Image Credit: Hannah Cattanach
As this MA is an online course, we students will have to work harder than those on a typical university course to gain the same social benefits. Working from home, we must be active with our social intentions.
Reflecting the difficulty of creating and maintaining social connections online, our first activity was to create a ‘custom avatar’. We had to pick items from around our homes and arrange them to represent essential aspects of our personalities. I found this an enjoyable task as everyone loves talking about themselves, and boiling down your personality into one picture forces you to prioritise!
Humour is significant to me, so I chose to represent my favourite brand of dry sarcasm in the form of this mildly alcoholic cat. I enjoy the off-beat and little, forgettable aspects of life. This arrangement of pictures and objects on my living room wall represents that. Shown here are small pieces of artwork that bring me joy, random things I have collected, or silly objects that make me laugh. If you look closely, you can see some game figurines and metal dice messing with the alignment of the picture frames. They are from Dungeons and Dragons, a very nerdy tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) I love to play with my friends. It is a great joy to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and play silly but epic fantasy story games together.
Even though this was simply a fun ‘get to know you’ task, I took it as an opportunity to frame my journey into UX. Until now, I have not been good at following my nose, and the potential opinions of others lead me to overthink my processes and doubt my outcomes. But as stated in the course material, this educational journey is a heutagogical one. Hase and Kenyon (2000: 2) defined heutagogy as “the study of self-determined learning” or, in other words, a journey where the learner is at the centre of their own learning experience. So, I’m going to take that as a piece of advice to trust in myself.
But most importantly, I found this task helpful to learn what is dear to my new coursemates. During my time as an architect, I have learned it is not the strength of the individuals that make the team but how that team communicates, interacts, and supports each other that is important. This, for me, is invaluable. Therefore, I am using the custom avatar activity to kickstart building a circle of UX friends and colleagues. To do this, I aim to be active on our course forum ‘Learn’ and in the course discord chats. However, digital social activity will be a struggle for me as a person on the autistic spectrum as I quickly forget to spend time or effort building social connections. This course will be, for me, however, the perfect opportunity to learn.
References
HASE, Stewart and Chris KENYON. 2000. ‘Moving from Andragogy to Heutagogy in Vocational Education’. Ultibase Articles 5(3), [online]. Available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED456279.pdf [accessed 22 Jan 2023].
German vocabulary of the week
Skills – Fähigkeiten