This is a competency about the actual look, feel, taste, smell or sound of your product or service. This is the part were the designer decides what kind of sense or experience he or she wants to trigger by the end user. This causes that you have to make a lot of “prototypes” in the different senses to decide which combination of “prototypes” is the best combination. Also experimenting with different shapes, materials and techniques of making things are essential to come to a desirable end result.

FS is a competency which I like to work on, because almost every time you immediately sees what the effect is of a certain choice you made when working on a prototype. Despite I said that I didn’t have plans to work on this competency I still did work on this competency. There were some very practical opportunities for me to work on this competency. For example, I worked on this competency on my Milano study trip by finding out what I like and dislike and more importantly why. As a designer this is important to be able to do if you want to be unique as a designer. If you couldn’t explain why you like or dislike something, you are mostly like also not going to translate this to your design, which wouldn’t make them unique. You then will become a “normal” designer.

I also got to develop this competency when I also made a part of the lay-out for the user-interfaces for our project. I learnt to work with Adobe InDesgin in order to be able to do this. InDesign is a powerful tool when it comes to laying-out documents and other things which need to be nicely layed-out. This could be a very handy tool in the process to develop my own house style as a designer.

This showcase actually itself was also a great opportunity to develop FS. Paying more attention to how things look and how things are placed, so that they seems logical for the reader is something I worked on after I got feedback from my assessor to pay more attention to this.

Also outside my study there was a lot of things helped me to develop this competency. As member of the first-years board of rowing club Thêta and bar committee of Lucid, I often was responsible of the designs for event posters. This was fun to do and informative to do. It is a great way to practice how you going to tell a story or how to persuade people to do something, by using visuals with just a couple of words or sentences. You don’t often get an opportunity to practice this so this really helped me.

Coming year I want to learn more about graphic design. What is good graphic design? Are there specific techniques? Are there certain tools to help you? These are questions I want to answer. Maybe I am going to follow a specific assignment which can help me answering these questions.