On October 18 I had the opportunity to make a presentation in the Time+Motion panel at AIGA‘s Social Studies Education Conference, held at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

The panel, moderated by Lily Maya, graphic design faculty member at MICA, included:

Transforming Programming into “Fungramming”
by De Angela L. Duff,
Assistant Professor, Multimedia Department, The University of the Arts

The Language of Motion
Jan Kubasiewicz, Professor, Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston

and my presentation,
Understanding Interaction through People, Settings, and Scenarios

This was my first presentation at an AIGA event, and as such, I wanted to follow all the guidelines that had been set. The most important one, as you can imagine, was a 15 minute time-limit to my presentation. I followed it, but had to write, re-write, ask for feedback, re-write, and write one more time what I was going to say. Even the night before, at 1am, I was still in the lobby of the hotel touching-up on the final details (Thanks to Cady Bean-Smith for her company and support in those wee hours of the morning).

What is the best part of having done all that? Now I can share with you exactly what I said since I have a slide-per-slide script, but before moving into the presentations, I want to thank Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Marty Maxwell Lane, Cady Bean-Smith, Lauren Waugh and Caroline Prietz for all their support, fun times, photos and memories from this conference.

Click on the jump for the presentation.

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Last spring, as part of NC State’s teaching assistant program, I collaborated with Santiago Piedrafita in the instruction of an undergraduate course. The experience allowed me the opportunity to plan, create, and execute a sophomore level Imaging class.

In the process, I also refined my appreciation of (GO TO NEXT FRAME)

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great pizza.

The typical student in the class has been introduced to graphic design software use in one previous semester, but no video or sound software experience.

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I argue that intro-level students can understand interaction through the exploration of three frameworks: People, Settings and Scenarios.

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In the class, each of these frameworks was explored through a particular project: a site survey, a subject study, and an activity map; with the objective of teaching students interaction as a context-based behavior of relationships in time.

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The projects responded to the course learning objectives.

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The semester began with the site survey project.

Students built panoramas by employing layering and annotation techniques to document a particular path of their daily activities. It was important for the path to be chosen from repeated patterns, since the idea was to have students question the nature of things that might be common to them.

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This student, Elizabeth Walters, used editing techniques, annotations, overlays and commentary to share her experience of a particular street. While working to create a narrative, she realized that it was inappropriate to represent the complete location. She had to think spatially: negotiating levels of importance, relevance, and personal value… to arrive to the essence of what she needed to communicate and to interject meaning to her piece. Working with/and in time and space became a challenge.

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Another student, Meghan Witzke, documented the bathrooms she frequents on a daily basis. (you would be surprised how many bathroom related panoramas there were)

Her process lead her to decontextualize the bathrooms from their locations; a decision which abstracted them so much that her message was complete lost.

As an anchoring device, a timeline structure was added, juxtaposing the visual narrative of activities, tools, and actions with a time-based organizational framework. Thinking about time became essential to the success of the piece.

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Another student, Meghan Witzke, documented the bathrooms she frequents on a daily basis. (you would be surprised how many bathroom related panoramas there were)

Her process lead her to decontextualize the bathrooms from their locations; a decision which abstracted them so much that her message was complete lost.

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As an anchoring device, a timeline structure was added, juxtaposing the visual narrative of activities, tools, and actions with a time-based organizational framework. Thinking about time became essential to the success of the piece.

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In the panoramas, students were able to establish interrelationships between objects, settings and people within their chosen environments, but most importantly, they had to visually manage time to communicate of specific meaning.

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In the second project, students ethnographically interviewed, in video, another individual in the College of Design.

The intention was to expose them to different actors within their same system to bring about their varied motivations, expectations, and ways of working. Students were expected to understand that talking about an audience or set of users is not a simple matter, and generalizations sometimes just can’t work.

Students were individually sent out bring back 10mins of footage.

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Photo by Caroline Prietz

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The raw content was now to be edited into a 1min clip.

