PRODUCT DESIGN
Reflective writing is a well researched method of aiding in the development of professional identities, but many people tend to face barriers when trying to write reflections in the more traditional methods presented to them.
My capstone project for the Interaction Design program, the Reflective Designers Toolkit or tool:kit was created to help lower years and future students to the program with developing a better reflective practice.
The live website can be viewed here.
Reflective writing is a well researched method of aiding in the development of professional identities, but many design students tend to face barriers when trying to write reflections or developing a reflective design process.
The Reflective Designers Toolkit aims at demystifying the reflective writing process by aiding students from the start of their design careers.
By providing guidance on process documentation, various methods of reflecting, and scaffolding into reflection writing, it helps students develop a reflective design process that works best for them.
Each year in design school offers new challenges in regards to reflecting, first years in particular get the worst of it by being introduced to process documents for the first time time. Third and fourth years have the unique challenge of trying to adapt reflective practices to work in non academic settings. While many students manage to handle writing reflections, there are many other still that need a bit more guidance in producing enough effective reflective content.
Over 4 months I worked through the project going through the full cycle of researching, iterating, and designing.
The final mockups were created to cover all the major screens, and were primarily created as a dark mode theme.
We made a conscious decision to switch all large paragraphs of text — the stories and wiki entries — to serif fonts for better readability. Our research on websites hosting Lovecraft's work would often discuss the order and grouping for the beset experience reading as a new reader, something we carried on over to our app design when sectioning off the library.
The toolkit is largely a research project that tried to determine a range of resources, tips, and prompts for design students. Along with the very text heavy results, a mockup for a website version of this toolkit was created.
Website mockups created — and tested against design students — for the proposed website toolkit.
The working Figma prototype can be viewed here , works best on a desktop browser.