Today, Natural Light wants to introduce to you a way for her to apply for art study abroad that has experienced many difficulties in her application for art study abroad. She has changed her major, not enough language achievements, not good at socializing, and was pitted by other institutions. She has studied in interactive design in the UK, and her collection of works has won the world's first RCA Imperial Art Interactive offer! Qize, a student of Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, applied for British interactive design by changing his undergraduate major in graphic design, and was admitted by Royal College of Arts, Loughborough University, Brunel University and other schools. Let's look for experience from her application process today.
Interview with professional instructors
Qize graduated from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology Graphic Design , I want to change my major and apply for interaction design in British and American countries. Before class, I made a preliminary assessment of Qize's basic abilities, and learned her strengths and weaknesses through communication.
It can be seen from the situation at that time that after four years of graphic design study, Qize has developed excellent visual expression ability, which is her greatest advantage.
The biggest disadvantage is that I have no understanding of the interaction design specialty to apply for, and my logical analysis ability is weak. However, logic is very important for interaction. If the logic is not strong, the project may be less unified, or fall into the maze of frameworks when facing interaction systems.
For Qize students British interaction design graduate student For the advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad, I have reduced the courses on graphic design skills, such as software making icons, logos, and mobile app interface design. The course focuses on understanding, imitating and practicing the logical structure of the website; Design and research process; Competitive product analysis; User interviews; Make persona, and what is interaction design, user experience design, design process and the way of thinking of interaction designers.
In character, Qize is a very introverted child, not very good at social interaction. However, introversion also has the advantage of introversion. For example, Qize is able to sit still and study independently with patience. He will not stop until he comes up with the research. Therefore, he has a high self-learning ability, can well complete the homework assigned by the teacher and consolidate the learning content in class. In interdisciplinary team collaboration, when finding problems, they will also use actions to support the team to complete the project in a principled and silent manner.
Portfolio Project
Qize's first project is about face blindness. The inspiration for this project comes from her finding that "face blindness" is not a simple phenomenon that we can't remember people, but a brain disease.
After the selection of the topic, we set the way of information collection as direct interview with face blindness patients. Qize found the community of face blindness patients on Facebook and had in-depth communication with them.
Facebook interview/test for face blindness patients
At the end of the project, we asked them to help us test our design scheme. Through these first-hand research and constant iterative correction, the solution we designed was finally recognized by these real patients. Qize and I were very happy and felt that we had made a very meaningful and interesting design.
Final solution
The design object of the second project is the single people who feel lonely and indifferent in the city. We have designed a smart mirror to help them record life fragments, and can look back and forth through an interactive interface similar to a time tunnel. At the final presentation, Qize also made a short video to show the scene of entering the time tunnel.
The third and fourth projects were completed in my summer class. The third project is the "application of blockchain technology". In this summer class, Qize and his teammates used blockchain to "release" traditional Buddhists, guiding believers to use the money wasted by unreasonable "release" for truly meaningful animal protection projects.
In many people's impression, blockchain is a technology about finance, economy, and management. What's the relationship between blockchain and interaction design? In fact, interaction is a profession involving many industries, and it is also a people-oriented design with user experience as the core. The emergence of blockchain technology has had a huge impact on many industries, especially banking, electronics, intelligence and other related fields.
When students understand and digest the principles behind blockchain, they can think about what this technology can bring to users? What kind of connection can be made with interaction design? How to apply blockchain technology to interaction design? What problems can the combination of blockchain technology and interaction design solve in the current society? Even if we do a project about blockchain in the future, what kind of value can interaction design provide. The learning of these technologies can incubate more innovative thinking, and at the same time, upgrade the portfolio project in depth.
The teaching mode of summer courses is synchronized with that of overseas art colleges, integrating various forms such as lecture, seminar, workshop, tutorial, lab experience, etc. We gathered teachers and students from various majors to improve innovative thinking and critical thinking in an all-round way through group cooperation, experimental innovation, hands-on practice, and group discussion.
Not only Qize, but also Hu, who is going to enroll in RCA Royal Academy of Arts this year, also completed a portfolio project in the summer course of "Blockchain+Interactive Design". His project was inspired by blockchain, and then started around the interactive way. The project thus completed contains more elements than "design", It is not just the visual interaction design that we often see in the past.
The fourth project is an interdisciplinary overseas work collection project with landscape design. Qize and her teammates designed the river purification system of a park into an interactive game, allowing people to enhance their "master awareness" of the environment through participation, so as to increase their environmental awareness.
