The next chapter in our book contains information about communication. This is something that Jimmy has talked to us several times about, since we need to be able to communicate well in our careers. The section begins with the book breaking down communication into three parts, encoding, the message itself, and decoding. I think that it would be helpful to keep these parts in mind, while constructing a project. It also says that as a designer, we have to tell our client what they need, which could be different from what they want. This was a point that was brought up by Seth Johnson, at the beginning of the quarter. There are several people that a designer has to work with, and consider them as an audience. There is the client, the corporation, manufacturing, and associates. A designer will not always have to work with all of them, but it is important to consider each one as they apply to the project.
I think that the next section of the book was very helpful. It broke down the information stages into statement, concept, detail and planning. I normally do this, but not as in detail. I think that it would help me communicate my ideas more clearly if i tried to work with these stages. Another section that I found to be helpful was the one on organization and quality. It talks about determining the relevancy of the information, determining the immediacy of what the client needs to know, and the scope of the information. A lot of times I include unnecessary information in my projects, and I need to work on compressing it into the important details.
Presentation of information is also very important to communication. A project will not go well, if the presentation does not communicate the idea clearly. The book re-visits the idea of setting aside plenty of time for a project. Time management is something that I constantly struggle with, but have gotten better at in more recent years. The next few sections compare the basic patterns of presentation to classical music terms. Having played the flute for around nine years, I am quite familiar with the terms so they made a lot of sense to me. Another important part of presentation is choosing the illustration technique. A designer can utilize various medias such as pencil, color pencil, pens and inks, markers, pastels and crayons, watercolors, photoshop, CAD programs, web pages, powerpoint, books and boards, CD's and models. I have been working with different medias, and trying to gain better experience with them, so that I can utilize them more in the future.
The last section before the perspective, the author compares a designer preparing to give a presentation to an actor preparing for his role. I have never been wonderful at public speaking, and I hope that these will be helpful in the future. The books talks about knowing your lines, knowing your props and setting, knowing the direction you are headed in, and knowing your motivation. It is hard to present anything without being motivated to do it. The perspective section in this chapter is about Mark Zeff, a designer and architect. I am very interested in architecture, so I was interested in reading about what he had to say. He starts off with saying that the most important ability, is to be able to communicate with a client. A project can not be run well if there is not a great understanding between the designer and client. Zeff says that they developed a series of processes to take their clients through to weed out any problems. He talks about how a way they do this, is through design briefs. Our class just spent a few class periods working on talking about how to make a good design brief. The next thing Zeff talks about is how when he is looking to hire people, he looks for people who are good at communication, and who are tenacious and brave. One final point that he brought up, is something that I really like and is something I hear a lot. He talked about how his personal interests are what inspires him in his work and helps him when he is creating things. I am always finding things in my life that inspire different works, and they always come out the best because I am passionate about them. Zeff's perspective section reiterated a lot of the ideas from the chapter, and has confirmed the idea that communication is one of the most important things.
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