Lessons Learned

At first, this whole term was going to be about writing a paper about design research. It quickly transformed into something more interactive and educational, and serendipitously, I found a colleague (Yu-seung Kim) who shared the same interests and goals.

The idea of running a workshop about how to make probes, though seemingly simple (in reality, it wasn’t. We had some rough work sessions!) , turned out to teach us a lot of rewarding lessons:
- we had to learn how to write a proper proposal
- we had to learn how to be more sensitive to our construction of questions and definitions
- we had to dust off our previous teaching experience
- our skill for facilitating a critique was challenged
- you can never be prepared enough. You never know what questions or comments people will say. You never know if people will interact or not talk at all.
- always be able to provide examples
- keep your eye on the goal as you present – remember what point you want to make
- give the participants a takeaway message
- make sure to balance out the difference between how much you tell and how much you facilitate
- if something is questionable, question it
- sometimes you just have to improvise…or maybe you have to improvise a lot
- provide specific direction and guidance, but also allow participants to be malleable in their thinking
- document your work! It pays off later
- don’t assume anything. Be prepared for everything.
- Cross your fingers. Sometimes you’ll get lucky.
- speaking is not something to take for granted. Be prepared or your tongue might get tied in a knot!

Teaching is something that’s never stagnant. It’s everchanging. Even one new student in the room can change the entire dynamic of the class. The workshop in the Art of Research class went over fairly well. It prepared us for future run–throughs and gave us a taste of what to watch out for. We had a long list of critiques not only of the workshop, but of our own presentation skills. Having facilitated a workshop helped highlight the pros and cons of our presentation skills. Improving these skills now will only be able to help us later not only with running more streamlined workshops, but also with running our own personal presentations.

Although Super Studio is coming to a close, we are still hopeful that we will be accepted to run this workshop at the AIGA conference in Baltimore this October. Wish us luck!

How’d It Go?

On Wednesday morning, Yu-seung and I attended Sean Donahue’s Art of Research class to do a run through of the workshop. We documented most of the workshop with video and took a few photos of the probe boxes.

Each probe box was equipped with:
_ a definition of a “cultural probe” on the exterior
_ directions with a specific requirement. (i.e. the group with the Polaroid camera had to integrate a written component into their probe, the group with the newspaper/paper had to integrate the “map” as a metaphor…)
_ a definition of “bi-racial” was provided
_ a blank probe (i.e. newspaper/plain butcher paper, cell phone, Polaroid camera)

a group of students presenting some of their ideas during critique

How’d It Go?
Overall, we felt the workshop went well for several reasons:
1) The participants were engaged with each other and had productive discussions
2) The workshop was completed in the amount of time we allotted. We even had more time for discussion, which was a good thing.
3) The short time given to create a cultural probe kept people from thinking too much, allowing people to concentrate on the overall goal.
4) People learned something new that they could apply to their own practices.

We talked between ourselves right after the workshop and here are some of our critiques and observations:
1) Have clearer visuals of cultural probes in the introduction
2) Prepare our own introduction. Premise the situation. Sean did a great job of introducing us, but we should be prepared for moments when we have to introduce ourselves.
3) Make more of an effort to integrate ourselves with the participants. Really push them to think harder, but always be positive.
4) It’s good to review and check-in with ourselves. We have to be on our toes when we critique and be able to provide quick feedback, suggestions and constructive criticisms.
5) Perhaps tighten up the question with more specifications to get them to move faster.

I think that a workshop like this would work well with a Part 2 follow-up or longer discussion about how cultural probes can be integrated into people’s practices.

For our final week, we will continue to analyze our work, post some video footage of the workshop run through and probably put together a synopsis of the workshop/ procedures, etc. that we can easily access and edit.

Probes: A Designerly Way of Researching

Next Wednesday, Yuseung and I will be doing a run through of our workshop in Sean Donahue’s Art of Research class. In the past two weeks, we got a lot completed: we submitted our workshop to the conference, worked on putting together a prototype of our “blank probe package,” lined up a workshop run through time with Sean Donahue, and refined the content of the workshop itself. Here is the basic overview of the workshop:

OVERVIEW
The aim of Probes: a Designerly Way of Researching is to give participants hands-on experience creating cultural probes—designed objects and activities used in qualitative research studies. Using our design capabilities and intellect, what can we, as designers, create to understand the people for whom we are designing? How can we gather meaningful feedback through the creation of tangible objects and visual communication tools and games that can lead to greater empathy and understanding?

