Placements

PriestmanGoode

IDEO

Territory Studio

Rockstar Leeds

Ubisoft Reflections

Aspirational career destinations: 

IDEO

Google 
Tesla, SpaceX

Facebook 

Tesla

Territory 

Priestmangoode 

Nike 

Aston Martin 

Uber 

NASA 

Airbnb 

BBC 

Microsoft 

McLaren 

Netflix 

Conjure 

Bungie 

BioWare 

Rockstar Leeds 

Ubisoft Reflections  


Networking and Communication

Featured in Fedrigoni 365

"Fedrigoni 365 is a project by design studio TM to commemorate the year 2018 by asking leading UK-based creatives to contribute a piece of work to a design compendium, which takes the form of the Fedrigoni annual Calendar.

The result of this process is a striking black tome that holds 365 single-colour designs within. Each design was created as an interpretation of a date that was provided at random to each participant. Confines were established to challenge each designer’s creativity by restricting the book to one paper and one colour print, which forced their pieces to focus strictly on concept, shape and form.

The brief was created to be deliberately restrictive, although there were slight concerns that it may be too limiting and could result in designs that were much of a muchness. It turned out that these worries were unfounded. The Calendar has organically shaped into a beautiful visual story whose pace varies from page to page, and spread to spread.

All proceeds will be going directly to the Make-A-Wish charity."

My portfolio was accepted and they asked me to design August 9th, so I had the number 9 to design. My 9 can be seen in the exhibition below:

Beyond the inherent irony of an exclusive interface designer being featured in a paper foundry's physical print exhibition, anything that positively gets my name out there is good. 

Design it; Build it 2017 - Newcastle

David Bailey

Director of Global Experience Language, BBC  

Playfulness, fun, weird 

BBC GEL UX&D 

Aleksandra Melnikova 

Difference between play and gamification 

Providing escape into other worlds 

Ade 

You should role play 

Be empathetic 

Give a shit 

The Granny Test - can your grandma use it? 

Habit forming UX 

Johannes Ippen

Use surprise and delight 

Foster curiosity 

Scissors on Kickstarter 

Make them trust you

Reward them! 

Catt Small 

Similarities of game and UX design 

Characters, mechanics, rules, goals, narrative 

Gamasutra 

'Game feel'

Mark Simpson

Seek random sources of inspiration 

An overview of the first iteration of Microsoft's Fluent Design - the new Xbox One dashboard UI

An abstract overview of the Fluent Design System

A floating home/action menu allows for the user to engage with most access points/areas of the system without having to leave their current location. This makes them feel more confident in using it without the threat of being thrown away from where they are. 

Popup layering is a very effective way of providing hierarchy and breadcrumbs to the system, particularly as the user moves from one part of a single application to the other. In this example they are moving from the 'People' tab to the 'Friends' tab. 

A very obvious button selection state is particularly useful on a TV interfaces because of the quantity of elements on-screen (enabled by the huge real estate of the display). This selection state is also tailored to the account holder's chosen colour, so mine is blue. This adds an effective layer of customisation, and has a big impact on the appearance of the system. 

Dark Mode dashboard with Purple profile colour

System theme selection

A ubiquitous feature in automotive UI design - Light and Dark modes, is now making its way into desktop, mobile and now console user interfaces. The same practical reasoning applies to all - using the system in a bright environment is easier in Light Mode, and using Dark Mode is easier in a dark environment. It's also a customisation feature that people really like to have.

Revised personal objectives

My three stage plan from Level 5 remains in place:

1. Start with automotive user experience design
2. Expand to public transport user experience design e.g. electric aircraft, Hyperloop
3. Spacecraft UX design

and then
4. Follow the future

Created with the knowledge that it will continuously and inevitably evolve/change entirely. This plan is a workable progress guide, rather than a concrete plan for my life. It's likely that my desires and interests will change over time; this is exciting, not worrying.  




A reflection of Jaguar Land Rover

Various press images of areas in the Land Rover Design Studio 


 

Credit: JLR Newsroom
Feat. Massimo Frascella, a member of the clay modelling team,
and a small part of the Land Rover Design Studio in the background

To reflect on the summer of 2017 and by extension Level 5, it could safely have been said that I didn't expect to reach stage 1 of my plan straight after graduation, never mind before graduating. But my placement at Jaguar Land Rover as an Interface Designer was incredibly useful, insightful and humbling. My designs, though unable to be shown here, will be used by hundreds of thousands of people on the next generation touchscreen system for all Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles. My sense of imposter syndrome was real - sat in the ridiculously impressive Land Rover Design Studio, with the incredibly inspiring future of this giant, revered company, sat before me, it felt more like I'd sneaked in rather than been offered a place. The new Range Rover Velar hints at the design-led future of the product lineup, and it's a future I'd be super excited to be a part of as a graduate. My manager has offered me the chance to return upon graduation, and it'd take something very special to dissuade me.

My mission remains the same - to work with the people making the future exciting, and use design to empower them.


FUTURE TRANSPORT, SPACE EXPLORATION, RENEWABLE ENERGY. 

Glug Leeds 2017 - three things learnt

Glug is a series of informal talks and networking sessions for creative people around the world. I attended their event in Leeds in September 2017 in order to gauge and interact with the the local creative community - it's free for students, which is great.

