I’ve just completed my third week of my Master’s program, and I feel like its picked up right where I left off with my design education when I was living in Seattle. I’ve been asked as part of my class to write a reflection on the first three weeks, so what you see here is the open-source version of that reflection. If it gives you any insight into who I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m interested in – mission accomplished.
The note book I’ve been using to take notes in my “Business and Design Thinking” class is an old sketchbook I started working on in 2005. I didn’t think much of it when I pulled that old book out, flipped to the first un-used page, and started taking my class-notes and drawing mind-maps about what we’re learning. Now that its time to write a little diddy about how the class has been going, to my surprise I opened the sketchbook from the first page, and just started flipping through it. Its contents not only surprise me, they made me smile. Page one starts sometime during my Typography Foundations class at the Seattle School of Visual Concepts, where I’m learning about some of the “better” fonts to use, including Gill Sans, Frutiger, Helvetica, and Futura. There’s also some notes in there about how to properly design your own font. Almost five years later, and I’m still using those “better” fonts, and I still haven’t designed my own font. Before getting to my present day’s notes, I pass through a bunch of work that has really shaped who I am as a designer including:
- Exercises on drawing in perspective
- Charcoal exercises in tonal gradation
- “Interesting” life drawing exercises
- Notes from my last few colour theory classes
Its hard to believe that its 5 years later and I’m still going headlong into this thing they call design. One thing I’ve learned for sure… the design seas are vast, and never ending. I could spend my entire life learning about design and I still would only have scratched the surface. The good news is that not only have I been learning about design for these past several years, but I’ve also had the chance to practice it. I’ll save that conversation for another post, and now focus on the first three classes of my Business & Design Thinking course at OCAD.
My first class was the first place I learned about something called the “Triple Bottom Line”. Its People, Planet, Profit. This is something that really stuck with me and is something that keeps coming up. I’d actually say there’s a fourth bottom line which is Purpose, but I’m starting to think that perhaps Purpose comes out of the harmony of people, the planet, and profits. To topic of purpose is something that comes up a lot where I work, and its definitely something I’ll be watching for intently as part of this course. Another topic that really grabbed me was the concept of the Basadur Applied Creativity profile, and the creative-types they have defined. I actually ordered surveys for my entire team at work to see where everyone lined up, and it was incredibly interesting (and oddly predictable) to not only see the results of the surveys, but also how different people talked about the surveys and engaged in a discussion around its validity and outcomes. It definitely provoked good thought about my team’s make-up, and who we were looking to hire to join the team. I even went as far as to send the survey to a potential candidate to get a better understanding of who they were. Very helpful, and immediately useful in my practice.
Another very interesting topic we touched on in-class was the question of what human-centered design really meant. Almost all of my previous study had been around user-centered design, which is actually quite different. User-centered design focuses primarily on the “user”, while its “human-centered” counterpart instead focuses on all stakeholders involved in a system. Also this class really got me excited because it quickly started talking more about the physical aspects of human-centered design, and even referenced one of my favorite designers, Henry Dreyfuss, and his methods around measuring the “average” human, and designing for ergonomics. I’m fascinated by all things industrial design (despite having never practiced it myself), so I really hope the class goes into greater detail in that area.
The last thing I will touch on, is the topic of visual thinking, which was referenced in our third class. Dan Roam wrote a great book “Back of the Napkin“, which I’ve read, had the chance to see him speak while at a Microsoft conference in Las Vegas once. This was something I was also really happy to see get addressed as part of the course, because I firmly believe in the highly visual nature of all design, and want to further hone my visual thinking, visual literacy, and hands-on visual practice. I would love to see more of my classes have a focus on sketching and drawing as a means to think, and be expressive amongst other classmates.
Lastly, I feel like the content of the class is up-to-date and covers very recent books, discussions, and emerging trends, and doesn’t get overly caught up in semantics… which is exactly what I was hoping for out of my first Master’s course.