Participants will be divided into small groups and presented with an issue and a question. Using a “blank probe package” provided to each group, participants will be asked to design several “probes” that can help them in their research endeavors. At the end of the exercise, we will come together to critique and evaluate each groups’ set of probes and sketches to help clarify as well as better understand the use of probes as
beneficial tools for research designers.

DESIRED OUTCOME
The desired educational outcome is to give participants hands-on experience that demonstrates the potential of innovative, non-traditional methods of research through the use of probes. The workshop aspires to encourage designers to contribute and apply their skill sets in the research arena.

WORKSHOP CONTENT
The workshop will be limited to 50 minutes. The workshop will begin with a brief overview defining probes, showing samples of probes that have been used in the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. Participants will be divided into small groups where they will develop their own probe prototypes and sketches based on a given research question. This will be followed by a critique and short discussion about the results of the exercise. In conclusion, we will share examples of the feedback gathered through actual probe-based design research projects held in our year-long Super Studio course.

Workshop Timeline (0:50min):
(0:07min) Introduction – Presentation: What are Probes?
(0:20min) Probe-Making Exercise (break-up into small groups)
(0:18min) Critique/ Discussion
(0:05min) Conclusion – Presentation: How probes were used in MDP Super Studio projects

This is a photo of a rough prototype of some of the items that would belong in a blank probe package. We wanted everything to look as generic as possible in order to give the participants the freedom to design and shape them to their needs. We are refining this for our workshop run-through on Wednesday so keep a lookout for our posts about it.

Workin’ on the Workshop: Gettin’ Specific!

This week, Yu-seung and I worked on the content for our design research workshop. We spent a while reflecting back on our own processes through Super Studio and worked around the idea of creating a mini Super Studio scenario that would fit within a 1 hour 40 minute workshop.

We are using the Social Studies Design Educators Conference as a reference point to help us construct our workshop. The workshops at the conference are limited to 50 minutes, but the conference organizer informed us that we could make a proposal for a 100 minute workshop. We are constructing our workshop to fit a 100 minute time frame because we felt that 50 minutes wouldn’t suffice.

Our target audience will be mainly design educators and some design students interested in design education and design research, so we decided that the question should be closely related to the main theme of the conference:

Conference Theme
This AIGA design educators’ conference addresses the social life of design. Graphic designers work with clients, institutions, users, and communities to make things happen in the world. Yet education often focuses on the individual voice. How are we preparing students for a lifetime of working with and for other people? How are our students connecting to the world?

In order for us to formulate workshop activities, relevant questions and proper guidelines, we really had to look back at our own experience going through Super Studio this year. What could we take from our experience? What was important for us? What could we modify? How has our process helped highlight what we should focus upon in the workshop?

Currently, we have developed a basic outline for the workshop:
• a “hello” introduction (5min)
• an individual introduction activity (15min)
• a small group activity – which is the main portion of the workshop (45min)
• reconvening and presentation/ discussion of the small group activity (30min)
• and a short “goodbye/thanks” outro (5min).

We want to provide enough information to stimulate the participants, but we want to leave it blank enough so that we don’t lead the participants to feel like they have to think or create in a certain way or method. Our introduction will start with a blank bare bones activity that will act as an icebreaker and creative juice stimulator, but our main activity will be more intense. We’re even anticipating a little frustration – a common feeling that followed us through Super Studio this year. Frustration…argh! It made us emotional, but it really pushed many of us to create more meaningful work.

The main question for our workshop will be: How can a sustainable space affect design students?

Why did we choose this question? The audience will be primarily design educators, so we thought that presenting them with a question about students would be relevant, as well as something that might be food for thought once they leave the workshop setting. We chose “sustainable space” because 1) sustainability is one of the topics for the conference and 2) it’s a perinent and challenging topic for designers right now. We even realized that it’s an issue that runs through our own studio space.

Coming up with this question wasn’t easy. We dissected our own Super Studio question in order to formulate this one.

The goal of our main activity surrounding this question is to present the idea of probes to our audience. We aren’t going to present our activity as probes, but rather as just assets that they can use to build devices to help answer the main question. We are planning on adopting some of the forms we used from Super Studio and creating blank versions of them. Since we understand that developing a probe from scratch in a short period of time may be difficult, we thought it would be better to present our audience with a sort of toy box or package of blank objects that may stimulate ideas for probes. We also decided to give provide three bounding terms for the main activity: responsibility, collaboration, and performance level. After the main activity, we will reconvene and open up the workshop for presentation and discussion.

