Professional Practices

Professional Practices (PP) is a stand-alone unit that is undertaken by all second year students in the Design School at LCC and provides the opportunity for GMD students to experience working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups to create a self-initiated collaborative project and work on a live industry brief.

GMD students are asked to reflect on their group working experiences. Here, Vivian Yang describes how her group tackled the two projects:

“The first project was to make a concept design for GenZ problems. As our team members were all Chinese, we focused on the white-hot competition in East Asian society. We designed an ironic board game to highlight this phenomenon.

At first, everyone’s enthusiasm was weak. After realising this, we shared our personal skills. Then we assigned work and set the time for group discussions on a weekly basis, which greatly improved the efficiency.

We met with some differences of opinion when discussing the rules of the game. Explaining the reasons separately and voting is a good ways to avoid meaningless quarrels. PP helped us learn from each other’s strengths. For example, we handed over the drawing task of card characters to an Illustration student, and GMD students were responsible for the card design.

The second project required us to design for a specific company. We were unanimously inspired to work for Full Fact (https://fullfact.org/), who collect and correct misinformation. PP’s multi-person cooperation mode was conducive to brainstorming and generating more inspiration.

When reporting back for the first time, the client suggested that we could do something more interesting. So in the final plan, we changed the static brochure into motion graphic posters and added a desktop pet app. We also learned some presentation skills from other groups, and added the research part to make our design more complete, clear and convincing. The PP unit shows real workplace situations that we may encounter, and gives us the opportunity to learn to deal with them in advance.”

Vivian Yang