Have you ever had a shower in the dark?

Another week, another nightmare partner pairing.

The lecture this week for GDUP was quite interesting. "The Dapper Brothers", two 2013 graduates came in to talk to us about their Design Research practices. The pairing of them is odd, they seem like complete opposites. Ones fat, ones skinny. Ones good at presenting, the other seems to waffle. Basically, they met at Uni and when it was time to graduate they decided to start a business together. They call what they do "creative consulting". From what I could tell, they don't do much of the design work itself but instead run the project and put all the pieces together for the client. They went through their methods such as brainstorming, mood boards, mind maps etc. which I've already come across a dozen times in DT.

The brief for GDUP this week was to redesign a shampoo and conditioner bottle. We were told to design them with short-sighted people in mind, or people who can't tell the difference between shampoo and conditioner. I was excited about this brief because it was an opportunity to use some of my 3D illustrator skills to create something that looked really professional. The lecturer put up some blurred images of shampoo and conditioner bottles and we had to guess which was which. It was surprisingly difficult to tell and I got most of them wrong.

In the tutorial we were assigned our partners for the brief. My first impressions of my partner were good. He seemed to be quite vocal in class, which to me indicated that he had a brain and wanted to use it and he seemed to have some decent ideas. Before we had a chance to discuss the brief he began sketching into his notebook. Very, very quickly my impression of him went downhill. He was set on the fact that we would be using the sketch he had scrawled after two minutes deliberation. I tried to brainstorm more ideas to give us more variety but he wasn't having any. It was his way or the high way. I was creatively sidelined and given the research component to do. He said that he would do all the sketching so I gave up and left him to it. The work he presented me with on Thursday was absolutely horrendous. It could've been drawn by a two year old, never mind a student studying to obtain a Bachelor of Design. The whole thing made me feel ashamed. That something that horrible could have my name on it. After the class I approached the tutor and queried whether we were allowed to make 'modifications' to the design before we handed the final PDF in. I have a feeling the tutor understood where I was coming from. Perhaps he had witnessed me struggling in the tutorial to have my say or maybe he had seen my previous work and somehow understood but I felt like we had an understanding. I could do better and I wanted to be given the opportunity to try.

This week I handed in my final photographs for Exercise 1. On Monday I caught the train into the city and met my Dad for the afternoon. We got some lunch at a café and discussed business before heading up to the roof of the apartment building he was working on to take some photos. Dad got a swipe pass from security under the pretence of grabbing some forgotten silicone and we managed to take some good photos. My photos were themed around Central station so the chance to get shot of central from high up was fantastic. I ended up somehow leaving my iPad on the roof and only realised once we were in the ute halfway across the city. To say Dad wasn't impressed was an understatement. Picking the final photos was difficult. My bike photo was the shining star in my eyes and I think my tutor thought the same. Presenting my photos in front of the class was really intimidating, probably because photography isn't my forte and a lot of people chose visual communications because they wanted to work with photography so I felt sort of out of place.

In Design Histories we watched some videos on academic referencing, which was quite boring to say the least. I completed most of the worksheet at work.

I'm slowly learning lessons whilst at uni, especially about partner work and working with others. I'm also learning a lot about myself and learning to cope with changing situations.