A glimpse of life after college

Today was a very interesting class/workshop as our class welcomed renowned designer Peter Sheehan! He came in to give us a talk and then carry out a workshop with us. It was very interesting to hear Peter's story of his journey so far and one can only dream of living a life like that. He spoke a lot about his inspirations and I could resonate with this. I couldnt agree more about how taking inspiration from objects and scenery around you can really get the creative juices flowing. He also said it was a good idea to bring a sketch pad with you to sketch down ideas as you encounter them as they are fresh in your mind.

I found his work with logitech very interesting and I feel this is an area of design I would like to pursue as I have an interest in it. After hearing about the design partners I looked up their web page and I was amazed. There is a video on their page which is a summary of the process to design a gaming mouse and it was so inspiring to see how they came up with the design and the model making side of things. It made the process look so fun and also made it look easy as they are so good at model making! Just that one video gave me a different insight into designing products and reminded me that I am designing products for other people and not myself and in future I will be getting people to play around with my models or give opinions on my designs so that I can improve in every aspect!

We then had a workshop with Peter. He began by showcasing his skills, he sketched an ideation page for a tablet stand/cover. He described what he was doing as he done it and he made it look so easy, it is so inspiring to see something like this being done in front of you and everyone else seemed to think the same as the room was in silece and concentration. After he had did this it was now our turn to produce one page of sketching and a final model as well as a few "monster models"! Everyone seemed intensely focused on the task at hand as we only had one hour. It was a different process than we were used to as we were orignally told to just use a black pen and layout paper and dont use rulers, however Peters process was a lot more fun and creative and I felt it suits me a lot more. I used to be slow at ideation pages and they looked rigid, they didnt have any life to them however after this workshop I have experimented with different pens, pencils and markers on different paper and just sketched down what was in my head, I stopped over thinking basically and this has improved my creativity and design a lot! I feel this class was my most productive yet and I feel I have learned more in this class than any contemporary class yet, the information I learned is invaluable and will continue to improve me as a designer.