LxD Weekly Updates
Summer Research Project
Stacie Rohrbach
Summer 2020
Week 1
June 1 — June 7
This week marked the first week of our research. Over the past week, I was able to conduct 4 interviews with design students and faculty. In addition to interviews, I became better informed about our research practices and modes of communication for the study moving forward.
My goal for this next week is to conduct 2–3 more interviews and pull all of my notes into Miro for next Sunday’s check-in meeting.
Overall though I have really been enjoying hearing from student and faculty experiences with remote learning. There are so many different challenges that came with the spring semester, but despite these changes, we were all able to make strides in our learning in different ways. It’s been really interesting to hear the range of experiences as well as the range of adaptable tools and methods that students and faculty found effective.
Some of the key insights that have stood out to me include a shared experience between both faculty and students. In a lot of respects, both perspectives share a lot of the same comments about what worked well and didn’t work well, like breaking down barriers with students and having the opportunity to sympathize and understand each other, as well as the push and pull of Zoom’s pro and con lists.
Students and Faculty also have very similar fears and aspirations for the upcoming Fall semester including navigating the worst-case scenario to establishing equity and a sense of belonging with students in person and remote.
I was expecting students and faculty to share a similar common ground, but I wasn’t expecting them to share such similar insights. In many cases, their experiences are so closely tethered they’re almost identical.
I look forward to completing and synthesizing these insights over the next week and hearing from the rest of the team! I have been really impressed by the response.
Week 2
June 8 — June 14
This week involved completing 2 additional interviews and starting to pull my key insights into Miro.
This process has been a learning experience and synthesis technique on its own as I have developed a system of writing handwritten notes in real-time during the interviews, transcribing the notes into Google Docs, and then pulling key insights from these notes into Miro.
In each interview we have conducted we have asked our participants the following questions.
- What went well last semester?
- What did not go well last semester?
- What key tools and approaches did you or do you wish you had leveraged?
- Fears/concerns for the fall semester ahead?
- Hopes/aspirations for the fall semester ahead?
Some key insights that have surfaced for me include.
What Went Well: Developing an openness and understanding. students and professors were able to develop closer relationships and levels of understanding.
What Didn’t Work Well: Despite a few of my participants sharing otherwise, Zoom seemed to be a pain point for everyone from, fatigue, expectations of showing your face, and having to look at your own reflection during class lectures, to professors and students navigating distractions, timezones and zoom break out rooms.
Key Tools and Approaches: Figma, Mural, Miro, and Google Suite were the front runners from many of my participants. However, through my interviews, I was also introduced to new resources such as Meshroom for iPhone 3D prototyping to reutilizing pen and paper and how this simple tool could be leveraged more virtually.
Fears and Concerns: There was a lot of uneasiness regarding how to navigate the uncertainty and the possibility of working in the same space together. Also, many participants voiced concerns about the equity developed between students and professors that are in-person v.s. remote and the quality of the work that is developed between them.
Hopes and Aspirations: I was surprised to hear that many students want to foster and develop interactions that include everyone, whether it be in person v.s. remote. Many people seemed excited and motivated by the different opportunities that could present themselves within this space.
Outside of the interview questions, I was also really impressed by the collective of individuals providing possibilities or interventions that could help the fall semester run smoothly. Including but not limited to:
- Help guides for students to help them create or develop productive working and resting spaces at home. Working from studio-based practices or methodology’s
- Providing professors with Zoom training or help guides that help them develop consistent methods and best practices in an effort to level expectations when on Zoom.
- Being clear and transparent at the very beginning of the semester about the worst-case scenario and how that would be handled, so that students can have a clearer understanding.
This led me to think, could these suggestions be folded into our efforts? Overall, it seemed like many people are ultimately looking for resources to help them adapt and adjust as the environment we are living in continues to change and shift.
Week 3
June 15 — June 21
This week I started the process of evaluating some of the key tools and approaches that stood out to both students and instructors during the Spring Semester. This week I started with evaluating MURAL.
At the start of my graduate school experience MURAL was a totally new tool for me and I learned to use it alongside my classes as a tool for working through mapping exeresis and jotting down and sharing your ideas digitally.
It wasn’t until this Spring that I had the chance to really understand the full functionality of the application as I was forced to work collaboratively within my teams and group projects — more specifically, developing in-depth design systems and mapping for my Service Design class.
As I reviewed the tool more in-depth this week I couldn’t help but think back on that experience and how my Service Design team jumped into working in MURAL pretty exclusively for all our mapping and initial sketching for our project.
Through this process, I remember some of the small barriers we faced onboarding students from non-designer backgrounds and uncovering aspects of its functionality that was new to me. i.e. The chat function and the breadth of templates that MURAL has to offer. This functionality was especially helpful — and not something I was originally familiar with when using the application.
In my analysis of MURAL I enjoyed coming back to some of these tools and identifying why they hadn’t originally stood out to me. In addition to what aspects of the application are working really well and what could be improved.
Since we are meeting Saturday this week I am planning to add to this post more over the next day or so but wanted to highlight something that stood out to me on MURAL that I am curious to see if other platforms have done the same.
Initially when hopping back on to the MURAL main website I was surprised and pleased to see that upfront at the top of their homepage they had curated virtual and online tools that capitalize on the current climate of working from home and being forced to work digitally.
I found the “Facilitating Remote Workshops Guide” particularly interesting as this is something that many of my classes struggled with conducting in real-time during the beginning of the pandemic this Spring.