Three things learnt:

A hell of a lot can be achieved in one year
If you're going through hell, keep going
Success is different for everyone, and so it should be  

Personal focus as a designer

Airbus Airspace by Priestmangoode

Crew Dragon Interior by SpaceX

I-PACE Concept by Jaguar

Train interior concept by Priestmangoode

With a personal focus on making the future better and more exciting than the present, I identified transport early on as somewhere I could hope to make a difference. Most people have to utilise some form of transport every day, and more often than not their experiences are negative. It is rare to hear someone say something positive about their morning commute, particularly if they used public transport. Though it may seem a trivial issue, the general population starting their day with a poor experience does not result in a population as happy, as excited or as productive as it could be. 

Conversely, most people's very first experiences on a plane or train are exciting and memorable. It is only after regular use that the thrill quickly fades as the intrigue over the technology wanes and they're left with constant delays, unreliable service and poor quality, dull and overcrowded environments. The transport of the future should make people look forward to using it, it should not be a chore or a hardship, which is what it often is now. 

My focus throughout Level 5 has been on user interface and user experience design, particularly interface design for transport. I intend to continue this development throughout Level 6, and potentially challenge myself in COP by exploring potential interface solutions for spacecraft. This complies with my 3-stage plan for the future, which is to start with a career in the automotive industry, then expand to public transport until I have the expertise and the understanding to help influence the future of space transport. Though my initial focus will be on human-machine interface design, I'd like to expand my role to designing the overall experience of the product or service, whether that be a car, train, plane, hyperloop or spacecraft. 

I fully expect this plan to alter, or be disbanded entirely in time. But by then I will at least have created something exciting and new. 

Being offered an Experience Design placement at Jaguar Land Rover

Jaguar Land Rover rang today to offer me an undergraduate Experience Design placement to start this June and last for three months. 

Though the ED placements are usually limited to 12 months only, I applied in spite of this with the intention of testing how far I could get in preparation for applying as a graduate, and to see if I could barter for a shorter placement. Because of how well my interview and assessment centre went, Jaguar Land Rover made an exception in offering me a shorter, three month placement. It's highly likely that my focus on transport UI in the OUGD504 Design For Screen brief, and my intensive focus on automotive UI design in COP2, got me the place.  

This means that I've almost achieved stage one of my three stage plan (Cars > Public Transport > Space Transport) before I've graduated. 

Couldn't be more excited. 

Design trends in the field of artificial intelligence

Logomarks for advanced AI research organisations tend to have circular, optical appearances; perhaps to relate to a vision to the future, an interface to the brain (in the same way the eye is), an omnipotent power, or a cycle of iteration-based development. 

DeepMind is a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc.. Their website uses a variety of different blues (likely to denote intelligence, calmness, openness, trustworthiness etc.) and responsive animated elements (likely to denote progress, electrical connections in the brain and in technology, the synthesis of biology and computing etc.) to create an appropriate but almost avant-garde appearance. 

The animations, colour set and typefaces all help to create a technological, scientific and advanced (but functional) aesthetic. 

Responsive animations and an optical logomark are also employed by OpenAI, a started-up founded by Elon Musk with the intention of democratising artificial intelligence. Like DeepMind, OpenAI's site makes use of string-like illustrations and a high use of animation, but OpenAI employs a much wider gamut of colours (perhaps to denote the intended openness and democratic responsibility of the organisation). 

Though colour is used liberally (above), many areas of the site are clean and white, with a large amount of negative space (or use the mode traditional blue-green approach [seen below]). This could again serve to create an open, honest and trustworthy appearance. 

In summary, responsive animations, gradient colour sets, custom typefaces and blue/green palettes are the trends most visible in the AI industry, and indeed many of these trends can be applied more broadly to the most recent, most well funded design arenas on the web. Gradients in particular are fighting against the previous trend of flat bright/pastel colours.  

DIBI Edinburgh 2017

I attended Design It; Build It in Edinburgh (March 2017). Three of the major lessons I learnt are below: 

1. User experience designers are almost never truly representative of the user they are designing for. But it is important that UI/UX designers try to put themselves in the shoes of their user. In the case of Molly Nix, a product designer at Uber, she spent time driving for Uber to try and make an accurate assessment of the needs and desires of their drivers. What she acknowledged however, is that her income was not dependent on driving for Uber, and that she could not be a driver for long enough to accurately assess what they need. So while it is important to try and put ourselves in the shoes of our users, and do so in a way which is physical as well as mental, we can almost never be truly representative of them. Good communication and liaison with your users is therefore highly important.

2. The importance of personal identity. Though often overlooked, it is highly important to develop a unique and successful personal brand for yourself as a designer. Mike Kus demonstrated the effectiveness of personal identity through his well-received slide deck, seen above. Though it is important to let your work speak for itself, it's just as important to express your personal philosophy as a designer, and make it clear what you are trying to achieve and why you are doing what you do. 

2. The importance of taking risks. Though taking risks is uncomfortable, if you are not taking risks then the impact you will have on anything that causes meaningful change is limited. Whether on a personal level or on a one of grander scale, doing things which make you worry means that you are doing things that are different, and it is only through doing things which are different that you can create positive change. 

Conjure

Conjure are a design studio which specialises in HMI design for vehicles, motorcycles and transport more broadly. I've done some investigating and have connected with many of them on LinkedIn. It'd be great to build a relationship with them, particularly with the need to do a placement at Level 6.