Briefing

The first week in the product design studios started with myself and my course mates taking an active part in team building activities with some of the first and second years, this allowed us to get to know them and build up contacts with them for advice relating to stages within the research or design process.  Next, we were given our brief, which is to design a portable gaming device, whist keeping in mind ergonomics, aesthetics and user centred design. This brief was later something which we had to breakdown and rewrite ourselves to achieve a better understand of the task itself, here we were also able to set out a list of common definitions before embarking on our own design assignment.

In order to prepare us for the design task which we had been set we were given a seminar on sketching and perspective drawing techniques.  Here we produced a series of three dimensional drawings of common objects, whist learning about shape construction techniques and how to use vanishing points.  This introduced me to different ways of sketching, which I may need to revisit to improve and better my drawings as I was not fully confident with freehand perspective sketching.

Another task that we were set to do as a group was to print off multiple different examples (photos) of portable gaming devices.  We were then instructed to arrange our sets of images into a mood board, which we ended up making two of.  One of the mood boards was arranged into a chronological timeline of when the gaming devices were produced, showing what previous devices looked like, but also giving an insight into what future of gaming devices could look like.  The other was made up of several clusters of images, which we had organised into groups of products that shared similar features.