CS247i: Final Class Reflection

CS 247i has been a very diverse class in terms of the content covered, which naturally translated into diverse learnings. Since the class was broken up into three projects, I will talk about my journey through them sequentially and discuss some of the learnings throughout.

The first project revolved around the creation of an explorable explainer for some political system. After being placed in groups, the high-level approach to this task started with research into the space, followed by interviews for more insights, followed by the development of system models, and finally culminating in the creation an explorable explainer.

We were tasked with picking a topic rather quickly, and our group decided to tackle the subject of political apathy. Through our research, our group learned that political apathy is often cited as the reason for low voter turnout, and we learned that participation in elections can range from as low as 9% for local ones to close to 60% for national ones in the United States.

After a great deal of learning in this phase, we were excited to get a more concrete idea of political apathy from our interviews. However, our group found that these interviews did not provide is with a concrete sense of what political apathy is. Although we were able to categorize people’s relationships with politics, the underlying system we would represent was ambiguous to us. The task of creating models of political systems was a bit helpful, but ultimately, we could not arrive to a concrete model of what political apathy was.

As such, my group and I decided to convey some of the complexities of political apathy by showcasing a specific example of someone’s relationship with politics, which was inspired by one of our user interviews. The hardest part about this challenge was maintaining a focus on politics, since our first iteration of the project focused too greatly on unrelated details like friendship.

It was here that I learned just how difficult it is to generalize one situation/story to convey a greater system. In going through the project, I learned that it is important to have a clear sense of the message to convey so that everything created thereafter can contribute to that message or be scrapped.

After this project we were tasked with creating a reference site for our topic, which required further research and interviews. Since our previous round of interviews were not as informational as we had hoped, we were a bit afraid of not getting more concrete information on political apathy from our interviews.

Fortunately, we had a breakthrough in our interviews when we learned about card sorting. We had been collecting a lot of information on voter turnout and political apathy, and we decided to place our information onto sticky notes and asked people to blindly categorize them with their own category names. It was through this process that our subjects introduced us to the idea the voting takes a lot of privilege, which can sometimes be mistaken for political apathy.

Our group rejoiced at this finding; although we had been looking at a lot of information and had encountered instances of privilege in our research multiple times, we had never put a word to it. It was here that we learned the power of getting fresh perspectives and where we learned the power of card sorting.

After this breakthrough and a concrete idea to work through, we were able to work effectively towards conveying the privileges it takes to vote in our resource site.

Finally, for our final project, we were tasked with creating a game that taught players about how a system works. Since we had been on a roll with our previous project, we continued its momentum by deciding to create a collaborative game where players would work together to reach the polling stations.

Through the rounds of playtesting involved in this project, me and my teammate learned that game mechanics should be chosen very intentionally to reflect the system we were trying to model. Our biggest struggle through the development of our game was providing players with the feeling of agency as they approached the polling stations. In creating a dice-swapping mechanism we were ultimately able to provide players with the great sense of agency that they were looking for.

Through the process of iterating that it took us to achieve this, we learned to be unafraid of big changes from iteration to iteration. We learned that some design decisions go as intended and others do not, but that it’s ok to take a step in the wrong direction with a design decision and reverse/change it if the playtesting reveals need for improvement.

Overall, I really enjoyed the application of concepts learned through the course and the learning by doing. We were largely responsible for guiding our own work, which made me feel proud of all of the deliverables that we created.