When thinking about my design processes overall, technology plays a massive role in everything I do within design. It helps me to plan what actions I will take within projects. I use digital art programs to sketch and brainstorm ideas at the beginning of every brief. I prefer to use more established technologies such as the Adobe Creative Suite, mainly because the newer technologies have a tendency to be unreliable. I do think that becoming overly reliant on art softwares I already had experiences with starting the course made it difficult for me to learn new ones but I think that after a while it is easy to adjust to more user friendly software such as Adobe products. However, I think that the monopoly that Adobe has over the creative industry creates a risk of a lot of sameness throughout the industry and encourages designers and artists to stay in a box of comfort and conventionality.
Over the course of 5.2 I have been exploring different technologies, most of which have been new to me. An example of this is coding design which I found really interesting, it struck me how quick and simple it was for a computer to make a design with coded input, and I thought that it could really make designing simpler projects a lot more efficient. I did realise that a lot of the work I do in design can sometimes be quite long winded or repetitive and that this means that I can come up with ways in the future to streamline my creative process. I did have some difficulty with this though, as I didn’t have any prior experience working with coding so I needed to work out any difficulties I came across.
AI is one of the newer emerging technologies which I have done some research into. I found it interesting because it would largely make art and design accessible to people who it previously hadn’t been. However, as I researched how AI works to create designs I realised that it used input from other designers, and a lot of the time those designers don’t actually consent to their work being used in this way. Some would argue that designers publishing their work should have this situation in mind and shouldn’t mind their work being used to create AI algorithms, but a lot of the output looks almost identical to the work used to train the AI and I think that originality is really important for successful design, to create something that people maybe aren’t as used to seeing. Overall, I think I will avoid using this technology in my own design in the future to actually create the designs themselves, because a lot of the time there are glitches and the design is quite obviously generated.
In future, I think I would like to explore more into design coding because I think that it is really interesting and the way that it streamlines certain aspects of design would be really beneficial when working to a tight deadline. My design will definitely be evolving over time to include technologies like this to make my processes more efficient and make my design the best it can be. I also think that newer technologies such as AR will be very innovative in the design industry as a whole because it will make it possible to design for each individual experience. I will remain open to exploring newer technologies with a lot of research into making sure everything I use within my design is ethical and beneficial to my working progress. I will also think about how the evolution of the industry can help my evolution as a designer.
Overall, I have learnt a lot about design technology this year, I think the main things that will help my design process in future are how to streamline my design process with efficiency tools and software, and how coding within design can help to make simple and repetitive designs quicker. This module has definitely changed the way I think about technology in design as well as my processes, it’s helped me a lot to realise which parts of my process need refining to make my work easier and quicker. This tells me that my values within design are that I would prefer to do the work all for myself and that any changes I make to my process will just be to make things a little bit more efficient. I think that reflecting on my work in this way will help me to remember the things which I can make easier within my workflow and how to do this.
