12) SKETCHING

In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned creating sketches as part of our design journey, but I felt it was important to touch on this more. Sketching is not something that I would consider myself confident in. I feel like I do a better job of explaining the sorts of things I want to build rather than showing them with a piece of paper and pencil. However, I recognised that sketching for this assignment is not only an important piece of the process, but also an opportunity to push myself creatively.

Sketching was something that occurred throughout all phases of the project. We created initial sketches to ideate what our design might look like and might do, refined sketches to better show how visitors will interact with the device, sketches to show different overlays and points of views from the garden, and sketches that better reflected our final design idea after making significant changes.

I found the lectures in class to be helpful to me during this process. As I mentioned, sketching is not something I find myself naturally gravitating to, so to have some guidance on foundational basics was helpful. Not only did I find the process of sketching to be helpful to expanding my creativity and pushing the bounds of my typical process, but I also found it to be a great artefact to be able to reflect on. It was interesting to be able to look back on the sketches that we had made throughout the entirety of our process and reflect back on all of the progress we had made. I also found it helpful to be able to refer back to these previous sketches while making iterations to directly compare what we might want to change or keep. I would not have been able to do all of these things if we had not sketched our ideas along the way.

The biggest mistake I made in the sketching journey was not actively taking pictures. As a result, I only have a few examples to show.