Reflecting on CS 247I: Design for Understanding
This class has been a interesting and unique learning experience for me. Coming in, I had little expectation of what this would be like since it was my first quarter here at Stanford. I had taken a class similar to CS 147 at Cornell though, where I did my undergrad, so I had some sense of what the types of things we would be learning about are.
The class experience was unique to me in large part because of the structure and size of the class. All my experiences with computer science classes thus far has mostly been classes with at least 60 or so people, including even the class like CS 147 that I had taken. I really liked how the much smaller class felt more intimate and allowed for more discussion and flexibility. It made me feel a lot more eager to be present and participate in discussions despite being a naturally more quiet person. I thought some of the class discussions to be remarkably insightful and interesting. In particular, I liked how some of the discussions towards the end on our board games brought up concerns that I hadn’t considered before. Thoughtfulness was what made our class discussions so valuable for me, and I feel like I learned a lot from my fellow students.
The video chats with industry professionals who had experience working in specific areas gave me a lot of perspective. Though I forget her name, I found the perspective of the speaker on information architecture to be really valuable and interesting to hear. Their contributions to the class helped for me to really reinforce the idea that what we were learning has the potential to actually make a difference in the real world.
Where I learned the most, however, is definitely in the moments where I was actually doing some of the tasks. Coming into the class, I did not really know what exactly we’d be learning about in a class called “design for understanding.” But from the beginning, when I interviewed others about political polarization, the topic of my projects, I learned a lot about just how different peoples’ knowledge can be. Listening to a lecture, on something like information architecture and then doing cardsorting immediately after helped me to understand and reinforce the materials, and I feel muh more confident now that I could apply the things we discussed in class in the real-world.
On political polarization, I felt like I myself learned a lot about the topic too. One question my group discussed throughout the entire course was exactly what aspect of political polarization we should focus on. There’s much to do in this space, whether its fixing the perception gap or examining how political polarization can result in a broken democracy. So we decided to start small, tackling one particular issue in our first project.
By the second and third projects, we had decided to branch out, tackling more and more aspects of political polarization as a topic. In the game, this was particularly challenging to do. But I think we ultimately did something that achieved what we wanted. Our mechanics forced players to sometimes do actions that went against their team when they believed more in what those from the other team was saying — in fact, that was the only way our game could be played without resulting in a stalemate, relying on cooperation. This and other ideas we got didn’t come from ourselves more often than not, but from our playtesters and from peers in class. I realized just how valuable this feedback can be and became better and better, in my mind, at getting the right feedback.
Ultimately, I think that designing for understanding means many things. It is, to start, understanding the audience, the people I’m trying to build for. It is understanding the topic, and it is understanding what my audience understands of the topic. It is about figuring out what people already know and what they need to know, and it is about finding the right way to help them learn what they don’t yet know. I particularly like how we explored many different ways of designing for understanding in this class. There’s not just one way, or even three ways, of helping people to understand something, and I think I’ll be able to apply the ideas and techniques I learned this quarter in more ways than I expect.