Following a guided process, students made storyboards of key moments. The intention was to have students think in terms of transitions, cuts, sound, fades, and moments of pause that could benefit the story they were trying to tell. They could rearrange the content of their interviews anyway they wanted, as long as they thought that the piece produced a cohesive narrative.

These storyboards then served as the guide to producing the edited clips in iMovie.

Let’s take a look at one example.

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Steven Valenciano interviewed by Helen Dear.

The production of these videos intended to extend the students’ understanding in time of the relationships between objects, settings and people within a particular setting, while creating conscious of the complicated landscape of users who interact within a particular system.

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But the understanding of these relationships was furthered by having students repurpose the footage into 12-page broadsheets in visual essay form. For this format, students had to use the full transcription and the same order of frames as in the edited clip.

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Visual Pacing became key. Realizing that the affordances of the new project required different strategies…

Some students dealt with it by using the type as the primary element…

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While others concentrated on the footage itself to provide the notion of time.

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To further stress the plurality of different approaches and the complicated landscapte of actors, the spreads

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were flattened out and presented together in an exhibit in the college.

Exhibiting the work facilitated a conversation with with the students about pacing, scale, story-telling and a printed representation of time.

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With these ethnography studies, students created narrative moments of varied actors of a larger system

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So far, students individually surveyed environments and subjects.

To execute the activity segment of the class, students were divided into 4 people teams.

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For the activity map investigation, students were asked to “map out” the user journey and activity scenario of signing out a book from the library

Students had to considered the experiences of signing out a book physically from the library

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or online, through the website…

This activity was chosen since it is something that do on a regular basis.

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To start off the process, a brainstorm session was done around the three main procedures of interacting with the library:

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SEARCH, CHOOSE, CHECK-OUT and INNOVATION.

A final category was added were students we encouraged to provide radical suggestions…

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Photo by Caroline Prietz

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The brainstormings then informed the creation of activity maps. Students performed these from an understanding of user interactions related to the library system, creating, describing, and modeling personas with very specific needs and behaviors within the system.

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As the final step in the course, students had to paper-prototype, using stop-animation, a path resulting form the information which came out of the activity maps.

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To provide multiple interactive behaviors, four platforms of interaction

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An iphone
A click-wheel ipod
A laptop
AND
a Nintendo DS gaming system

were distributed among the teams to execute the work..

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Each team had to prototype and design the experience of searching, finding, and checking out a book from the library system… in order to work with
time as experience

Let’s take a look at some edits of the prototypes produced…

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Group Project by David Maki > Laura Taylor > Nick Schlax > Teresa Cunningham

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(from top left to bottom right: Cady Bean-Smith, Ryan Clifford, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Lauren Waugh, Caroline Prietz, Marty Maxwell Lane and Alberto Rigau.)

From October 17th through the 19th a group of us in the Masters Program drove up to Baltimore to attend AIGA‘s Social Studies Education Conference, held at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In the lobby of the event, there was small setup with an iMac running the Photobooh application, so that we could take pictures with our friends to create a visual guest-book of the conference attendees (I so wish we had thought for our symposium last year).

These are some of the photos of us playing around…

Lauren Waugh and Caroline Prietz

(Ryan Clifford, Cady Bean-Smith, Lauren Waugh, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Caroline Prietz, Marty Maxwell Lane and Alberto Rigau.)

(Cady Bean-Smith, Ryan Clifford, Lauren Waugh, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Caroline Prietz, Marty Maxwell Lane and Alberto Rigau.)

(Cady Bean-Smith, Lauren Waugh, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Alberto Rigau, Caroline Prietz, and Marty Maxwell Lane.)

(Cady Bean-Smith, Lauren Waugh, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Alberto Rigau, Caroline Prietz, and Marty Maxwell Lane.)

Bye Bye

Rebecca Tegtmeyer and Marty Maxwell Lane represented the NC State Graphic Design Masters Program at the MFA panel on the last day of the conference. They did incredible.

