Week 10 Capstone

We are so back. This week has continued to progress very well, although I can feel myself getting close to burning out (praying that doesn’t happen until I’ve submitted everything in 3 weeks 🙏). Week 10 was an incredibly important week on my Gantt Chart, with practically everything overlapping from all of the design phases. With that, I knew it would be a bit of a grind, but I managed to get the majority of my weekly to-do list done! However, the amount of deliverables we have is a bit mental, I have to have everything done 2 weeks earlier than everyone else due to the FISU World Cup, which has resulted in a lot of work. Although I think I'm on top of it, which is nice! All of my prototypes are now done, and I'm starting the process of photographing and documenting them for the ReDesign Submission and my final reports. I am also working on creating 3 different reports for the project, one is a visual summary of my process, one is a written summary (DES302), and one is a casebook about sustainability in football. Along with this I have to create an advertisement video for my project, and film a 10 minute presentation. Thankfully, I managed to get all of these underway in week 10, and hope that the remaining 3 weeks continue to be productive. However, the amount of different things to focus on has only heightened the sensation of stalking from this project. I know myself and my peers are struggling to move our heads away from our work at any point, and guilt seems to run riot whenever work isn’t being done. Even laying in bed late at night after a productive day carries a grey cloud. This project has captured my mind in both good and bad ways. I’ve loved working on something I’m passionate about, and I thoroughly enjoyed prototyping and testing something that’s solely my creation. But my mind is also never free of this project, and moments of mental silence are few and far between.

CARL is back to structure this week’s blog, yay! Week 10’s context was focused on a bit of everything, I set out hoping to polish and finalise my prototypes, decide on a logo, begin to structure my video, visit, photograph, and document local urban spaces, create packaging designs, and create my urban space mock-up images. This carried context over multiple deliverables, which ensured I had everything started and ready to develop and finish over the next 3 weeks.

My actions to ensure that this context was met were fairly straightforward. For finalising my prototypes, I decided on a final composition for my seed mix and created 18 studs, 6x 15mm and 12x 13mm. This ensured that I could both have a total stud set on a boot and a 12 stud set for use in packaging and hero shots. Along with this, I created my final 3D model (model 6), which has been printed and will be picked up in week 11. Model 6 has minimal mechanical changes to model 5 due to the mechanical success of model 5 during testing. This means that Model 6 shouldn’t require much testing at all, as the only significant changes come in the top thread size and the shelf within the stud, both of which shouldn’t affect the mechanics in any way.

Deciding on a logo was pretty simple, I asked a few peers for their opinions on my drafts and chose the one that received the most love. I then carried this onto packaging, which I modelled off of currently existing stud packaging.

Structuring my video was a bit more of a struggle, I initially went all in on creating a video about my message rather than my product, but after a discussion with Gabi, this was pivoted to more of an advertisement-style video structure for my project. After this, I created a script and gathered precedents and footage for my final video. Visiting my local green urban spaces was quite enjoyable! Although some were a lot smaller than I realised, and so weren’t documented due to the limited space available for my project. Despite this, these spaces could still be utilised by way of much smaller events - like a football juggling contest or something. I captured photographs and video footage of my chosen 3 urban spaces and used this media to create mock-up images of how these spaces could appear during and after my project.

All of this resulted in a week that concluded the prototyping (propose and validate) phase, which I’m personally a little gutted about, as this is by far my favourite part of design with any project. Regardless, It’s good to have functioning prototypes done and ready for documentation as we move into the final two stages of my design process, the plan for impact phase and the deploy sustainably phase. It also resulted in a whole lot of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Trying to work on all of these different deliverables at once has made my head a bit jumbled, and I keep losing track of what I’m doing by accidentally being distracted by a separate part of this project. Despite this, I’ve been quite lucky that the distractions still seem to benefit my project as a whole, as work is still being done.

This week has shown me near to my limits, and the remaining three weeks will continue to push this boundary. I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve produced so far, but wish I could look past the looming due date and be excited about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I find it difficult to be excited about something that also signals the end of an enchanting journey. I’ve also learnt that what I’ve created and the vision I have luckily captured the interest of my stream project partners, who provided positive and much-needed reassurance.