CRITICAL REFLECTION

I knew I wanted to do something around the topic of climate change, it’s what I’m most interested in at the moment and also incredibly relevant. I have done a lot of research around this and I’ve tried to adapt my daily life to be more environmentally conscious. It made sense to me to base my project around this topic.

What I soon realised, is how deep and vast this topic is, and it is not good news. It was very easy (too easy) to get lost in dark areas and feel so overwhelmed about the state of our planet.

The more research I did, the harder it was to hone in on one topic, as there are so many potential paths I could take. I am very interested in wearable technology, as it is something I haven’t yet explored. I thought this would be a great opportunity to combine these two interests.

Guru’s day came, I had a lot more research, but still nothing concrete.

All of the previous projects I have ever done, always asked for a solution to a specific problem or request. For example : create an innovative lighting system.

With all these, I could see the end goal. I knew what I was creating and why. Without this clear vision, I found that I was struggling to come up with a brief. By the end of the day, I’d decided that I would like to create a product with a visual embedded message with the aim to educate or start a conversation.

When the news came that DJCAD was to close and we needed to get our stuff out as soon as possible it came as a bit of a shock. A lot of us had just started to get into the rhythm and excited about creating our products.

When my flat mate moved back in with her parents, I made the decision to move to Edinburgh with a friend so that I wasn’t alone, and we could motivate each other to work. This was a tough decision to make as the flat was very small, and I could only bring as much as I could fit in my car. My workspace would also drastically reduce in size.

I created a small area in the flat where I put the cardboard I’d saved, and as many tools as I thought would be helpful over the next few weeks.

I no longer had access to any workshops or the materials that I was hoping to play around with. Most recently screen printing on textiles with smart inks.

This pushed me to look more into online statistics and live data. I coded a lot to get the numbers to translate into colours and more visually appealing data. I wanted to find a way to combine the live data into a product.

This product would have other functions other than just present the data. I realised that I wanted to incorporate way too much information and materials into a single product. I think that my final product, which is a lot simpler, and more minimalistic actually presents the data in a much more successful way than my previous ideas.