Before this class, I did not know a lot about habit formation or how to break away from bad habits. I always thought that habits would form if you did them every day without having some kind of structure. My favorite takeaway is that while habits form from doing them everyday, they only really form if you anchor them to some existing behavior and how your environment can also really shape habits. I also loved that all readings were very relatable to what we were learning in class. I thought that reading excerpts from books like Atomic Habits to the diverse podcasts/audio books were helpful because it provides a variety of information and it was up to us to choose what we wanted to leave away with. Some tools and methods that I will carry with me are to anchor ideal habits to existing ones by incorporating more cues into my routine or making it easier to start the habit to reduce that friction. On the contrary, for habits I want to break free from, I will consider adding more friction to those habits in order to lessen their frequency until I am no longer having those habits. In terms of course quality, I really enjoyed the material because again it was relevant to the work we were doing in class. Sometimes the material felt repetitive but I also understand it’s a way to reinforce our learning. I also enjoyed the discussions but I would have preferred if we were allowed to stay with our table mates to engage with them more outside of project level discussions. I did enjoy that we would have whole class discussions because hearing other student perspectives was always interesting. Something I enjoyed was working with my team to build our prototype, and learning to use Figma. I did find it a bit stressful when we only had a week to do the prototype but I think that is how it can be in the design world–where you don’t have much time and have to do with what you’ve got. I think that sometimes you need to go through many iterations before you are content with something you will present, and in this case, it felt like we were short on time but staying up with my team paid off. During our iteration and prototyping process, I enjoyed how well my team and I worked together. It’s not to say we did not have disagreements, I just think we delegated tasks really well and communicated our point of views well, allowing us to compromise on ideas and design choices. One of the design choices we compromised was in the stretching routines, where some of us wanted to incorporate more options for the user while others thought the more straightforward the better because it would reduce friction and allow ease of habit building. Again, this ties into what we’ve been reading about reducing friction to build ideal habits versus adding more friction to prevent bad habits. I think that having a solid understanding about behavior definitely allowed us to create thoughtful designs and I will say that this class has been one of the best design courses I have taken because of how well structured and connected everything was, and it felt that everything we did had a purpose and was not just busy work. Thank you to the course staff for leading an amazing class!
