DES 241

DES 241 Blog post 26/07/2021

Introduction:

My name is Michelle I am a design student and an Arts graduate. In my Arts degree I majored in Sociology and Employment Relations and Organisation Studies. I wanted to study design because I felt it provided a path and a career opportunity to mitigate social issues through a design lens. Design is practical and design solutions are implemented faster relative to policy solutions. Since starting this degree, I have learnt to integrate sociological knowledge, research and theories with design principles and framework. My last project was increasing food literacy in primary school students in contemporary New Zealand. We focused on two developmental learning theories; Observational Learning and Familiarisation and created a classroom-based app that worked to expose students to food from all food groups. We did this through utilising gamification techniques but more importantly we examined the socio-environmental context behind the struggles caregivers face when providing for their children, and sought to alleviate the wider system-based issues first. Our group was fortunate enough to work with many non-governmental health organisational programs, such as Garden to Table and Heart Foundation, organisations that have first-hand experience improving food literacy in schools. We made sure our product was providing value to our target users by doing as much user research as possible. We surveyed over 100 students and 5 teachers. In addition, we sought and received very detailed feedback from the leads of Heart Foundation, Garden to Table, Head of Dietetics at UoA and Liaison Dietitians at every iteration. The Heart Foundation was very pleased with our project and would like to provide us with grants to into develop our product. This is the type of project I am interested in, and the type of social problem I would like to mitigate.

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lEHyRyY=/

I was the project manager and research lead. I am again the project manager for this project. I enjoy being project manager because I enjoy learning about people and their interests and motivations. I would like to choose a project that they all have a connection to, so that they are passionate about their work and motivated to make an impact. I have already discovered that I am research orientated, thus my preferred role within a design team will always be context and user research. I would like to know the strengths/interests of my team so that I can align their strengths with the right role. Today we had our first group meeting. We made a discord group chat and got everyone familiar with Trello. The process to role designation was very smooth. Most team members wanted to work on multiple things which meant all roles have at least 2 members. We are going, as a group to visit the Art Gallery and Museum on Thursday morning at 9:00am.