In reflection on assignment 2, I guess the biggest takeaway was that I was surprised how surprised I was.

I have been creating digital resources for nearly a decade, and assumed I knew enough to make easy work of this. While I suspected I would feel burdened by following prescribed methods to develop and iterate the product, I was constantly (and happily) surprised to see that there were areas of the design process that I had skipped in the past, and ones that I use all the time that, when looked at with fresh eyes, evolved to become much more useful.

The review of Design thinking and learning theories was extremely valuable. The MALAT program has taken us in a lot of different directions. In my experience, much of what we have done is to explore concepts, and be introduced to new ideas (or expand on existing ones). While we have had a variety of assignments and activities, my experience so far has felt largely ‘philosophical’. 527 began, and the focus of the course is creation; something tangible needed to be produced.

The return to the salient elements of past courses to scaffold this one helped me in three ways:

  1.  It re-enforced the concepts we have covered by review, and by calling on them to be put to action.
  2. It focussed my efforts in directions that could be justified academically
  3. It corralled what is usually (for me) a ‘free form’ creation process into a much more structured one.

Point 3 is where I see the most value, at the moment. By structuring the design process, and scheduling deliverables at each stage, I have definitely learned to consider each element of design as separate elements, and to attempt to evaluate these steps before proceeding. It’s a tired analogy, but it forced me to build a better foundation before walls and a roof.

For feedback, my biggest surprises were how intelligent the feedback from my co-workers were, and how welcoming they were to go even further with the technology. It was suggested that I change camera perspectives on my animation, bump up resolution on my renders, and most interestingly, make the presentation more interactive and explore a VR option. What was most  remarkable was that this came from managers who were fairly battle weary from being overtasked. In previous jobs, I worked with a lot of talented people, but who who were able to offer little technical feedback on instruction; they were all SMEs. So, I’m excited  that my colleagues are able and willing to contribute so much.

The next steps will be:

  • to integrate the feedback into the 3D animation. It’s nice to be able to control and own that entire process as I don’t ned to try and relate the information to a third party and hope it works; I can iterate and re-iterate as many times as I like and gain direct feedback from the users. I’ll export the video to 1080hd and even a 4k trial. 1080 should serve most individual users, and although I had not considered it during the design process, 4k for use in a boardroom presentation is a very nice option.
  • To export some of the video to a virtual reality prototype and see if it is what the users want. I suspect it will be overkill, and difficult to implement without a big re-think of the training structure at work, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong as it’s an exciting project
  • To work to overcome the technical issues I encountered with the presentation software. Keynote did not function as smoothly as I’d hoped, and it appears PowerPoint has dropped a function (that I have used in the past) that was critical for my initial vision. I would have liked to address these before the assignment went in, but time constraints dictated otherwise!

I’ll be using design thinking much more in the future. To circle back to my initial thoughts, what I initially saw as a constraint kept me much more focussed and aligned on this project. Add to that, the clear sequential nature of the process added a final unexpected benefit: I was able to put the project down when pulled away, and know very quickly where to pick back up when returning. In contrast to the unstructured nature of my design process before, this revelation alone was ‘worth the price of admission’!