Our goal for next week is to formulate a 250–word proposal to submit for the conference. We will also start working on designing the blank objects and package contents to be used in the main activity.

Week 6: Research + Interviews = INSPIRATION

Today, Yu-seung and I met with Paula Goodman, Director of the K-12 programs at the Public Programs office at South Campus. Paula gave us insight about the Design Based Learning Program for K-12 Teachers and provided us with a lot of guidance and inspiration for our own workshop. She provided us focus, gave us a few examples of workshop activities, but most of all, encouraged us to really look into ourselves and our own experiences to help shape the content for our workshop.

There are several things I feel I learned from our one-hour talk:
1. The experience begins at the beginning.
2. Consider the takeaway experience – what happens after the workshop?
3. Give people space to conceptualize their own thoughts, using their own experiences.
4. Provide moments of self-reflection, deliberate or not.
5. KNOW what problem you want to solve or what question you want to pose – FOCUS!!!
6. Use what you know to connect with your audience – help unravel the repression people have placed on their creativity.
7. Balance what you show versus what you tell. Leave things open for interpretation.

Thank you Paula!

Besides meeting with Ms. Goodman (which was really like a breath of fresh air), we also read more on participatory design and watched TED talks on creativity and design education:
Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original.”

Design is in the Details
Paul Bennett

This week, Yu-Seung and I narrowed down our main workshop question as well as came up with a plan of action for the next month. Our goal by week 10 is conduct a test run of our workshop (details to come):

THE BIG QUESTION:
How can a workshop show designers/ design educators how their affordances can help solve social issues?

OUR SCHEDULE:
wk7: workshop samples/ research
wk8: no class – work on proposal to submit to design conference
wk9: present finalized proposal, present refined workshop models
wk10: test run workshop

Back to Basics

Yuseung and I thought in order to get some clarity about our focus that we should take a step back and brainstorm our own knowledge of the design research process. We stepped away from our computers and took about an hour to compile some of our questions and keywords on post-its. This really helped us organize our thoughts and it gave us a jumping off point for where we want to go next. We had questions about how one gets involved with design research, what goes on in the process and what happens after all the research is done.

more to come… .

I Smell Collaboration

In Week 4, everyone presented their individual focuses and goals for the term (to view classmate blogs, please go to the links page). Yu-seung Kim and I both conveyed interest in design research methods and case study samples, so after class we decided that collaborating our ideas would be the best way to strengthen our goals for this term.

We were advised to look into conferences or journals that would help us focus our writing, research and visualizations. As luck would have it, Luke Johnson sent us a link to a conference on an AIGA conference called Social Studies: Educating Designers in a Connected World taking place in October 2008. For now, Yu-seung and I are using this conference as a guidance tool and we’re thinking about submitting a proposal for the MFA panel. Thoughts of also submitting a proposal to run a workshop relating to our work are in the air as well. It made me really think, what other ways can we educate others about design research?  Other than a paper or website, how can we share our ideas and experiences of design research and how can we stimulate others to want to integrate design research methods into their existing practices?

The Research Process: Iterate Reiterate

ITERATIONS

TURN INTO

REITERATIONS

THAT CAN PROVIDE REALIZATIONS

In design research, research and analyzation methods also need to be approached differently. Using design affordances, we were able to uncover even some of the most provocative dreams and desires, seen here in our visualization of the real (to the right) and the desired (to the left). Design research isn’t just about asking the right questions, but it’s also about looking at the results from a different perspective. So, this leads to the questions:
1) What methods can we use to conduct analyzation in design research?
2) What is effective about these approaches?

What is Design Research?: Probes

Part of answering design research often includes probes. These are photos of probes we created for our research during Super Studio I. What did we learn from these probes? How were they effective? How did they not work? What unique questions did these probes answer? I plan on dusting these off this term and revisiting these again.

Bounding Terms: A Reference Point

In Super Studio 1, we were given these three bounding terms: existence value, conversation and stickiness. As we strove through the semester, we struggled to define and refine the meanings of these three words, returning back to them often as a reference point and grounding tool. For this term, we were asked to create trios of terms that would also help guide us through our research.

Terms for guidance (and still developing):
/// context . analyzation . audience

/// imagination . empathy . unspoken

/// emergence . reliability . legitimate

/// human–centered . strategy . experimental