My Experience With the Design Cycle

Over the last couple of weeks we have been working with the design cycle in order to make a final project. First we started with the investigate part, where we needed to research quotes, lyrics, and poems, and then make 30 pages with those copy and pasted. Afterwards we needed to chose the top choices of each and then from those three top choices chose the one that we could use to make a whole project out of. I chose the lyrics of a song that I thought was really meaningful. Afterwards, we had to do the design specifications and the design brief that helped us understand what we really wanted to do with our project. After the investigate comes design where we needed to create 5 designs for the project, here what I did was various ideas, but then I resolved to chose another idea instead of the ones I had had before. This is where you needed to justify your chosen design with the design specifications, to see if what you were doing was on the right track or not, and where you justified any changes made to the original design specifications. Afterwards comes the plan, where you write how you are going to create your project, meaning the process or steps you are going to follow in order to make a the design specifications work on the chosen design. This is a very simple step, where you only needed to write a justification on what you were going to do and how you were going to do it. The second to last step is the create step, that is perhaps the most important step of the whole design cycle, where you use the design specifications, the chosen design, and the plan, in order to make that final product that you are going to present to the class or the school. This step is the step that took the most of the time, because it’s where we needed to do the whole thing and it really took a long time to get all of the details you wanted and things like that. Also something that I haven’t done yet in the create step is a justification with photos or a video, that needs to be posted on our blog. Finally the final step that we haven’t done yet is the evaluate step, that we will do this Friday.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogs

Blogs have their advantages and their disadvantages just like with any public social network. When you have a blog you are writing things to the world, you are publishing things that everyone in the world can see somehow. This fact makes blogs be a very dangerous source of information and one of the main sources for cyber bullying. Everyone in the world that owns and has any way of having internet available can create a blog, whether they know how to use it or not, everyone has the availability to one. Knowing this, you know that everyone that has internet can see your blog and you can see theirs if your casually searching for something on the internet.

The advantages of having a blog are for example, if you like writing, and you want to show the world whatever you have recently done, you can post it on the blog, and everyone will be able to see it and judge it with their own criteria, whether they like it or not, people can see it. This is good for some people who like to hear people’s opinions, because in blogs you can leave a posted comment that the blog owner can see and follow the advice for the next time that person writes again.

On the other hand having a blog can be a very dangerous thing, firstly some people give too much information about themselves on the blog, and that is super dangerous now a day, because if anyone can see it, you don’t know with what person you are going to encounter in one of those blogs. Second of all it is one of the main cyber bullying sources of the internet, because you can post the blog, and write anything about anyone in the blog, and some people own blogs of Hating this girl or that guy or follow me to destroy this and that, and sometimes those blogs have led to teenagers committing suicide.

The internet is a very powerful source of information, something that we should really be careful about, because you never know who is reading you blog, who is following every post you say, and maybe how hurtful you are being to the person you blogged about. So I think that if you have a blog, it can be used for things like school subjects, were you can post anything that will be read by your teachers, and leaves nothing related to you. Having any social networking tool is very dangerous especially if you are someone who likes to post information about yourself. You always need to remember to be precautious when using a social network.

Emerging Technologies

Every day, new technologies emerge to the world; either it is a simple cell phone or a new type of computer, everything is new to us. The new technologies that come out every day have a certain impact on the people in every country. People in the US are more exposed to these new technologies than the people in South America, because they get them faster than us, therefore they are able to buy them and get to know these new technologies first. These new technologies have certain impacts on people, they get popular when they first come out and the old things that were once popular soon become forgotten, and this is a constant cycle. Because of this constant cycle, companies are obliged to make newer and better things each time, because people demand them. People don’t want the same old phone that looks slightly different, they want something that will make them want to learn about these new things and get them.

Companies then have a great profit, because even though they spend thousands on building and trying these technologies, they actually get back a lot more because they sell it to a high price that people will buy. People will buy it because of social pressure, if a group of friends get the same phone, and one person doesn’t get it, that person will feel pressured by the group and will get the cell phone no matter what. This is what you could call a sort of fever, because everyone will be super exited about getting the new phone, so people will start buying it and everyone will want to get the new phones and forget about the old ones.

Investigate

In this stage of the design cycle, you need to start re-searching about the topic you are going to do your project about. In this first stage, you make the design brief, where you show how you intend to solve the problems I have been presented with. With this you will be able to have a more detailed design specification. The design specifications, is where you give a detailed description of the conditions, dimensions, materials, process and methods that are important for the designer.

When you are in this stage you first need to look for the topic, being the thing you will be doing your project about, then you need to write about it, in the design brief, and from there your design specifications.

In our current project the Investigate part, was to search for lyrics, quotes, or poems that were meaningful to you. You needed 30 pages of investigation and from all of those poems, quotes, or lyrics, you needed to chose your top 3 of each. From there you needed to chose the one that was truly meaningful to you and do the design brief about it, where you needed to state why you had chosen that song, poem, or quote, after you kind of knew what you wanted to do, you needed to write your design specifications where you tell the designer what materials he needs to use and how he is going to use it. During this process we also chose the type of font that would answer the main questions.

I think that this step is the most useful one of the whole design cycle, because it is where you actually get to see the initial meaning of the whole project, it is where you know what you are going to do. Later you are going to design and plan, but this is where you see the raw idea, something where you can look back and see what the project about before you was made any small changes.