The creativity involved in designing is one of my favourite aspects of being a designer. Throughout my master I have nurtured various skills to support and enhance my creative process. By employing a range of ideation techniques across different projects, I explored problems by looking at them from multiple perspectives.
While I entered my master’s program already able to illustrate and communicate ideas through sketching, I expanded my skill set by learning digital drawing and using sketching not only as a tool for visualization but also as a means to generate ideas during ideation. I also experimented with embodied design techniques, such as bodystorming, to incorporate physical actions into the ideation process. My preference for working with tangible objects was further strengthened during the Interactive Materiality course where I conducted an extensive material-based-exploration to find the optimal materials for my group’s idea.
Throughout my master projects I have applied a mix of different design perspectives as defined by Smeenk, Tomico and van Turnhout [1]. I often began ideating from a first-person perspective generating ideas from my own experience and then moved into a second-person perspective by involving users to evaluate and refine those ideas.
Although the prototypes I created during my first and second projects sufficiently functioned for their purpose within the projects, I was not entirely satisfied with their quality as they were unable to provide a complete user experience. This motivated me to set a higher standard for my final master project. Therefore, my goal for my FMP was to create a prototype that could deliver the full experience of my concept. To achieve this, I expanded my approach by incorporating a third-person perspective, returning to academic research to inform and validate my design choices. By combining these insights with my improved skills in electronics and coding I was able to create a prototype of Slumber that truly embodied my vision.
Relevance to Identity and Vision
Having a solid and diverse creative process is an essential skill for a designer that wants to create innovative solutions. Therefore, I reinforced my ability to use different ideation techniques and refined my approach to challenges by using multiple perspectives to form a complete understanding of the problem at hand. Through these processes I am able to focus my creativity on clearly dividend problems to ensure I create something that is both innovative and meaningful.
[1] Wina Smeenk, Oscar Tomico, and Koen van Turnhout. 2016. A Systematic Analysis of Mixed Perspectives in Empathic Design: Not One Perspective Encompasses All. International Journal of Dsign. Retrieved January 14, 2025 from http://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/2543/738
