seems like a long story

This is not the final reflection. But because I really haven’t posted here for long long a time, I want to reflect about the past month and our IDP project.

The reason I didn’t write the reflection I should have is, my brain struggled…in some aspects.

First for myself, even though I’m not sure whether it is what Marty said about the transition, I can feel there is something changing within myself.

–Language transition. That did begin earlier, but I feel it late. So sometimes my brain is blank and I can’t come up with any words either in Chinese nor English. That is different than when I first came here. I knew what I want to say in Chinese that time but maybe it was hard to translate it into English. But now, I even don’t know how to express in Chinese. (Reflection about more than one month, I feel much better now)

–Transition of way to think. I used to be in the way without constraints to think. When I played the zeither,  when I drew, it’s a way to express myself, to let my emotion out. Or I thought in the way like an engineer when I did related works, rational and strict. As for design, we should think about both aesthetic and usability, we should consider the other people’s experience, emotions and habits. You can’t be too emotional, which means you should avoid designing for yourself. And at the same time, you shouldn’t be too rational and be sensitive enough to give your design life. Learn to balance is really important.

On the other hand, for our project 4 and 5, it’s really a different try and hard challenge for our team.

When we decided to design for blind persons, we were really excited. We did the prior projects in form of visual things, which people can see and interact with. But this time, for people who can’t see, we will try to design for different elements for them to interact with, like sounds, touch or smell. And at the same time, difficulties came then. I really experienced the time when one keeps thinking about the design all the time! Especially when our defined context is eating for blind persons. Every meal after that would cause my reflection and thinking. I know my teammates also experienced such a feeling and Sangwoo did self-blindness to inspire himself about this design problem.

Firstly I felt struggled for three aspects:

–We tried to simulate what the normal persons can feel for blind people. But is there any better way to design a digital eye for them? I didn’t know whether we could use different physical ways to act as the eyes.

–When we talked about the eating situations about blind person and also from the research resources we found, all I could think about was the table.

–No such experience in designing an object, especially one without the interface.

It seems like the story is too complex, yes I felt really upset. However, the interview with our target users gave us more inspiration.

–Our knowledge may not be enough to design something that can simulate an eye, but we could help the blind people develop or use their own skills by a tool. They are more sensitive with sounds or touch, why not design for a tool that can help them using their ears/fingers to get the information more easily?

–Design for everyday life is really hard because we are too familiar with it, but when we interviewed the blind people, we can find it was because some details in their daily life, during the mealtime, that make their life harder or even uncontrollable. Maybe we couldn’t solve all of their problems, but if we could do even a little, they will get help and be more independent, they will get pleasure from our design, which will make our work be meaningful.

–Maybe the design for object is different than digital stuff, but there are similarities between them. All the solutions should be around the problem, if you know what you are doing for, the directions is easier to find.

This experience is really memorable, with my own struggle happening in the same time. I love our team, we argued a lot, we got upset, we felt our design can only do a little after the test and went on to redesign. We know it still has flaws and we will still work on it.

Really long, somewhat complex, but it’s really happy to realize the transition is happening. (lol…. why sounds like a dialogue in the vampire story ..)