Mar 24, 2021
Week 7
Begining generative research
We started our generative research this week after presenting the exploratory research findings.
Brainstorm ideas
As a first step, we had a brainstorm session in which everyone proposed potential design directions and artifacts based on what we learned so far. Each of us sourced several inspiration images and shared them in Figma. This helped us get on the same page about what the team is interested in as well as having a sense of what the artifact might be.
We found four themes in the proposed ideas:
- Imaging future self
How might we help students envision who they want to be in the future and motivate them to make plans accordingly? - Self-directed learning
How might we give students the freedom to choose their own learning path during unstructured time? - Soft skill building
How might we improve the teaching and developing of the soft skills that prepare someone to be future-ready? - Collaborative platform
How might we facilitate the teacher-teacher and teacher-parent collaboration so as to create a better learning environments for the students?
Design principles
To find opportunities to merge and evolve those initial ideas, we decided to step back and work on generating design principles that we would like to incorporate in the artifact. We checked a few examples of design principles behind different products. Salesforce and Medium provide two inspiring examples.
We then came up with a few principles that reflect the values we think are important for the students based on our research insights.
For our next steps, we would like to explore applicable contexts for our design by creating persona and storyboards. In addition, we hope to practice participatory design methods and incorporate stakeholders in the design process. The in-class activity with guest lecturer Liz Sanders about creating a tool kit for participants to create personas themselves was inspiring to us. However, we are not yet sure about whether personas and/or other generative research method(s) would be most valuable and feasible for us to co-design with the stakeholders. So another thing on the to-do list is investigating methods that would be most helpful for our goals.
