Process book
GDES-270 spring 2020 (David Ramos, American University Design)
ramos@american.edu · office hours
With the move to an online format, this project is no longer required.
Design is about process. Successful projects emerge not because of last-minute brilliance but from careful study and wide-ranging experiments, carried out over an extended period. This course’s educational outcomes rely on your engaging with process. Your grade, also, reflects the depth of your work, and the thoroughness with which you have presented that work.
I’ll be evaluating your work, in part, through a process book—a collection of material that you created in the course of your projects. It should include:
- Notes and images from research
- Sketches from your ideation and reflection
- Drafts and alternative versions
Save these materials as you work on projects. Make a habit of saving a new version of a file whenever you make major changes. (Keep the old version.) Set aside folders for your projects. When in doubt about whether to keep something or throw it out, keep it. You only need to save materials for graded projects.
That’s the raw material for your process book.
The book itself will be a PDF, of any reasonable dimension. You can make this book however you like; I suggest Keynote or Google Slides, but you can work in InDesign if you are capable. As you wrap up work on each project, add that project’s materials to the process book. Provide section breaks with headlines identifying each section, and put your name on the document.