It's been a long time! :) Just finished a new course in Designing for Inclusivity. I learned a lot in this class, and even got to experiment a little with illustration for the first time. I learned the importance of really involving people at the heart of the design process, understanding their pain points, doing experiential testing and conducting interviews. These were all familiar to me in UX design, but not really something I had explored to this point in Graphic Design. It was interesting to learn about professionals like Michael Bierut, Fan Sissoko and Jean Hewitt and understand how they approach their project work as well.
In the creation of my project, I interviewed parents of neurodivergent and neurotypical children, and a bilingual education teacher to understand the pain-points. I also read more about the experiences of parents in the UK and what their pain points are in the process of designing my final project - a poster of the school's values for a primary school. This project had stakeholders that included teachers, parents, neurodivergent children, neurotypical children, and second-language learners in an inter-city school.
My favorite part of this course was experimenting a little with illustration. I made the conscious choice to create more "inclusive" characters that children could identify with and would bring a little happiness. I also learned that using a palette with muted colors helped to provide an aura of calmness to neurodivergent children.
The languages I had as options here represented the most common languages spoken in the UK and allowed for students to easily select their own. The buttons that students could click through allowed for flexibility for neurodivergent students, they could look at them in order or look at them out of order. Below are some of the illustrations I created. I am a big fan of kawaii animals and I thought this brought a little bit of my own personality to the brief.
As always, really enjoying my time learning at AUB and can't wait to get started on my next class in a couple weeks :)
