Collaborative Design Practice - Task 1

Collaborative Design Practice 

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Design Exploration / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University 

---

INSTRUCTIONS 

Week 1

For the first week of Design Collaboration, we were asked to form groups with different specialisations of 5-6 members. My group consists of Meiling, Jonathan, Jeyann, and Yumnu. We were then put into a meeting with Ms Zazila, the leader of a Sabah NGO. We were also going to work with her for our project. Her company (EZPlast) needs help in branding and also raising awareness about her brand. EZplast is a company whos goal is to give back to their community through buying plastic waste. For our first meeting, we were given a more indepth explanation about her company and her reasons as to why she created this company. Along with what she needs help with, after which we created a WhatsApp group with Ms Lillian and Ms Zazila for communication. 

Week 2

 For our second week, we have decided to create some questions to ask Ms Zazila to help us better understand her goals and company itself. We have scheduled a meeting with her as soon as possible. During class itself we all worked together on completing an empathy map and it was during this we decided to have a meeting since we couldn't answer all the questions accurately. 

Figure 1: Empathy Map V1

Week 3

This week the meeting with Ms Zazila was conducted. We also continued the empathy map and finished it off after the meeting with Ms Zazila. We were given feedback that we need to be more proactive, to look into our target demographic and do more research. We had a group discussion afterwards to brainstorm possible solutions to the problems we had at hand. We then came up with questions to ask Ms Zazila about the location her company is working from, to better understand how we can provide solutions that are related to them. We also thought of possible ideas that we could propose to her. 

Figure 1.2: Empathy Map V2

Figure 1.3: Problem Statement First Attempt.

Week 4

This week we had our design proposal presentation with our NGO partners and Ms Lillian. Overall, everything went very well and we were told that our direction was good so far. We just need to begin creating our actual output. 

REFLECTION

Week 1: For the first week I am excited to be in my current group! It's nice working with people you know do well in their work. Working on another project similar to my minor project is going to be interesting as it's almost like taking the knowledge from that and really putting it into practice. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing for our group.

Week 2: We've worked on our empathy maps from the perspective of the company rather than the typical user centric method. We have also scheduled a meeting with Ms Zazila for next week to help us answer the questions better and focus on her needs as our client. 

Week 3: This week we had a bit more of a rough start, our feedback was to be more proactive in our work. We had unanswered questions but did not do anything to try and answer them yet. After class we all stayed and tried answering everything together and doing as much as we could to rectify our slow pace. As we need to make sure we will be ready with our problem statement and presentation for our presentation next week. 

Week 4: This week went really well! I'm glad that Zazila was happy without our output ideas. We all put a lot of thought into making sure that these ideas are sustainable and able to be executed by our clients. Now it's onto the more fun part, actually creating a design that represents EZPlast!