Nicholas McLaughlin Blog

Before I go into any of this. I’m writing this after the fact, I was in initially going to do this in a week by week chronological format but as I went down the rabbit hole with this project completely I threw myself in and lost track of this documentation.

This documentation might seem to jump around a lot and thats either because I’ve chosen to focus on aspects Ive been involved in.

Brief :

What we took away from it :

As a team we broke down the brief, distilling it down to the key elements that we wanted to look into and where our scope of work was.

We did go a little bit out of scope on some aspects but we were treating that as possible suggestions to the client ontop of what they asked for.

Getting it on the board :

Just my chicken scratchings of us breaking down the brief as a team.

Team Building :

Marco’s nicer more legible version of the team list.

I thought of a good way for us to separate into our teams. By allowing everyone to voice their opinions on where they would want to be most and where they would want to be least the teams naturally formed.

There was some members of the team that either had no strong feeling to what they wanted to do or others that wanted to do a bit of everything without committing to any one thing so then the roll of Free Agents was made that meant they could float between the teams and help out whenever needed.

Planning the week :

I seemed to be appointed to the roll of organising the project so I viewed that my roll is to organise all the boring but important stuff so that means everyone can do the more enjoyable, more creative activities.

Glasgow Science Centre Research:

As we where designing for the Science Museum Group (SMG) I went, with Marco, to the closest equivalent we have, the Glasgow Science Centre to see how they make a fun educational exhibition for the past 20 years.

Figa board :

Elias Showed the team how to use a Figma and how we can implement it as a team to work on the visuals of the project together. Its been a great resource for this project and I’ll want to use it going forward for my own projects.

Click here for the Figma board.

The figma board was updated by most of the team throughout the entire project.

The teams (throughout the project) :

Everyone has their own strengths, weaknesses and personalities. If there is anything that I can do to make it easier on everyone by organising things in a certain way or as acting as a middle man between people then I believe its in my role to do so, that way everyone can focus on their work.

I am human and initially I was getting annoyed by people and their attitudes towards the group, the project, myself, but after taking a step back I had to remind myself (with help from others) that my roll as logistics is not to try and manage people but to allow them to do what they’re best at and if they don’t then it is not my job to police that.

As with all group projects there has been some tension but the people that have been in everyday have done such a great job of defusing that energy and reminding whoever is going through it at the time that its not forever and to take a step back and relax. I’m actually proud of core members of the team and how they’ve been supportive of each other and had a willingness to adapt and work.

Attractor Screen Research

Looking at font from the time :

Sketching the form :

All quick sketches, discussions and ideas of the forum was just assumed to be a podium and a screen after Paul had suggested that the podium be further away from the screen (1.5m). As I was sketching out the drawings on the left Mikhail was discussing his idea for a more connected outreaching design that you can see sketched on the right which he then used as a base for 3D Blender model.

Iconography :

Iso talk with Pawel :

The talk with Pawel game me a great insight into how design firms like ISO work similar to projects we do in the studio or how closely the system I was using for this project naturally followed similar structures as ISO’s.

Planning Week Two:

Each week I would start a fresh. Look at what had been done, what has to be done, what was in progress and how everyone was feeling about it personally and then moving forward from there.

A big take away I had from this part of the project was how much I gained from running it by the team and asking the guys if I had missed anything. One or two times I had missed something which I’m thankful they mentioned.

UX Journey :

Using a Miro board I went through the user experience and made sure there was no dead ends that the user could find themselves in making the user annoyed or breaking the program.

In the future I want to use the Miro board to visualise the user experience flow and think it through so I don’t run into any snags.

Attractor Screen Text :

Here is the copy for the possible text that would be on the attractor screen, the call to action and the text that could be on the panel next to the physical interface.

Attractor Screen Mock up :

Above are just some initial mock up ideas I had after discussion with the team and incorporating different elements and ideas from everyone. The fonts and bar that Elias and myself had worked on. The footage layout that Mikhail had suggested and the processing code that Marco had built with suggestions from Paul on the carousel menu and Koyaanisqatsi, of course.

How to communicate Speed and Progression :

My research that I did into how to effectively communicate the speed of the frame rates and the relationship between that speed and ‘our time’.

Planning Week Three :

Bringing it all together for the final week. This weeks focus was obviously trying to finish up, bring it all together because I had it in my head that without allocating any proper time to the presentation then we wouldn’t do it properly and that after all this work it week seem rushed and non-professional.

Capture Rate vs FPS :

Mock ups for iconography on how to communicate the relationship of each element.

Looking back at it now I think we went down into it too much and over designing the system instead of stripping it right back and making it as obvious as possible.

Screen Mock ups with clocks:

After we had decided on the clock icons I did a quick mock up and all seemed well under it was brought to our attention that it was obvious to us but wouldn’t be obvious to anyone outside the project.

I’m sure that kind of insight will come with more experience and time.

Answer the question and work back :

Struggling with visualising the relationship between the two different measurements after Pauls conversation.

The relationship between how fast things actually move.

And how fast they have to move so that we can see something moving.

Above are just the initial notes of trying to simplify the lesson that we want the user to take away. So by working backwards, starting with the answer/thought we want the person to have and then trying to reverse engineer how we would get from that answer to the question we have to ask them.

Screen change mock ups :

More mad scribbles on the boards showing the creative process of myself, Mikhail, Marco and Elias all trying to come up with a way of communicating the lesson/take way of the whole project.

Again more quick Figma mock ups of how would we want to show the 3 videos of footage.

In future projects I’ll want to use figma more just for its speed and accessibility.

I also think there is a more elegant way to display the 3 windows but at this time I don’t have it and would need to spend more time on it if I could.

Asking Year two to test :

We asked the second years to have a try and give us any suggestions or thoughts of what they thought.

For myself this was an opportunity to observe people using the exhibition from a far and see how they use

The Presentation :

The final thing

After the project is finished and as I’m looking back at my learning journal and trying to document everything I’ve realised that so much of my work in this project is something that I didn’t document because I didn’t think it was important at the time or it was stuff that I don’t know if I could have documented it.

A lot of my work on this project was planning, team management and visual identity.

On the part of planning and team management, I didn’t particularly want to take that role on this but it happened naturally and I thought to myself that if I take on this role then that allows the other to get on with what they’re good at. What did happen is that people would come to me and ask for my opinion on each part of the project but I made sure that I would only encourage if they asked or guide, at no point did I want it to become my singular vision.

On the part of the visual identity myself and Elias worked on it and it all went quite easily, it wasn’t in the scope but I did think it was an important consideration so that even though we’re not actually supposed to do it, we have a clear visual identity to refer to and to help drive the aesthetics of the project.

Self Evaluation

Looking back at everything thats happened over the last three weeks there is a few things that I’ve taken away from this experience;

I had to learn how to not let things bother me as much, at the start I was understandably annoyed that some people were coasting and others were doing all the work and giving up their time but with the help of people in this project and my life, they reminded me that its not the end of the world.

What I will say though is that I’ve discovered that I actually do like leading a team, it did help that the team had great core members. But when everyone was working and collaborating and everyone was on the same wavelength and in the same flow state, it was amazing.

Another take away is that if I could do it again then I would take Pawel’s advice and have the role of team leader as its own role instead of an after thought or a secondary role for myself. If I had a second time and a bigger team then ideally there would be the role of team leader/free agent, someone that could help out when needed on all parts of the project but who’s primary role is logistics.

Over all I enjoyed this project and really enjoyed working as part of a team and I’m really proud of how much everyone has done.