Earlier today we had an introductory course lecture which began with outlining how this year will run and what we can expect by the end of it. Our year two course structure has changed in comparison to previous years. Our course structure now follows a similar path in what is done in the final year. The reason behind the change is because our University Design staff feel that we need the skills that are learnt in the final year to be learnt this year because it will put us in the best position when we eventually go on our year in industry.
Instead of having very small projects to do with a lot of modules, we have one project, which contains four modules that lasts the duration of the whole year. I am looking forward to this because it follows a similar structure to what I had at secondary school.
Our project for this year is, designing our futures, designing a product which will be targeted at the over sixty-fives. A challenging target market because they are not people we can easily relate to unless we spend a lot of time with grandparents, etc. It is a challenge and it should be very interesting to design a product that solves a problem, rather than design a product that creates more problems or does not easily facilitate its intended purpose.
We have been given some themes that we can follow:
- Aids/extends independent living
- Aids health and wellbeing
- Enhances personal safety
- Extends working life
- Enhances confidence to explore new horizons
or we can come up with our own and from that point we will end up formulating our own design brief. The first module we will be tackling is the product research, which will last around six weeks. We will then move on to product ideation, product development, finally product launch.