The course Creative Programming provided me with the experience that if I have an idea for a design or an interaction in mind and I want to make it experienceable through code, I can. As a result, I was less insecure and scared for the next technical course in line: Interactive Intelligent Product. When it was pronounced in the first lecture that this course was going to be a combination of the courses From Idea to Design and Creative Programming, my expectations of this course evolved from slightly insecure and scared to enthusiastic and interested. Where Creative Programming focussed more on the skill of writing code instead of creating something within an actual context and problem statement, it felt like the perfect next step to combine these two aspects of design and learn how to really implement coding into an actual realizable product.

At first, I was a bit confused to receive all the example codes instead of writing code myself, but now I understand that it would not have been achievable to learn to write this code myself within the scope of this course. However, this course has thought me that I am capable of understanding the pure basics of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which feels unreal to me. I can honestly say that I have never envisioned myself capable of working on projects and codes like these and even succeeding in doing those activities.

I remember dr. J. (Rong-Hao) Liang - the lecturer of this course - saying in his final speech at the end of the last lecture that we can consider ourself magicians from this point on: I know now that there is no longer a barrier when designing products for a specific user and context. Every product can be an interactive and intelligent one, accomplished by the use of machine learning.

Learning about the basic knowledge of machine learning and being invited to understand, work with and alter complicated but intriguing example codes will help me to be able to think further out of the box and make my future designs more limit-testing, which is the primary insight that I’ve gained through this course.

Furthermore, I am proud of myself concerning my effort and my motivation for this course by attending every lecture and workshop, paying attention, making notes, participating in the examples shown during the workshops, and succeeding while performing these activities. Unfortunately I do feel like I could (and should) have done more. This course has been groundbreaking for me in general, but I haven’t taken all the opportunities that I should have taken. I should have taken the accelerometer home more often and invest more time in trying to understand, work with and alter the example codes to fit with the goal of our project. I did do this one time during the course and I did succeed in solving an issue within the code, but I took this experience too easily as a confirmation and as a reason to go back to my conventional skills again for the rest of the project. Of course, other aspects should also be taken into account concerning this statement. There was only one accelerometer available for the whole group, and one member of the project group was a bit more assertive than I was in asking to take the accelerometer home and working with the code. But, I should not have used these aspects as an excuse to avoid working with the provided codes and making the knowledge my own. Being aware of this, I am planning to be more assertive, not only towards others but more primarily towards myself for future design challenges. If I want to become more aware and more capable within this field of design, I need to step up my game and no longer make excuses to go back to my conventional skills within group projects.