UX & Industrial Design
As a graduate of Industrial Design, I find that it and today's UX and UI concepts are very similar.
Industrial Design is the art of creating products and processes that people interface with. To learn more, check out What is Industrial Design.
Industrial Design is the art of creating products and processes that people interface with. To learn more, check out What is Industrial Design.
Industrial Design
As students we learned how to creatively think about the issues regarding a product and create ideas on how to improve it or create it from scratch. Then we went to creating working sketches, storyboards, drafting, illustrations, proposals, and then to creating prototypes. We designed and made mock-ups of items like clocks, chairs, lighting, and many other products. Ergonomics, or how people interface with the product, was a large backbone of the course. Psychology of design was also important.
The most useful part of the entire program, in my humble opinion was a course called Creative Problem Solving. I could always DO work, I just, at that time wasn't as good at creating ideas. After graduating, I realized that I was a fountain of ideas and I reaped the rewards of the course over the following years. I still feel that way and ended up teaching Creative Thinking at the Design School at Fanshawe for 2 years.
The most useful part of the entire program, in my humble opinion was a course called Creative Problem Solving. I could always DO work, I just, at that time wasn't as good at creating ideas. After graduating, I realized that I was a fountain of ideas and I reaped the rewards of the course over the following years. I still feel that way and ended up teaching Creative Thinking at the Design School at Fanshawe for 2 years.
An opportunity to solve a problem
In my third year, our class was approached by someone from Thames Valley Children's Centre who invited us to look at some of their issues and try to come up with solutions. Of all of my class, I was the only one to take on a problem. I was tasked to design a way to take the computer boards that the children used and some how move them and store them behind their seat.
I ended up winning the Easter Seals RESNA (Rehabilitative Engineering Society of North America) International Design Competition. I was one of 5 winners from across North America. I was very proud that I was the only Canadian, female, non engineering winner. I was published in their conference literature. If you go to the link, type in "fanshawe" in the top right hand corner . By clicking on the golden tear drop like icon on the timeline at the bottom right you will be taken to my 2 pages (649 and 650). I wish I had a better reference for this paper but It's wonderful I found it on an archived site.
I ended up winning the Easter Seals RESNA (Rehabilitative Engineering Society of North America) International Design Competition. I was one of 5 winners from across North America. I was very proud that I was the only Canadian, female, non engineering winner. I was published in their conference literature. If you go to the link, type in "fanshawe" in the top right hand corner . By clicking on the golden tear drop like icon on the timeline at the bottom right you will be taken to my 2 pages (649 and 650). I wish I had a better reference for this paper but It's wonderful I found it on an archived site.
UX and UI design
After graduation, I worked at AutoData Marketing when they were a MAC shop and all the employees were female. The only two males to start was the manager, Chris Wedermann and our programmer, Nicolas Schisler. The other person involved at the time was a Venture Capital investor.
The company created software to lease vehicles and our product was called AllMakes. At that time, if you went to a car dealership, you would walk up to one of our kiosks and via a touch screen screen, choose what kind of vehicle that you wanted to get a price quote on. You would navigate and choose the vehicle type, what type of tires, paint colour, etc. It then would print off a spec sheet that you could talk to a salesperson about it. My job was designing all the screen designs and editing the images that were for the screen.
As I have said to many people, I got paid to play for 3 years. I learned how to scan and clean up pics, create 3D looking buttons, use Illustrator and a page layout program. These were all the programs that I would end up teaching for 10 years. I helped out a bit in the imputing of the boolean logic for the software when they needed my help during crunch times. I also managed a database of over 1200 images for all our vehicles in the software.
The company created software to lease vehicles and our product was called AllMakes. At that time, if you went to a car dealership, you would walk up to one of our kiosks and via a touch screen screen, choose what kind of vehicle that you wanted to get a price quote on. You would navigate and choose the vehicle type, what type of tires, paint colour, etc. It then would print off a spec sheet that you could talk to a salesperson about it. My job was designing all the screen designs and editing the images that were for the screen.
As I have said to many people, I got paid to play for 3 years. I learned how to scan and clean up pics, create 3D looking buttons, use Illustrator and a page layout program. These were all the programs that I would end up teaching for 10 years. I helped out a bit in the imputing of the boolean logic for the software when they needed my help during crunch times. I also managed a database of over 1200 images for all our vehicles in the software.
In conclusion
I look back fondly at this time in my life and am hoping to find another collaborative, creative environment to be part of. I am very interested in continuing my love for problem solving and how people interact with technology.