A summary of my first year at university

I recently finished my first year at University, studying Product Design BA. What a year it has been! I have definitely learnt a lot and my approach to design has changed quite drastically. I have decided to go into depth more on each of the aspects I've learnt about this year on other posts, but for today i want to do a summary of the whole year and evaluate how I feel it went.

So let's start at the beginning.

This year taught me a lot about the dos and don'ts of design. At the start of the year, I found myself in a position where I'd had little experience with true designing and so found it hard to complete the briefs set to a high standard.

Everything from the layout of the presentations, to the quality of my sketching needed improvement and I feel that I am now in a position to say my work is much stronger.

One of the hardest parts of the course for me personally was the fact that I was unsure what exactly to do. What research do i need to complete? How much? How thorough does my work need to be? What sketch pages am I expected to make?

All these questions made the first brief difficult. I did what I thought was right, and made many, many mistakes along the way. But how else are we meant to learnt if not through our mistakes. At this point in time, I'm still far from perfect, still find it difficult to always know where to start but i have a routine now, I know my way around the basics.

Over the course of this year, we have covered some really interesting topics, some that I've loved and some that I've hated, but they've all been challenging in their own way. One of my personal favourite briefs was one based solely on research of a future technology, one where i could focus on any topic i wanted as long as it was to do with technology. Because of that, this brief was one of my strongest. It was a brief that I could delve deep into and take the project in any direction I wanted to.

Another topic i enjoyed focused on educational children's toys. After completing this project, I came to realisation that children's products are potentially what i want to focus on as a career after University. However, it is only my first year and i still have a lot more exploring and developing to do before i decide on a career path.

Personally, i think one of the biggest developments i made this year was understanding how to professionally lay out my work so that it's understandable with as little text as possible, usually images as the main way of communication. This was something i really struggled with at first but now feel more confident doing and strangely find it easier than using text now. I've also learnt how to properly assess my time management using gantt charts and evaluation. Overall, I've found ways that make every brief easier, but still challenging and engaging.

In my next few blog posts, I'm going to delve deeper into each aspect of this year and how I feel it went, but for now, I'm surprised at how little I knew at the start of the year and how quickly I've managed to learn new skills.

I look forward to next year!