Over the last couple of months, MURAL has worked on developing a book that highlights these different tools in depth. Stating on their website that:
“Everything we know about work is changing: where it’s done, how it’s done, and who does it. As facilitators, we just got everyone comfy using sticky notes and colored markers, but there’s more to teach.” — MURAL
I found this insight really interesting and look forward to seeing if other tools have pivoted and also developed tools and guidebooks for their users as they work towards navigating this new way of learning and working.
Week 4
June 22 — June 28
Over the last week, I have had the opportunity to really dive deeper into researching the different tools and approaches that students and instructors found useful over the course of the semester.
At the beginning of the week, I worked towards grouping the insights around tools and approaches from our interviews via Miro. This was helpful in identifying what tools seemed to be the most popular amongst instructors and students.
Some of the key themes that emerged were
-Presentation Methods
-Classroom and project management methods
-Figma
-Mural
-Google Suite
-Keyshot/Solidworks
From the extensive list, I chose to evaluate the following tools specifically, including:
- Slack
- Mural
- Medium
- GSuite
-Google Jamboard
-IPad
-Trello
-Canvas
Personally, I tried to stick with the tools that I was most familiar with and had developed over the course of the spring semester so that I could include some of my own experiences, tips, and tricks working with the tools.
As I had found in Mural a lot of larger companies are capitalizing on the working from home/remote schooling component of the world that we are currently living in; pivoting their products and providing supporting content to help their customers navigate these uncertain times.
One that stood out to me specifically was Slack. Slack has done a really good job of sourcing content around this area as well as looking into opportunities that help schools specifically.
I found this particularly interesting because similar to Slack as one of the leading tools one of the approaches that also stood out was how to navigate classroom management and project organization.
Slack seems to be tackling some of these communication and management issues head-on.
Moving forward I am interested in exploring how different instructors managed and facilitated their virtual classrooms and how this could be streamlined and more effective across multiple disciplines.
Week 5
June 29 — July 5
This week I spent a lot of time completing and refining the Tools/Approaches spreadsheet. New additions to the list for me included.
- Procreate
- Invision Freehand
- Drawing
- Phone Calls
Once I completed updating these tools and approaches I worked to categorize the tools and approaches into the following nine categories.
- Communication Tools
- Prototyping Tools
- Documenting & Digital Mapping Tools
- 2D Making Tools
- 3D Making Tools
- Code-Based Tools
- Project Management
- In-Class Approaches
I then took these groupings and put them into post-it notes that I then mapped to the key insights from the Stakeholder Mapping Miro sheet. I am hoping that this preliminary work will help in our next steps in identifying specific tools that would make the most sense for these groupings within the learning objectives.
I am interested to see what steps Stacie will have us take in the coming weeks and am looking forward to bridging the learning goals and the tools together.
Week 6
July 5 — July 11
This week I spent the majority of my time working between the Tools & Approaches Excel Document and the Learning Gap Document.
After meeting with my teammate Michelle we decided to start identifying the learning goals that applied to the broader nine categories I had developed last week as a starting point. However, after identifying the higher-level categories we decided to dive deeper and develop a column that also showed specific tools and applications that could work best of each specific idea associated with each learning gap.
For this week I took on the work for the following sections.
- Communication
- Knowledge
- Skill
Since I was more heads down in the excel document I don’t have too much more to report here other than the fact that my sections were closely associated with providing tools around strengthening communication channels and organizing project and class management.
This coming week I look forward to reviewing this work further and starting to think about how we share it with a larger audience so that it’s effective and helpful in the coming months.
Week 7
July 12 — July 19
Over the course of the last week, I worked with Matt on tackling and developing a method to synthesizing out Tools/Approaches spreadsheet information further.
During our meeting last Sunday as a team, Stacie outlined the structure of the website she developed to showcase our work. During this session, we discussed opportunities for changes and additions to the framework. In addition to reviewing the framework, we divvied up writing and editing work throughout the site. With my primary involvement in the Tools/Approaches document, I volunteered to work with Matt to synthesize this content further making it easier to understand to an outside audience.
Our process has been broken into three parts:
- Transferring all the content from Google Sheet into an editable format in Google Docs.
- Developing a new outline and style guide for presenting the content in a way that is easy to digest and compare tools for instructors or students.
- Edit the content to fit the new formatting and style guide.
After completing the content transfer from the Google Sheet this is the new outline/guide that Matt and I developed from the fields that were originally represented in the Google Sheet.
Tools & Approaches Web Guide/Template
Style Guide:
- 3rd Person
- Use “students” in reference to all years of study.
- Condense 3–5 bullet points within the columns
- AVOID JARGON
[NAME]
Summary
+Add Summary Paragraph 5–6 sentences: Synthesis of the most important aspects of the tool.120/150 words
Reference Link
https://www.[NAMEOFTHING].com
Features
[______]
Primary Use
[______]
Alternate use
[______]
For instructors
[______]
For students
[______]
Limitations
[______]
Cost
[______]
Similar tools
[______]
Identifying these fields of information and consolidating or rephrasing some of the headlines helped Matt and I gain a clearer understanding of our next step and how we planned to take on editing.
With the go-ahead from Stacie on our outline, we both moved forward with our first drafts of editing for two categories.
I took on Communication Tools and Matt took on 3D Making Tools.
We are both keen on hearing from Stacie on how we approached this new outline and seeing if she had and additional feedback or editing before move forward with taking on the rest.
