Stop, Drop & Design Prompt Vol. 1
Launch: 4 December 2017 | Completion Deadline: 15 January 2018
#stopdropndesign Manifesto | Sign Up to Participate
We are thrilled to introduce our first design prompt. We literally have no idea how many people will participate or what the outcomes will be. Thank you for joining in this experiment. We recorded a launchcast on December 11th at 6:30pm EST, where we discuss the initiative, prompt, and critical design.
Stop Drop & Design aims to build a distributed community of practice through critical design prompts meant as an exercise in fieldwork and design thinking. This is purely for practice and engaging with concepts, people, and practices across our communities.
When you sign up to participate, we will place you in distributed groups of 2–4 depending on the response based on your skills and interests. Once we assign you to your groups, you will have roughly a month to deliver your findings and designs via Medium which we will feature on our publication and twitter. You are welcome to submit a companion video to help illustrate your thoughts and designs.
There is no sponsorship, and while we encourage you to publish your findings under the creative commons license, ultimately, your work is your own. Please note, that by participating, you agree to our manifesto and code of ethics. We will also add you to our slack channel for collaboration and updates, and you may also request to join.
Prompt 1: Waiting in Line
Bettering one’s community is an admirable goal, but in order to do so neighbors must get to know each other better — and what better way to do that then while waiting in line!
User group and contextual space is up to you, but we encourage you to focus broadly on people who aren’t acquainted with each other.
Keeping in line with our manifesto, the goal of this prompt is not to “solve” the problem of waiting in line. Rather, it is to provide a critical commentary on the experience:
Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. Critical Design is used to make us think. But also raising awareness, exposing assumptions, provoking action, sparking debate, even entertaining in an intellectual sort of way, like literature or film.
Here is a short paper to add more context.
The fidelity and form (e.g. system, service, tool, etc.) of your design(s) is up to you, but we hope to see:
- Your research methods & synthesis
- Any key insights and discoveries
- How you understand the system(s)
- Why you chose to focus on a particular area
- The Design artifact(s)
- Possibly a companion video or presentation
Examples of Areas of Interest
- Queuing represents a space in which we spend a lot of time staring at our phones or otherwise distracting ourselves from anything but a focused goal.
Example Spaces
- By redesigning the experience of standing in line to encouraging communication and relationship formation, we can provide both a medium for getting to know one’s neighbors, and also a means of spending time more usefully.
- Disney theme parks encourage play via interactive queues — both to keep in the theme with the park and to encourage a friendly atmosphere with fellow park-goers. In essence, redefining the goal of waiting.
Food for Thought
- “Why we wait in line” Bendix, 2015
- “What really drives you crazy about waiting in line (it isn’t actually the wait at all)” Swanson, 2015
- “The experienced utility of queuing: experience profiles and retrospective evaluations of simulated queues” Carmon & Kahneman, 1995
- “The Psychology of Decisions to Abandon Waits for Service” Janakiraman, Meyer, & Hoch, 2011
- Time Dilation, Wikipedia
This project is co-created and organized by S. Poppe & Gabe Persons, M.S.. Thank you to the inspiration of Midwest UX, Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell, Nick Hawes, Liz Mikolaj, Prianka Rayamajhi, Matt Edwards, Jacquelyn Yakira, Christian Beck, Matt Jennex, Adam Williams, and Tarun Gangwani for the preliminary feedback in helping us get this idea off the ground.
