infoconstructor

Thanks to the student who snapped this masterpiece I sketched while explaining the design research exercise today (her accompanying tweet: ‘What a prodigy, hey hey…’). As silly as my little joke sketches are, that’s as serious as our design research exercises are in class. Today’s session was good – they had to do a short, straightforward interview, being respondent and interviewer by turns. As an introduction, I showed them part of Brenda Laurel’s talk about her research into girls’ games in the nineties. Also explained a bit about the research I’m engaged in at the moment for clients.

For most of them, this exercise turned out to be difficult. After laconic, general responses from a respondent, they just stop, unable to get any further. At each team, my colleague and I stop, and demonstrate how we would ‘push through’ with new and more detailed questions, until we’ve gotten a fuller picture of the respondent’s experiences and emotions.

A few students just gave up anyway and indifferently scrawled brief responses – I gave them hell, because they have to develop a sense of urgency. And they have to understand that only results count – turning in crap is not an option. If they’re not motivated to achieve even a basic goal like this, well, maybe they’ll find some kind of job or school that’s more suited to their mentality. A design professional they will never be. At least, not the kind we train.

In general, however, we’re beginning to see some progress and have a positive impression of the students. At the end of class, they gave some good advice to help us improve the lesson, and feedback which indicates that they understand the importance of research skills.

Read the results of their interviews of each other in the train – very interesting. Will review their work on the first take-home assignment this weekend. Saw a few other tweets: “That guy is scary…” “Crap this, crap that…” Students, realize one thing – I’m not scary, DESIGN is scary. Design is no different than dance, or sports, or acting or filmmaking. You have to bust your a** to get even one pixel, one word, one shot really RIGHT. Have patience – just get your minds on the work, and you’ll be amazed at what we achieve this year.

Student explaining an interface idea for a ticket machine.

Great lesson today! Adjusted the form of the activity, and immediately the level of the discussion and of the results got very, very interesting. Asked them to imagine ‘logical’ and ‘illogical’ locations for a ticket machine, and then to create an interface sketch for the machine in a school (hypothetically: students here usually get free transportation). The sketches and discussion focused minds exactly on the topic: context of use. Here, a student is showing a sketch I found intriguing: a large ’start’ button is in the center, and a constellation of several large cities in the region appears around it. Clicking one of the large cities as a start destination gives a list of the closest regional stations. The idea is that a student almost always lives in a town or city fairly close to the school, or at least, not across the country from it. Other suggestions included allowing a student ID number to be typed in (personalization), and downplaying first-class tickets (students almost never buy them).

Also interesting: almost every team included some ‘illogical’ locations for the machine, which they then re-considered and found logical. In fact, almost any location is logical to buy a ticket, as long as it’s somewhere on a person’s travel path. Playground? Sure, the parents will pick up the kid, and it’s much easier to buy a ticket there than at the crowded station with bags, kids, etc. weighing one down. Obviously, mobile and near-field scenarios would dominate the ideal solutions.

But for the moment, this is a good way of focusing on our learning goal: understanding the relationship of context of use to design.

Too bad I didn’t figure out this approach for the first two classes – but their lesson was nonetheless reasonably good. The many hours we put into designing the curriculum are paying off: we can rely on our lesson plan for a well-organized, structured lesson in which all learning objectives are dealt with.

The assignment to design an online form produced some interesting work and discussions. It’s really the perfect combination of content development, visual organisation and interaction design skills. Here a student explains a screen designed to allow volunteers to fill in their available hours.

If the Smartboard wasn’t such an utterly stupid, badly designed and ineffective product, I might even like it a bit at times like this. With second-year students, we went through a number of scenarios for the use of sound in a widget which feeds updates from an online travel diary. The ideas and features created in this brief discussion were actually quite good, and gave a good impression of the ‘rules of the game’ when it comes to using sound, which is one of the most potentially annoying interaction design elements. This kind of collective discussion and revision works particularly well for the ‘widget’ assignment.

It’s here – a perfectly preserved and slightly restored Unic drawing table, ready to use. Even the original toolkit and manual! Will I succeed in making interesting work on it? We’ll see…

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Found some beautifully designed old books at a sale. The typographic ornament above is from the title page of a 1936 edition of Willem de Merode’s poetry. It’s 4 centimeters in diameter.

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Saw an interesting example of ‘folk’ input devices at Dudok cafe – rather than fingers, almost all the waiting staff use their ID cards as input devices. This works well, especially because the touch screen contains elements too small to comfortably select with fingertips. The following two photos show the starting screen of the interface, and a total view of the user. A nice example for the first-year students becoming acquainted with the use of ethnographic research techniques in design. Observations like this can result in new input devices.

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