The following contents will be about the first class on Design Fiction and updates on our theme(AR + Music) projects. I hope to give you readers an idea on the things that we do here in DATE.
Design Fiction
For this course, we are free to be teamed with any one of our choices and the first class went like this:
Morning session – Introductory lecture on Design Fiction and some practice on hand sketching during the session. Practically, this course will give some insights on creating a story around a product or service for marketing purpose. However, we will not be promoting anything in this course and apparently, we will be using the origami robots for our storytelling. Right before we had our lunch break, we were tasked to narrate “How to make a toast” with exactly 8 scenes on 8 pieces of paper for the afternoon session.
Afternoon session – We came back from lunch and started working on the drawing and storytelling. I got myself two friends of mine from two different themes as my teammates while the others formed their own group. We finished everything in around 2 hours and what’s left was just to briefly present the story and drawing to course TA for grading purpose.
Personally, I would say at this moment Design Fiction is more relax than Origami Robot because all the work can be done on the same day as compared to the Origami Robot where we had to spend extra days to complete the homework.
PS: The skills that will definitely have an edge in this course are basic Adobe (Ps and Ai), hand drawing, or generally, anything comes from your creativity. As the final assignment on this course is to produce a video, needless to say, Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro will be your main tool (feel free to use any other video editing software). Afraid not if you have no experience on anything I just mentioned just now because technical skills are not everything, you can always be useful in another way inside your team, just make sure that the deliverables are met and all of you enjoy what you all are doing. That’s what matters the most. 🙂
AR + Music
I figured the previous blog posts had not mentioned anything about the theme so let me briefly run you through what happened up until this point. In this theme, we are free to come up with any own idea(s) relating to AR and Music, and then we will proceed to execute those idea(s) after it is accepted. From week 1 to week 4, it was more about finding the ‘why’ on the certain idea(s) and picking the best that we think is meaningful and doable based on our capabilities. Since week 5, we have been researching on the ‘how’ for the chosen ideas, figuring out different technical parts of things and present those findings and first stage products (in our cases are iOS app) to our theme TAs. The meeting will happen every week and Prof Zhang would join us every now and then to provide us with some feedback. Our TAs are undergraduates and graduates under Prof Zhang research lab and they are very helpful and nice to work with.
This post may be a little bit lengthy but I hope you are able to get something useful out of it and I thank you for spending your time in reading my post.
Cheers!
Best regards,
Shin Jie
