Doing Creative Things Using Technology

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Extras:

Trash to Treasure prototype 1 Trash to Treasure prototype 2 Miro Board PitchedIn XD video

This will definitely be a project that stands out during my three years at uni for sure. The main reason being the unexpected hiatus in our studies due to a nationwide lockdown caused by a worldwide pandemic. Adapting and communication were key manners we had to withhold as a group for this project during these unprecedented times. Our strength as a group comes from the fact that we were able to overcome numerous hurdles and tackle problems in a realistic method. I also believe our time management and efficiency was impeccable - probably the most efficient I have been in a group throughout my years. Our use of online tools such as Blackboard Collaborate, Miro, Google Drive etc, has allowed us to utilise a wide range of work methodologies and create a system to help us adapt to these many changes that were beyond our control. 

Screencap of our Miro board at the end of semester

Miro was more handy of a project management tool than I thought. It was a good place to gather for meetings as all our work was more or less displayed and it would have made it easier to work out what has been done and what still needs to be done. I will most likely use it in the future. 

15/06

Screencap of completed XD prototype

As we draw closer to the end of semester and closer to the due date. We work diligently to complete the prototype of PitchedIn. We set up the wireframe of the website and Charina did an excellent job on the web design! Everything functions as it should. 

15/06

For the second creative workflows assignment, we are asked to reflect more on the realistic version of our flowchart rather than ideal. So for this assignment Charina and I made a Gantt chart. Unlike last time, we are more specific with the tasks we list, and we are able to label each one with a suitable amount of hours.   

Screencap of Gantt chart

Updated ‘Realistic’ Gantt Chart Workflow here

03/06

On Wednesday Charina had constructed some logo designs for PitchedIn, that day we discussed as a group all her different logo prototypes and ended up with a sleek, user-friendly design that we were all satisfied with. From the appearance of the logo alone, I was inspired to go out of my way to attempt to create my own interpretation of what the web could potentially look like. I was also inspired by an existing web example shown to us by Charina - eatsleepwork.com. 

Homepage of eatsleepwork.com

The homepage had a playful aesthetic as it recreated the appearance of a seemingly home office room of some sort. The site reminded me of my year 2 semester 1 project; Work in Progress as it delves into personal work spaces.The design prototype was made on Adobe Illustrator.   

Constructing the design on Adobe Illustrator

27/05

On Miro we decided to start planning out the layout of the website (the flow of how the pages are laid out). We thought it would have been in our best interest to first plan out how the web pages are going to flow before tackling it on XD. 

Screen cap on Miro of our web flowchart plan 

There are essentially two main parts of this web prototype, that would be your own personalized page where your profile is. Along with the profile there would be a page where you talk about your current project. There would also be a ‘pinned’ project section where you would keep in track of the projects you are interested in and keep up to date in their projects. From each project page you would also see a section of their details or feedback statistics. And there would also be a section where you can request feedback from others if needed. 

18/05

For this Wednesday’s studio workshop, our group tuned into Claudine’s Adobe XD tutorial. From her workshop, we understood the importance of UX/UI design, and even elaborated and touched upon numerous examples of other graduates’ portfolios and how they have integrated their interests into the style of their web design. There was also discussion about tools that already exist out there that help you make your website online and public, such as Wix or Squarespace. Wix seemed more suitable to us as less coding was involved with Wix. There was definitely a lot to consider in the construction of a website. The basis of Adobe XD was that you are able to plan the layout of your site before you construct it online. 

Shortly afterwards, Nat and I played around with XD for ourselves and discovered there was an additional co-editing feature! It functions similarly to Miro in the fact that it becomes a ‘live’ board and you can see who adds what in real-time. It will certainly come out in handy when it comes to creating future prototypes of PitchedIn.  

15/05

Within the Wednesday studio morning, we had been requested to take part in a rather interesting workshop - Trash to Treasure, The gist of this individual workshop is to utilize all the resources around us (not buying anything new) and recreate a ‘rapid prototype of what you may intend the final outcome of the project is going to end up being. Because our group have essentially decided to create an online platform, I look towards using more digital resources as opposed to physical. For me, the first thing that came to mind to use was ‘Scratch’ - a ‘kids learning coding programme’. I was rather familiar with the programme so it would have been easy to recreate what I had in mind of what the UI of the site would end up being. 

I ended up making two versions of an ‘online interactive community’, the first one was more standard and functioned more like a ‘normal website’, clicking through to different pages as projects are organised into either ‘open’, ‘closed (busy)’, or ‘feedback required’. The second design was more... unconventional to say the least. It was a 2D top-down view recreation of studio in it’s simplest shapes, with circles representing one student. The gist of this version is you can move around independently (‘virtually’) and converse with different people as long as they allow you too. Kind of like a more realistic representation of what being in studio would be like. 

13/05

For one of my classes - creative workflows, we were required to make a flowchart of our work progress for assessment. Because we shifted our direction of this project, we can’t really say we have a solid plan for what needs to be done, so instead, Charina and I made more of an ‘idealistic’ generalized plan of what we intend to do.

screen cap of workflow chart

‘Idealistic’ Workflow and Project Planning sheet here

13/05

Similarly with Brightside era, we wanted to collect and observe similar works that exist today and compare and contrast. So today we thought it would be in our best interest to look into already existing project management tools such as Click-up, Trello, Slack and so on. We made a document on Google Drive and in a table we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each one. 

We did this in hopes to better understand whats already out there in today's market and allow us to develop something different but also takes inspiration from these tools. 

Link to our research doc here

screenshot of one part of the doc

06/05

In our second week of online learning, we were provided with resources and sheets related to documentation which aided us in our planning and refining our idea. We were able to complete both, I think we worked quite efficiently today!

Link to our project planning doc here

04/05

During our group video call there was an interesting project concept brought up by Charina. The idea was essentially how we can create an online community for the students of AUT which would allow somehow interaction and collaboration as similar as we can make it to face to face contact. Also described as ‘putting the colab back into collaboration’. The main issue this would tackle is how hard it was (in this time of COVID) to maintain regular communication with your uni peers. Especially with studio, it is not easy if you might need feedback or some critiques from other students when you’re not around people physically. So we hope that this platform could end up being a possible solution. 

To start us off, we needed to come together as a group to discuss in more depth this new possible direction we are taking. For the first time, we looked towards a new online tool to aid us in this discussion - Blackboard Collaborate. The only other instance we use this platform is to carry out BCT meetings for all the students and lecturers. Fortunately, an opportunity was given to the students to use the ‘rooms’ for different groups if desired. Our group had a video call meeting within one of the rooms and utilised the whiteboard feature to carry out a quick brainstorm session.

Our group came up with the name ‘PitchedIn’, inspired by the concept of elevator pitches. we then proceeded to talk about the good and not good things about the idea. There were a lot of good points about it conceptually, such as the reason for it and what it stands for. Most of the negatives seem to stem from the constructing of it, so it will be interesting to see how we’ll work around that.