OUAN503 - Responsive - Individual Practice - Study Task 3: Evaluation

OUAN503 - Evaluation:

OUAN503 – Responsive Evaluation

This module has been a particularly tedious and soul-wrenching experience for myself and everybody I have had the fortune to meet regarding Responsive over the past few months. It can be agreed by many that the workload was constant with little or no regards to what other modules we were undertaking at the time and I find that in fact affected the quality and quantity of my work overall.

However, it was particularly enjoyable to be given the freedom to choose what live briefs we were able to respond to. Independence and choice was a privilege in this module and allowed me to find areas of practice of which I was capable of and will help me in the future. In terms of time management it was obvious that I struggled with some of the larger briefs such as YCN and DANDAD. This was genuinely because of a high workload in other modules and partially lack of enthusiasm as longer briefs tended to lose my attention span very quickly whereas shorter competition briefs were more manageable and easier to juggle between other aspects of the course.

Standard of work was also an issue as I felt that feedback often wasn’t substantial enough for me to find areas of improvement in my work thus leading me to leave my work at – in my opinion – at a very low standard. In order for Responsive to improve as a whole, the requirement of constructive feedback must be made clearer as I received a lot of pointless feedback such as ‘you need to improve this’ and ‘this isn’t very good’. Some peers did give me very critical and helpful feedback of which I was grateful for, however some comments like the ones mentioned did nothing for me or my work.

In order for me to improve when responding to live briefs in the future, I feel that keeping a better, more obvious schedule or plan would be helpful as I would benefit greatly from better time management on my behalf as there was often to the temptation to ‘leave work unfinished’ which was due to boredom of that particular brief. To overcome that boredom, setting a better time plan would force me to work on those dedicated days and the quicker I try and get a brief done the better as it would not drag over weeks and induce my lack of interest.

Responsive was definitely the most difficult module I have experienced so far mainly due to amount of briefs that we were asked to undertake. I found it very daunting at the start when told that a minimum of five live briefs was the requirement. After completing five briefs it actually became quite addictive and a positive experience as I found that learning new skills and communicating with new professionals was exciting and encouraging.

An area of improvement for future collaborations would be to work outside my comfort zone and not necessarily opt for members of the group I am familiar with. In our collaborative practice brief, I found it difficult to approach members of the Illustration group as I was not aware of their personality compatibility, skillset, or interest. An introductory session would have been highly beneficial to all of us as it would have given us the opportunity to get to know everybody briefly before choosing who we were going to work with. In the real world you will often talk at least once to a possible work partner before being thrown into an agreement or project with them. I feel that this was not available to us and seeing as some of struggle with social encounters (myself included), it would have given us all a confidence boost knowing that being in a room full of strangers is not so daunting anymore.

 All in all, I feel that this was a rewarding yet challenging module – of which it was expected to be in the first place – that I found to be helpful in preparing me for future briefs and different means of tackling them. I thought brief analysis was particularly beneficial to my responsive work as it enabled me to select and work out target audiences, what needed to be achieved, how, and in what context. I wish never to stumble upon a module like responsive again alongside any other work I may be doing, however I definitely saw the positives to such a negative part of the year.