Sketching My Experience

In most of my posts, I tend to gain insight based on a broader scope of what was read; however, in reading this section of Buxton's Sketching User Experiences, one phrase in particular stuck out to me: "being able to articulate the reason for your decisions" (147).

Throughout my time in RCID 805, which I'm not over halfway through, we have been making project after project. My focus - though not where it should have been - has primarily been on learning the technologies so that I could complete the projects for class. Don't get me wrong; I certainly have been thinking about the rhetorical situation and the process involved, but that has not been at the forefront of my mind as much as trying to figure out which buttons to press, which boxes to click, and which options to drag to get the technology to work with and not against me.

Reading the above phrase, though, really keyed me in on where my focus needed to be instead: on the why. Why am I even making these projects? Why am I doing  them in a certain way and not another? Or, as Buxton puts it, "Do I want this rather than that, and why?"

I am pleased with the timing of this reading. All along, I've known the importance of asking these rhetorical questions but have not done a good job listening to the voices in my head that were telling me to actually ask and answer them. Today, though, I finally have a skeleton of a website up so that I can place my projects on "display" - though hidden from most of the world as they are certainly not - or hopefully won't be anyway - my finest achievements. In setting up the website, we were asked to create multiple sections wherein we could discuss our rhetorical process and decisions. Now that this space is "up and running," I can kind of hear it speaking to me and beckoning me to fill in those spaces. I feel more of a need to ask and answer rhetorical questions regarding the projects we are working on.

In determining the questions and in answering them, I want to keep in mind much of what Buxton has been saying, namely the importance of creating a literacy of sketching. I want to really do well with showing and explaining the process by which these projects were made. For, the projects in and of themselves, for the most part, are not going to display well. However, the thought that went into them and the ideas that they represent certainly have meaning and value - value that I would like to return to when creating similar projects in the future.