The presentation, following a format that I do not remember the name, lasted for 10 mins. In that short time, Rebecca and Marty were able to speak about the pedagogical approach of the NC State Curriculum, explain the structure of the program, delve into projects briefings, and they still managed to show 2 fully developed investigations, culminating in the marriage of everything that had been explained before into well executed pieces.


A little bit about studio culture.

Design thinking had to come up.

Cameo appearance to me!

The biggest concept map ever seen by man! Great job Rebecca…

WEEEEEEEE!!!!

Marty brought down the house as she explained her research and development of processes…

…all culminating with the on-line community project from last semester.

YOUR WELCOME, but the thanks really go to you! You represented us in an incredible way!

From October 17th through the 19th a group of us in the Masters Program drove up to Baltimore to attend AIGA‘s Social Studies Education Conference, held at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

It was a great conference on many accounts, but most importantly it gave some of us the opportunity to share with students and academics from other institutions.

Having learned my lesson during the Boston conference (where i did not take my camera), I can now tell a selected visual story of the event. If you are interested for a detailed account, see Louise Sandhaus’ blog where she has some very interesting and detailed notes of many of the sessions, panels, and lectures.

How could anyone not notice the new design building?

The typography session kicked early saturday. Michelle Wong wishes to help students learn typographic skills through the implementation of a plug-in into indesign.

Denise Gonzales-Crisp burned the traditional typographic approach. (the screen almost caught fire)

The conference guest book.

People in the lobby.

Looking in the lobby.

Looking down into the lobby… HI CADY!

The team giving moral support to Deb… Santiago, Cady, Marty and Rebecca.

Go Deb!

Denise and Santiago enjoying the event.

Tired?
All nighter?
Falling asleep?
No need to worry… just…
CHOOSE YOUR CRIT FACE
and let the feedback roll in!

This is the first button set I’ve designed. The idea for it came from an inside-joke with Cady Bean-Smith, Sidney Fritts, Marty Maxwell Lane, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Lauren Waugh, and Liese Zahabi, graduate classmates of mine at NC State University.

***Update: Thanks to Armin Vit for having Quipped the buttons in Quipsologies, Vol. 23, November 2008.

***Update: Thanks to Jamie Rose for blogging about the buttons.

Screenshot of the conference website.

This semester’s AIGA education conference, Social Studies Conference: Educating Designers in a Connected World , will be held at the MICA campus from Friday, October 17 through Sunday, October 19 of 2008.

A few days ago I was notified that my original abstract was accepted into the conference. This is my final revised abstract.

Understanding Interaction through People, Settings, and Scenarios

At NC State, the Professional Bachelors of Graphic Design prepares students to understand design from a systems perspective. Among courses that address the issue, three are dedicated to imaging. Last Spring, when co-teaching a three-credit sophomore class —Imaging II: Settings and People (Leading to Activity Scenarios)— with Santiago Piedrafita (faculty member), students were introduced to interaction and time-based media through three key ideas: settings, people and scenarios. Each was addressed through a particular investigation: a “site survey (settings);” a “subject study (people);” and an “activity map (scenarios).”

For the site survey investigation, students were asked to build annotated panoramas through layering techniques, documenting and commenting on a particular location of their daily commute. To visualize the importance of people within a system, students collected ethnographic data of other school members, which they then reinterpreted into one-minute biographical video clips and oversized broadsheets. The semester concluded with an understanding of scenarios, exploring how myriad interfaces found on various mobile platforms shape and affect interactions (scenarios) between users (people) and their environment (setting). This investigation was carried out through hand-made rapid-paper-prototypes, later modeled into stop-animation video clips.

Throughout the semester, concepts were introduced through observation and interpretative methods like annotated tableaus, visual essays, authored journals, video interviews, collaborative ideation techniques, activity maps, paper-prototyping, and stop-animation photography. These “image-making” strategies helped students visualize and actualize key aspects (and phases) of diverse design problems (project-definition-driven, project-building, project-making), understanding issues they will come to terms with when undergoing interactive and time-based media work.

A small break from the semester work. At the end of February we played guests to the candidates of next year’s incoming graduate class. I was asked by the department to do a recap of last semester’s symposium.