about how I will run the demo, create a timeline, physical space? How will I present the interactive activities through my presentation slides?