Candidacy Activity #3

Documentation:

As I state in my reflection, I got half way through the project before I read the part about documenting my progress. My phone broke soon after, and I lost all the pictures on my phone. I attempted to recreate some of my pictures with the help of some of my teammates, but I now know I must always document my work, and learned the pretty important life lesson I've been told my whole life, read all directions first.

Plan:

Work Time:

Next time I know to always document when I plan to get my project done. This will be extremely useful next time to make sure I stay on track and don't let prior engagements interfere with my work time, because I will have already planned around that.

Reflection:

Throughout this project, I learned many things, including how to use certain tools, and how to be resourceful. I think my biggest challenges in this project was trying to backtrack my mistakes when I didn’t read the whole project outline. My first mistake, which now I don’t think will ever happen again, was not reading all instructions before beginning my die project. I got about halfway through cutting when I realized that I needed to document my work. Once I started documenting I lost those pictures whenever my phone broke, and I attempted to recreate a few over the course of several days. This taught me to always read everything first, and when handling a big project, expect things to go wrong so you can plan ahead. If I had planned ahead I would have set aside days for school, vacation, and errors, and worked faster then the deadline, not with it. As for tools, my biggest problem came with trying to drill all the way through ½ in plywood. The wood kept splitting over and over again no matter what speed I went, which caused me to drill many times. I was not independent on this tool at the time, so this gave me a lot of practice and helped me to become more comfortable with the tool. I definitely needed to plan ahead when it came to measurement in this project. As I quickly found out, my measurements would definitely not create a 5 by 5 die when I put them together. I spent many hours in the design den that day trying to figure out a way to keep my sides even while still making a 5 by 5 die. I eventually found somewhat of a plan, but this required me to do a lot more cutting, which would extend the project much longer than I already had. At that point, I decided to put together what I had and move on to the next thing. Through this, I learned that sometimes it is ok to fail, and if I realized this sooner I would have put down the tools and the camera, and quit dragging the project out and not turn it in because I felt like I could fix it. Only now that I’m not looking at my die that definitely looks true to its name, that I realize that even though it doesn’t look the best, it was a valuable learning experience for me and I am much more comfortable with my ability to use tools independently in the Design Den.