Provide a general description of the items below and introduce the services you offer. Click on the text box to edit the content.

About me

Hi there, Welcome to my digital portfolio. My name is Shashoti Haque. I am a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto pursuing a specialist in Digital Enterprise Management. As a soon-to-graduate student I have worked on various technical projects, this portfolio reflects only a portion of my undergraduate career. I am passionate about all things technology and am always excited to take on new and exciting opportunities to challenge my creative abilities.

Aside from my studies, I possess over six years of experience working in a client-facing environment. Two of these have been in a corporate setting within an IT department where I received exposure on how IT services and projects are handled. I want to build a career in which I can leverage my love for creative expression, process improvement and providing creative, technical and managerial support.

In my spare time, I enjoy playing around with various creative mediums ranging from painting, photography, music production and cooking. I am competent in various applications such as Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Balsamiq, HTML and much more.

Learning About Technology

This course has been very eye-opening. Speculative Design III has introduced me to various aspects of the world of Java, Android Studio and mobile technology. It has allowed time to develop a fundamental understanding of key components of app development.

Throughout this course, I recognized that technology is constantly evolving. There is a need for continuous development and adaptation to remain relevant in such a fast-growing industry. After this course, I possess an understanding of the different design principles and I have developed more technical skills to put in my toolbox.

Process Analysis

The project I’d like to talk about is our submission for the Mobile Design App assignment. We developed an application called the ‘Pill Pal’ which is an app specifically for seniors to track their medications dosage and times. We were brainstorming issues different age groups might face and we had settled on developing something for seniors. Heath issues often arise with age which is why we were inspired to research and develop an application of this nature.

My role in the process was documenting and conducting research to support the design of this application. Upon further research, I learned that seniors regularly makes errors in consuming their medications which can have serious health implications and sometimes adverse effects. I also discovered that Seniors prefer specific shades of blue. They tend to find comfort in different shades such as baby blue and royal blue as they communicate a sense of trust and comfort.

When considering the layout, I recognized that the final design should be straight forward and easy to navigate as we dont want to overwhelm our demographic with an overly complicated interface. We kept the amount of pages minimal with a home page, an add medications pages where the user logs in each supplement or medication, and my medications page which displays a summary of all the medications that have been logged with their schedules and dosage.

A major challenge the team faced was attempting to implement an alarm system within the application. Our team member tried various workarounds with our suggestions but we could not get the alarm to work the way we wanted it to. I had suggested that we keep the code in despite the alarm not working to show that we had explored the possibility of incorporating it.

In the end, we had a functional user friendly application with three pages which was a home screen, add medication page and my medication page. Our platform allows users to input, track and manage their medication supplements which streamlining their health journey.

Technical Communication

I want to describe the concept of an MVP, short for “Minimal Viable Product” that is commonly used in several industries. Its something I hear a lot in my current industry of Information Technology. A MVP is essentially a rough draft of a product to provide the audience an idea of the potential of your plan.

For instance, say you have an idea for an application that you believe could be the next big thing. You decide on the effective route which would be do just lay out the foundation of the product itself rather than building out the product to its full extent with limited resources. A Minimum Viable Product is not a fully defined plan, but but rather an outline of what your product would look like.

The purpose of a Minimum Viable Product is efficiency. It helps you develop your idea and receive feedback very fast. The idea could then be modified and further developed based on the feedback received. It is a calculated approach to developing and implementing a product or potential idea.

Teamwork and Collaboration

I will be discussing our project for the Design for Education: Virtual Reality assignment. Our team chose 'somewhat fidelity' as our level. We designed a prototype to resemble our classroom in DV2082. I believe this project demonstrates my ability to work effectively in a team as one of our teammates had a family emergency across the globe and was not available to contribute significantly to the project. The remaining peers and I had to put in additional effort to complete the project. With the three of us, it was easier to divide up the work as in our previous project we found ourselves often searching for work to ensure somewhat equal distribution of the project tasks. Overall, this project taught us how to collaborate with limited time, other commitments and minimal resources.

Conclusion

The duration of this course has greatly evolved the way I see design which involves elements of functionality, creativity and limitations within the design process. Looking back, I recognize my design philosophy has provided me with a deeper understanding of the future of the technical world.

The projects I worked on contributed greatly towards the progressive development of my understanding of speculative design. It has taught me to acknowledge and appreciate the collaborative back-and-forth process of designing and receiving feedback. Given the time constraints, minimal resources and competency, my peers and I were challenged to navigate and determine the best course of action. These challenges prompted us to make difficult decisions such as which features or functionality to prioritize, how to effectively collaborate, schedule check-in meetings based on everyone's availability and much more.

Our two group projects were focused on problem-solving through design. My teammates and I found ourselves searching for a problem first before attempting to solve it. This reversed approach opened up a gate of possibilities and allowed us to consider the bigger picture putting ourselves in the shoes of a different demographic. In previous Speculative Design classes, particularly the projects my team had focused on were geared towards our demographic. Due to the obvious bias, our design projects weren't as strong. I was genuinely inspired and excited to pursue our project that addressed medication management for seniors. I believe it's because there was a need for it, and it required further investigation whereas for the previous projects, my teammates and I were depending on our personal experiences to develop the project.

The process of user testing allowed us to share our ideas beyond the team. The four of us were looking at it very closely so having additional eyes on it gave us useful feedback which helped us develop the design accordingly.