500 words

• Your increased awareness and understanding of the key concepts and practices explored through the tasks.
• The specific insights and learnings you gained as a result of completing the tasks.

Question A

Across all five of the task within this assignment, the same underlying pattern kept appearing: make/observe something, review it, and use that feedback from the review to improve the next attempt. The poster-a-day week ran through that cycle everyday - make a poster, review/reflect, and carry learnings into the next poster. The horizon line study would work as an observation, gather data and then notice data. The apple music usability test ran as a structured study, to then cross referring the data to explain participants behaviour and the effect. The ai collaborative poster worked similarly too: prompt, analyse, feedback prompt, and complete. Recognising the same repeating concepts across all tasks was the biggest shift in my understanding for me in this assignment. Instead of thinking of practice, observation and analysis all as seperate skills, they are instead all tools that should be used in collaboration with each other in order to create the best possible outcome.

Another concept that was recognised thought out this assignment was how much a fixed constraint can shape the outcome of a project. For task 1, the 48hr window per poster forced a new level of self confidence within my decisions that I am not usually used to. This in turn though further developed my skills and by day 7 I was able to fully visuise my design before I even touched my computer. Task 3's identical task script for every participant made it so that any struggle between tests could be traced back to the apps interface rather than the instructions, making all the results comparable. Task 5's chat with Claude worked in a similar way, each prompt asking for a different change within the chat bot limitations, and narrowing in those changes until it got it right. Across all the task, the constraints wasn't what made the task hard, its what made the result reliable and useful.

Question B

Task 1 taught me to control my self imposed pressures. After I recognised how the pressure was effecting my work more than anything else, I immediately noticed an improvement within my produced results and therefore allowed me to create more freely. Task 2 showed me how my predetermined categories could fall apart. For example, on day 4 when I covered an area that was a mix between urban and natural, it forced me to recognised my data as a spectrum rather than binary. Task 3 identical instruction script for every participant meant that all results could be traced back to the app interface, making all the results comparable. Task 4 described the makers as independents, becoming self surficant thorough there craft and valuing lifestyle over money. Task 5 taught me how a tool made to produce something isn't the same as finished product. Claude would follow my instruction but would never flag its mistake within its own work. Making clear that generative tool like Claude can help with projects but doesn't know what does and doesn't work within design, making it skill I have to bring myself.