Interaction design is a major that covers a wide range of subjects, and the learning content may involve engineering, anthropology, psychology, business, etc. So when we look at the enrollment requirements of the interaction major of overseas universities, we can see that most universities will emphasize that there is no rigid requirement for the professional background of students when recruiting the interaction design major, but they prefer to recruit students from different non design professional backgrounds, and encourage more students to apply for interdisciplinary applications.
Our summer courses also bring together students from various majors. The purpose is to create an interdisciplinary atmosphere for students, absorb more knowledge in the process of learning together, and comprehensively apply design, technology, humanities and other aspects to the collection of works. This interdisciplinary project like Qize was also completed in summer class with students majoring in landscape design.
Such a course is not only an opportunity to exercise interdisciplinary thinking and adapt to the teaching mode of overseas universities in advance, but also an opportunity to examine your team cooperation ability in the course. In foreign art colleges, students began to complete their homework in groups from the foundation year, and started to work in interdisciplinary teams with other college students in the second and third grades. In the last year, after the gradual exercise, students can take over the real cases from college partners.
In a team, each member has its own advantages and disadvantages. If we can reasonably divide the work according to the characteristics of each person, we can complete the project with the highest efficiency in mutual assistance. In the process of cooperation, each member may have his own ideas. Therefore, having good communication skills can run in with members faster and avoid wasting more communication costs.
The summer program is the best practical opportunity for teamwork. Students can not only cultivate teamwork spirit, but also practice communication and leadership skills. They can even further understand their own strengths and weaknesses in the division of labor and learn from others' strengths. Of course, there are more than summer course projects. For example, many large-scale design competitions, short-term courses and summer schools, there is no limit to professional background, and interdisciplinary projects can be done in the form of team cooperation.
Application Review
Qize's application process for studying in the UK for interactive design can be said to be a wave of N turns. Since the application is made in other institutions, which belong to a large category of overseas study institutions, although there are many successful cases of application, they lack experience in the application of art majors and are not very familiar with the application process, resulting in repeated amendments to the documents and endless problems in the whole process of applying for art studies.
All these twists and turns have seriously affected the mood of Qize students. During the collection of works, we have always seen Qize students who are always anxious. Even in the late application period, other students jokingly said that "Qize students' frustration can penetrate the walls of natural light". It can be seen how much pressure Qize had at that time.
As a teacher, I can understand her stress and anxiety, so I have communicated with her mother many times with the educational administration and consulting teachers, hoping that parents can help share and ease the child's pressure. I often chat with her late at night, hoping to do my best to relieve her pressure.
For inexperienced students, the application of overseas art schools is really a painstaking task. Despite the big project of collection of works, there are many trivial things to do, and every link should not be left behind. Students will encounter many difficulties and unbearable pressure on their way to school. At this time, parents and teachers need to pay more attention to students and see whether children need support, help, protection or encouragement. After all, we also play an important role in children's applications.
As one of the earliest art collection training institutions to provide application services, Natural Light also realized the particularity of the application of art majors at the beginning, so it formed an application team. Applicants have rich experience, are familiar with the enrollment preferences and curriculum settings of various universities, and will customize the most private overall plan for studying abroad in combination with the characteristics and needs of students. From the early stage of school selection, the middle stage of paperwork, the later stage of interview and other links, there will be a specific application teacher's full 1V1 tracking. The purpose is to cooperate with art teachers, share more pressure for students, not be affected by trivial problems, and let them focus more on improving their professional ability.
It is gratifying that Qize finally applied for her dream RCA during her study in interactive design in the UK Royal College of Art . Originally, she wanted to apply for an American college, but she turned to the UK because of insufficient language scores. Now it has got the world's first Huangyi offer. Qize chose RCA not only because he simply liked RCA's title, which is the world's first, but also because he especially liked RCA's educational philosophy and methods. Especially for the interaction design major, the attitude towards some new concepts and new technologies is absolutely worth choosing.
When studying in the UK for interaction design, from the beginning we didn't understand the interaction specialty to the completion of the interaction design portfolio and the best offer, we overcame many difficulties together and made a lot of efforts, so this offer is particularly valuable. The relationship with students has also become a friend who is also a teacher and friend because of "sharing difficulties". Qize also told me that when I finished everything, I wanted to travel with you. I hope that in the future, I can also stand beside students as a friend, face difficulties with them and get the ideal offer.
Natural light shares more topics for you:
Interactive Design for Studying Abroad: recommended by American and British interactive design schools
Interactive study in the UK: human-computer interaction, user experience and ergonomics
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