Phase 3: Week 7 — Concept Generation & Workshop
03/14 Sunday
🌹Rose:
- Put together a presentation
- Enjoy Hillary Carey’s lecture
- Made progress in ideation
- A good balance of secondary and primary research
🌱Bud:
- Begin generating ideas
- Get something down for design principles, keep affinity mapping & sorting
- Ideation process
- Need time to dive into some reports
🌵Thorn:
- Hard to find time in class to work together
- Don’t know how to do participatory design for this project
- Hectic week
- Don’t have much done since Monday
During this group meeting, we discussed our first round of storyboards generated with our initial design principles.
Peter and Lulin’s storyboards were around platform for promoting student’s self-knowledge through engagement with community members and volunteering. Karen envisioned that future students interact with their global penpals by utilizing AR glasses with recording and sharing features. MK came up with the idea of people sharing life through a VR game.
We further discussed VR applications that exist nowadays. Lulin brought up that Walmart has the VR employee training program which could help employees navigate through busy retail shopping scenarios (e.g. Black Friday), as well as prepare employees for worst case scenario situations(e.g. a store robbery). We also talked about VRChat which is a game that allows users to communicate with people from different cultures.
03/15 Monday
Stacey Williams and Adam Cowart are guest lecturers for today’s class.
Stacey brought up a lot of inspiring topics which we had a discussion around:
- Is there a conceptual map that everybody should be working on, be clear about the system- a shared way to bring the system map to the team
- Is leadership development curriculum an artifact?
- Look at intersections of disciplines to find out issues, e.g. Look at gardens, metaphor of roots
- We need to transform how we know to how we think about knowing
- Banking model of education
Specially, on the topic of global citizenship, we talked about:
- How might we use community-based engagements as a method of representation to teach students
- Where are resources going , how do you shape that in the educational experiences students have
- If there is a required gap year for students, what will they plan to do?
In the following lecture by Adam Cowart, a PhD candidate in Transition Design at CMU, we learned CLA framework and how we could scaffold of CLA to think about present and future.
03/17 Wednesday
We had a one-hour meeting before studio to keep generating concepts in preparation for the workshop with Liz Sanders.
We discussed concept of gap year program which was inspired from Stacey’s talk:
What we like:
- Student in future would be more comfortable with media literacy
- Collaboration & diversity
- Potential ways to integrate it to existing education system
- Like most: embracing ambiguity — talk to teachers — personal autonomy(what do I look in my portfolio) — self-direction
Opportunities & Questions to think about:
- Make more extreme: every student is supposed to take a year
- What type of students should consider taking a year?
- A student would not want to take a gap year, what other offerings could there be?
- What are the roles of parents, family and educators?
- Can educators also take a gap year?
- There is incubator program in CMU. How can we adapt it to hs students?
- Might be an elective to take a gap year, and there is community for students to share experiences about gap year opportunity.
Missing pieces:
- One piece might be missing is how is cultural sustaining for individual? Is there sth embedded also help them reflect on their culture and identity? The similarities and differences.
Liz Sanders Workshop
In preparation for this workshop, we started working out whom the person we are designing for by creating a persona. We used Creating Personas that Peter shared with us earlier as a guideline to structure the persona, then expanded it out by adding images and ideas:
As required, we brought the following items to class on Wednesday so that they will inform the workshop.
- Any concepts they have already generated
- images that could be used to characterize different types of people (students, teachers, etc)
- images of formal and informal learning environments (physical and virtual)
- images that could be used to describe how people live and learn today and in the future
During Liz Sanders workshop, we learned the method of co-designing and how to create a persona toolkit for a generative workshop with participants. Liz presented examples of toolkit for in-person and virtual workshops, and introduced that how to explore future experience with current and future personas.
03/18–03/19
We had an in-class activity in Research Methods for Design class, we used STEEP and Three Horizons methods to brainstorm and map possibilities for our studio projects.
We then used Importance/Difficulty Matrix to access possibilities of our interested ideas:
- Learning different culture by game
- Student entrepreneurship program
- Trades rotational program
- Mixed reality potluck across the globe
- Students take a gap year
We narrowed down to five concepts and tasked ourselves with each of us creating a storyboard and presenting to each other during our next team meeting on Sunday.
