This year, I have the fortunate opportunity of doing a mentorship at Engine Digital, a digital design studio that focuses on UX/UI! I chose Engine Digital because I have been unsure whether I would like to focus on Branding or UX/UI as I move further into the program, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to see explore the world of Interactive. I am being mentored by Matthew Johnson and Gracelle Mesina – two super nice and chill people who are mega talented! My mentorship with Engine Digital is slightly different than my classmates because Engine creates a brief for me! For this project, the theme is “Better Living Through Digital”. I had the option of choosing between two different areas of focus:
I decided to choose Zero Waste 2040 because it felt like an issue more closer to home. Don’t get me wrong – I know “Climate Emergency” is a global crisis but I felt like it was a huge problem with countless ways to tackle it from. In our first meeting, Grace gave me a tour of the space. It was a 3-level office located near the Olympic Village area. Everyone worked on the second floor (and I saw Courtney from 4th year there!), while the top floor was for lounging and eating, and the first floor was the lobby with a couple offices and meeting spaces. There were two dogs there. One of them was a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (one of my favourite dogs!!) and it came into our meeting room and got all the belly rubs on the sofa I sat on. Matthew, Grace, and I spent the first meeting getting to know each other and I gave them a small presentation of my portfolio. They were happy with my portfolio and gave a ton of great feedback on things I could work on! We quickly briefed on the project itself, before parting ways as two hours had already past.
The next week, I came back with more research done and gave a presentation (that was given a max of 5 minutes in length) on the research I had done, problems I found, and potential solutions to these issues. There was about 30 slides in my presentation, but here are a few of them:
After giving my presentation, they gave me more feedback on some of my ideas. To expand on my current ideas, they encouraged that I focus on larger themes (potential “blockers”) and create many questions surrounding those themes, rather than think of potential solutions. We sat there and discussed a lot because I was feeling slightly confused. In IDEA, we hadn’t explored this way of ideating – I was used to always finding a problem and thinking of several solutions in a span of 2 weeks or less, and then spending the 1-2 additional weeks creating the product. This new way of thinking really opened up my mind and it is currently the stage I am at right now. In the past few days, the effects of COVID-19 have really start to hit Vancouver (and the rest of Canada). All my classes are now online and my mentorship meeting this week will be online as well. By this week, I am expected to have a final idea and solution figured out. I am not quite there yet but have emailed Grace to further discuss my ideas. Hopefully I’ll be able to think of something in the next few days! I’d give myself 9/10 so far during this phase because I am really trying my best to create high-quality presentations for my mentors. This has felt pretty challenging already, especially with the new “UX”(?) way of ideating/thinking and I’ve been feeling a bit lost. I am glad though, because I think I’m going to learn a lot (and I already have!) through this mentorship.