Week 12
Evaluative Presentation & After
Evaluative Research
This week was about cleaning up our evaluative research and presenting it to Arnold Wasserman. The complication this added was that we had to boil down what we wanted to show in order to also have some extra time to give it additional context. With the previous week’s work collecting evaluative information about our town concepts (a reflective future and a collaborative one) we also have a large amount of data to comb through and insight to discover.
Some initial feedback from Professor Scupelli was too:
“[set] up the problem space, really understanding what ARC means, how ARC is linked to the concepts, and then how people responded to them, and then what’s the next version of your concepts.”
Between preparing for the presentation and gather our insights we created several key visualizations to ARC and the problem space.
The Design Principle
The new way to visualize our concept that broke things down further than just tenants, but instead looks at actions, method, and mindset. This change allowed us to communicate our principles in a more universal way so that they translated across the services to give it its identity and its design.
Design Insights
Before our slide deck, we were struggling to decide what the end result was telling. We had a lot of feedback and understood where some of our biggest pain points were, but we struggled to decide which concept would be best. in the end, we combined the story (of course!) and created a comprehensive system that spoke to the best part of both the reflective and collaborative future.
This combination of concepts proved to be an insightful and effective adaption in the final presentation.
Evaluative Presentation — The Good
When we presented our concept and story was received well. Arnold, the guest reviewer, also felt like he understood the concepts well despite it being somewhat new to him.
Very clear, well presented, Iget it. — Arnold Wasserman
Evaluative Presentation — The Not So Good
The most productive and effective feedback we got was about the true nature of the problem we were trying to solve. Arnold made it very clear that he liked out idea, but was struggling to see the world where it would actually take place. What events would lead up to it? How does this change happen, fast or slow? Are you really addressing the power dynamic in play?
These were all questions we had asked but had not addressed well enough. Arnold suggested that we research schools that were already “ARC” to understand what lead to their success.
One things that’s missing is that it isn’t the case in other countries. They aren’t perfect, but they perform very well. —Arnold Wasserman
From this, we might be able to better imagine a change in Portland educational system.
After the Presentation
Taking what we learned about the presentation we began to debrief about what was said and clarified several points. Most importantly we did a deep review of what other schools were doing abroad and looked closely at the new models of education. We collected many articles about the topic, but one from Vox proved especially helpful. The work we did continued fast into the following week with backcasting and more serious discussions about our artifacts.
