Skills learnt to build a more professional projects

During my first year of University, I certainly learnt a lot of new skills and techniques, but I also learnt new elements of design and research. All things I'd never heard of but made my work so much more truthful and professional once I became more comfortable with them. Today's post covers the things that made my work more professional and controlled.

One of the first things we covered that ultimately made work look more put together and displayed a strong sense of time management was the use of a gantt chart. Before University, I'd seen gantt charts but never personally used them, so when we were asked to track our time management, I made a very simplified version using the table function on Word and annotated it afterwards to explain if my prediction was correct. Although it was functional, it was not practical and so we were taught how to make more concise gantt charts that compare the predicted time scale and the actual time management for each project. Once we were taught how to properly use gantt charts, they became a quick and simple way of improving work and bringing it all together.

Another skill I learnt early on that really helped with research and understanding the potential future of design was trend maps. Trend mapping focuses on designs and technologies that are predicted to come into the design world within the next few years, typically 5, 10, 15 years. By splitting these advancements into time periods and technological sections, it becomes easier to analysis the potential future of design and see which areas require more work and which areas are close to completion. Trend maps were used for our Human 2.0 project where we had to design a technology for the future. For this project I focused on diabetes and how there are potential technologies to prevent, cure and live with diabetes. The information for trend maps can often be difficult to find if there aren't many advancements being made in that particular area. Personally, I found researching difficult but once I had my trend map complete, I was pleasantly surprised with how easy I found it to apply this research to my work and design work.

Possibly the biggest and most important skill I learnt that truly made a drastic change to my design work this year were the presentation boards. At the end of each project, we had to create several presentation boards to summarise our work. Covering consumer boards, technical boards and even sales board, we were taught to cover the most important parts of our project in a limited number of pages and text, which I found particularly hard. In order to make the presentation boards look as put together as possible, we were asked to use CAD images such as illustrator to get detailed images digitally. At first, I didn't like using presentation boards as I found it hard to cover all my work and research in 3 A3 pages, however, by the end of the first year, I found myself really enjoying presentation boards as it's interesting to see which parts of the project stand out the most and summarise the work.

Overall, I certainly learnt a lot over the course of this year, however all these skills have really helped make my work look more professional and collective. Hopefully, next year, I will continue to learn new areas that can further improve my work and make it more concise in the future.