This week we took part in a one-to-one tutorial session to help us get some final feedback before next week’s critique. As always it was useful to get my lecturer’s opinion on my current work and any advice he has to improve.
Before the one-to-one tutorials, we took part in a new workshop activity named feedback bingo, where we sat with another class member for ten to fifteen minutes, looked at each other’s work, and offered thoughts and feedback. I found this exercise very interesting and wanted to dedicate this week’s blog post to reflecting on how it worked and what I got from it.
Whilst giving and receiving feedback has been a part of our classes since we started, we have never sat and given peer feedback to each other on a one-to-one basis before. We have completed several design critiques where we give and receive feedback as a group, we also have lots of one-to-one tutorials with our lecturer, teaching assistants and sometimes visiting professionals.
I have found all these different feedback methods useful, critiques are great for getting lots of people looking at your work at one time, so you can get lots of fresh ideas and opinions from a critique session, however, you never really look at the project in any depth. there is never a real chance to explain the thinking behind ideas or give reasons behind design decisions. Design critique feedback normally surrounds the visual design of a project as this is what people can easily see when a piece of work is presented. This is very useful, and I know that this feedback has allowed me to improve projects and been very useful, I hope the feedback I have given others has also helped them. Often, however, I have left these sessions feeling as if, if I had explained the deeper thinking behind a design decision, my classmates may have given different feedback or at least understood the project better and therefore given even better feedback.
One-to-one tutorials whoever they are with are great for discussing finer details within the project or allowing the person to ask questions about the design decisions or why you have designed the user flow in that way. This is great as you can ask questions and get advice from someone with experience and knowledge. However, the downside is you only really get advice from one person, which means you only get one viewpoint, albeit a very useful one. Often you would like a wide range of opinions to spot all the areas for improvement or get inspired to find alternative solutions.
It's hard to say which of these feedback methods is the most useful and I am glad we regularly use both, so we get that range of feedback and opportunity to see the work of others. This week we were able to try another feedback method titled Feedback Bingo, where we sat down with a classmate, like a one-to-one tutorial and talked through our projects, able to ask questions as well as to give and receive feedback. We were able to do two rounds of feedback bingo, so we were paired with two different classmates and doubled the amount of feedback we received.
I found feedback bingo to be an enjoyable exercise to take part in as much like a design critique you had the opportunity to give and receive feedback, so it felt like there was a give-and-take element to what we were doing. You also were able to ask questions about the person’s project which I found useful, as it allowed me to better understand the process, the reasoning behind the design. This allowed me to tailor my feedback more and make it more relevant to what the person was trying to achieve, rather than giving more general feedback that may not always be what the person needed. I felt the feedback I received was more relevant to my project and would be useful to implement. It was also great to have a design conversation with a classmate, often as these are solo projects it can feel like a very individual task and this exercise broke away from that. I was impressed with the work I looked at, it was very different to mine, and I think that was great to see. I left the session feeling more confident about my work as well as with areas to improve.
With the design industry being such a collaborative area, this exercise is a key area for me and my classmates to be comfortable with. I would therefore like to see more opportunities to do feedback bingo sessions in future, alongside the critiques and one-to-one tutorials we do more regularly.
Receiving feedback on a project is a key part of making improvements and ensuring a project is the best it can be. It is easy to get trapped into a single way of thinking and often it takes someone else looking at the work and offering advice to see where there is room for improvement. Design critiques and one-to-one tutorials offer these opportunities and have been a huge part of the work I have delivered, feedback bingo would be another way of getting more opinions and advice which would deliver better results. I think it would be beneficial to do feedback bingo more often alongside critiques and tutorials.