Design Pillar: Listening

Being a designer means being open to the wants, desires, open spaces, and opportunities that are most valuable to whomever you are working with and working for. I've had the benefit of working for clients, teachers, fellow students, family members, and for myself. It is rare to design for only one of these groups and handling expectations and communication of each is a balancing act I expect to be mastering throughout my career. An example of this took place during my final semester at CMU. I worked with 5 other students on a location based game. The fantasy for which was running around main campus destroying academic buildings as a giant monster. During this project we had to evaluate the somewhat cryptic desires of Legendary Entertainment, our client company, as well as those of the individual team members from legendary we met with directly. Beyond that we had the CMU students who were our primary audience. We subdivided them into two groups, those that were new, and would use the app to familiarize themselves with areas of campus, and older students who had built grudges with particular locations over the years. As we began to survey and understand what they found most rewarding we also had to frame the project goals for our faculty so that they could evaluate and guide us. Each of the faculty comes from a distinct background and explaining the experience and design objectives to each became an exercise in flexibility and accommodation. Next we had one another. As teammates we each communicated our personal and career goals and how we expecting this project to fit into those goals. Making sure the design provided something for each of us was important both in meeting the educational standards of the University and in creating something we all felt passionate about.