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.