Prototype Roadmap, Project Plan and Iterations
Last week’s assignments, a prototype roadmap and project plan, made it clear that I had to choose a direction for my project. I couldn’t keep wavering between ideas or waiting for a lightning bolt idea to hit. As Graham reminded us several times, choosing a direction and actually starting something is more worthwhile than spending all of your time thinking or doing nothing at all. You can always change course if it becomes clear that the direction you chose isn’t working out. This has been a tough pill for me to swallow. This year in particular I’ve learned a lot about how afraid I am of failure, which has almost always been the reason I’ve felt paralyzed or stuck in my work. If I don’t move forward with an idea, then I won’t risk failing at it, which means I can maintain the status quo. The catch of course is that if you don’t move forward, you also can’t succeed.
For the purpose of the assignments, I chose to go in the direction of a messaging platform. The design of its features and functionality would be inspired by restorative justice, offering a conversational interface designed for empathy and respect in the exchange of ideas. I developed a roadmap and project plan for it, which actually felt really good. It made my project feel like it finally had a shape and I had some concrete steps I could take to make it.
My prototype roadmap looked like this:
My project plan looked like this:
In class on Monday, as I was sharing these assignments with Graham and the class, it kind of felt like all of my perceived progress suddenly came to a screeching halt. I read my value proposition, and when Graham asked for clarification on a part of it, I found myself talking instead about an idea that had come out of a recent conversation with a former instructor, Jodi: my long-term goal would be to create a framework for designing digital conversational spaces with restorative justice principles. I would get there by mocking-up some of the ways this could be done, that I could use to show and test with users. So even though I had done my assignments for one direction, it was clear that another direction was still floating around in my head.
Graham asked me to get more specific about the framework direction, and then pointed out that it might be more satisfying to me as a designer than a messaging platform. It would allow me to develop branding and visual design for it, and it could be an open-ended project that could continue to evolve, and maybe event others could add to it.
Sometimes it takes hearing someone else say something to realize that it’s true. After class that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about this question of what would be most satisfying to me as a designer. And I had a feeling that Graham was right about the framework meeting this need. On Tuesday I got up and started plotting out what the framework could look like, with the goal of presenting an outline of it to my thesis advisor that coming Friday.
Although this took the shape of a Google sheet, in a lot of ways it felt like the most making I’ve done so far this semester. I took some of the elements from the theory and implementation of restorative practices and identified ways to design them “into” existing social media platforms. My vision (for now) is that the framework will materialize as a resource website in the vein of Ethics for Designers, Design Patterns for Mental Health, and Time Well Spent.
I also revisited my project roadmap from last week, and adjusted it for the framework direction. This helped me identify two user groups, users of social media platforms and designers of social media platforms, and to identify the features I need to develop for our proof of concept, due February 25.
The second iteration of my project roadmap looked like this:
