My Digital Making Journey- Original Tutorials and Reflection: My First Class

The first class is often the most daunting time in a subject. Am i in the right room? Will i know anybody? What if i don't make any friends? What if i am no good at this subject? What if i can't handle the workload? Maybe i should just drop the subject now and pick up a summer semester...? Whether people are willing to admit it, these are the things that most people think about going into an unknown subject not knowing a single person.

The first task for the course was to get into groups of 4 or 5 people with one member from each industry and discuss what possible object we could use to begin our assignments, relating to our own industry. The object didn't have to directly be an item identified within your industry but one that you could relate to on a personal level and tie in with your work.

A million things were going through my mind. At this stage i was completely unaware of the work that we were to undertake in the following assignments, so some of the thoughts i had now seem quite ridiculous and almost impossible to do in the latter stages.

For myself, i have always had a connection and love for water and the land that creates its edges

In particular the ocean and the beautiful Australian coastline 

I wanted something that would represent the connection between the two, on a social level as well. An object that allowed a connection for people from one to the other

An object that symbolizes human interaction and connection with the ocean, a tool that allows people from the land to exist on the ocean

After speaking to Russell about my current thought process he suggested something a little more achievable. Obviously my thought process at this stage was set on this theme of the ocean that i had be working on in my head but Russell had the advantage of knowing what work lay ahead and the skills that it would take in order to produce something of this complexity.

 I left the class that day reasonably confident that i was going to use an anchor as my found object.

I think for this first class a brief introduction and tour in the Workshop and Fablab would have been beneficial and possibly even a small metalworking task to get the ball rolling. I was coming into this whole new world completely blind, i literally never used 123D Catch or Make, seen or even used a laser cutter or 3D printer, i didn't know what or where the FabLab was or even anything about the workshop. For the first few stages of this subject a lot of things were assumed and that made it quite difficult for myself to get moving in the right direction. Even the simplest of task can be confusing to someone who has never done it before, they may have a different way of going about problem solving or even just a different thought process and for something that has a clear right way and a wrong way, it can make it a lot more difficult than it needs to be. A lot of time could have been saved during the initial weeks if a simple step by step explanation of the basics had been incorporated within class time.