The first week

The first week is over and I'm starting to get into the Swiss rhythm of life. Work hard, party harder. The Swiss really are well trained drinkers, almost as hard drinking as the English. I experienced this at an authentic Swiss cheese fondue, the national dish. It involved beside cheese also lots of schnapps and wine. But even more than partying hard, Swiss people enjoy working hard. A normal work day seems to go from 8am to 6pm, that´s an hour added on either end of an English work day. Even students stick to this habit. Uni usually starts at 9am and sometimes goes on until 11pm. They work in the studio every day, as if it was a job and they really do start at 9am—sharp! Voluntarily! I'm used to working at home, because as I mentioned before we don't have any studios at UWE. Here students come in, do the work and go home and relax. It´s quite common to go for an "Apero", a drink after work. But this really does mean one drink and not more. I'm getting into the habit (of both working and drinking) but as a night person still find it hard to get out of bed at 8am every day.



Last Monday we started the Digital Media module with a briefing. The 20 students on this module are being taught by one professor, one lecturer from the industry and two assistants, one of which is an expert in corporate design and the other one in webdesign so we get support in both of these areas. It all seems very well thought through and it´s a brief written specifically for us, not a recycled one that´s been done for years and years. The lecturer from the industry used to work for Kahn + Associates in Paris (they do some nice visualisations, check them out), then for Yahoo! and now works as an interface designer for Skype in London. Because she was still in London when the module started, she briefed us via Skype! I don't know if she did that purely to impress us but it sure worked. Yes, 20 students and 3 lecturers in Zurich talking to a macbook and looking at the projected screen with this woman explaining the brief — live from London! A bizarr experience. No offence—but tutors back in Bristol find it hard to work a projector and have difficulties playing a Quicktime movie on a Mac; these guys here set up a video conference that worked absolutely flawlessly without even thinking it was anything special! I was very impressed.



The 8 page project brief of our project which is entitled "Social Networking 55+" explains the current situation of social networking sites, and the task is to develop a platform for a digital cross-generational social network under consideration of universal design, information architecture, usability and legibility. Then there´s a schedule with the different project stages and what´s to do, it´s a 5 week project and we have presentations every other week. It says exactly what we need to do each week, similar to the one professional brief we had last semester that was belittled as "spoon feeding" by some people that can't handle a professional approach. We also have two workshops like "design process for digital projects" where we talk about user centred design, personas and scenarios, information architecture and maps, wireframing and prototypes, user testing(!), visual design, specifications and style guides in the first one and the other one is called "visual design for the www" covering typography, grids, structure, hierarchy, whitespace, colours and accessability. The final result to hand-in is a concept presentation, a clickable prototype for chosen scenarios, home page and a printed documentation in an edition of 5 as well as a digital version of it! Yes, that´s how they deal with module files. How I understand it, they have to actually design a printed presentation (book) according to certain style guides that explains your process, research, design stages and everything and then they take the digital version of it and compile it into a bigger book and everybody gets a copy at the end. But I'll explain that later, when I know more about the details.



After the briefing, the students devided up into teams (by themselves, without class politics, without drawing numbers) and started working on the brief. I forgot to mention that the briefing started at 4.30pm and these guys stayed in the studio until 8ish and then went for an Apero, which in itself was interesting as they actually talk about interesting stuff in their spare time, design related things, usually typography. They're very passionate and 'elitist', and actually know what they're talking about. They have an opinion and they can defend it using actual arguments and not just killer phrases like 'just get on with it'. It feels really good to be able to have intelligent conversations with people that know what they're doing and don't just pretend to know stuff. Next morning they started at 9am for their independent(!) study and worked on their concepts—self motivated—on the first day after the briefing. The Swiss are really keen on working.



Tomorrow we'll present our ideas to the class, with actual presentations that they take seriously like a sales pitch. It´s been only a week but judging by the amount of work it feels like I've been here for a month already. And it´s really enjoyable so far.