2. documenting design

The Design Documentation seminar focuses on the importance of communicating processes, development, research within the design discipline by not only taking documentation as a simple logistics process but as an actual tool to develop collective knowledge and build an accumulative body of thought.

The goal of this seminar is to acquire the ability to communicate the creative process through a coherent and meaningful narrative in order to reach a broad range of interested professionals. Which has a lot of relevance especially in this multidisciplinary masters program.

To give a concise core seminar concept statement:

“documentation transforms design decisions into a shared language”

web page development strategy

In the first few sessions of the seminar, the main subject was to get the web page going and live as soon as possible so the group can start feeding the necessary documentation. We started from the provided template and were given different options as to how and what we could use in terms of applications and tools to develop this site, as well as basic taxonomy parameters and guidelines.

We were given a quick lesson on setting up the repository and linking it to the selected editing platform. The default option was to use Visual Studio Code to program the site using HTML language. From a personal point of view, this was a challenge because I had at the moment minimum or close to none coding experience and knowledge, but an interesting challenge as I have the intention to learn at least the basics of coding.

All things considered, the decision was made to stick to developing the page using Visual Studio Code and learn to code along the way to take advantage of the fact that the repository was already linked and working correctly with this application. Now the question became: how to learn to code along the way taking into account the very limited time available because of the workload demanded for the course? And so began my relationship with Chat GPT.

The following is not meant to be a tutorial on how to perform AI aided coding. Just a short (very short) explanation of the experience and some insights.

Personally I find it interesting that this course became an excuse to actually engage with this technology or group of technologies. Use of AI hasn't been a necessity at all and honestly didn't seem to be useful in any way to my particular activities, so I find it interesting to have this “educational” approach to it. I do understand that calling this an educational approach might seem like a way to justify the fact that i am using the novel threat to the environment to make my life easier, and it is in a way, but i also understand that it is a powerful tull and I believe that getting to know it in an academic setting for academic purposes other than cheating is probably the right way to go.

The first useful outtake about this experience was the evolution of the quality of prompt making. First prompts given to the machine were simple and broad tasks which proved to be a good start but needed a lot of refining to achieve the desired outcome. This was time consuming and easy to lose track of the steps of the process which is needed to be able to tailor the code correctly.

It is also important to mention that from personal experience, it was very useful to actually have a basic level knowledge of programming language and coding in order to make the best out of the AI tool’s assistance.

This is because the tool is going to be as explicit as possible and try to cover as much content of the question as possible. This is polished over time just by refining the prompt delivery so it becomes more specific every time. Nevertheless, it helps quite a lot to know what is actually useful and what is maybe just an alternative recommendation the tool is giving you.

This being said, the tool delivers a pretty comprehensive explanation with each response so it really is a matter of reading the instructions carefully as dropping x number of lines of code into your file can become messy.

As a continuous ongoing process this site will evolve and develop hopefully with a decreasing use of the AI tool. So please feel free to come back and check it out.

reflection 1