On May 4th 2009 I carried out the last of three formal presentations related to my Final Project at NC State University’s College of Design. Even though the step is a required component of the academic requirements at the graphic design program, I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of my interests, ideas and research with faculty, students, and other members of the community.
The presentation was a 25 minute summary of the research and work carried out on my final study at the graduate program: Design as Choice Architecture: informing consumers about debt-related behaviors. The following video is a recording of the original May 4th exposition.
In retrospect, having worked on this final project felt more like a rite of passage than anything else, signaling a transition into a deeper and meaningful design life. I am happy to report that all requirements for graduation were successfully met and I have been granted the degree of Master of Graphic Design. :)
I am getting a bit nervous. The calendar dates keep progressing and my making seems to be resting stagnantly. Nonetheless, major progress was achieved this morning through the discussion and appreciation of smaller details. These procedural wireframes have begun to seriously integrate much of the research, expressing itself through a series of functionalities.
As it can be anticipated, my system has already changed again, but here I present what I showed in the meeting today. Read the rest of this entry »
Next month I will be presenting the progress of my final project at the NC State Graduate Research Symposium to be held in the McKimmon Center on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. What follows is the abstract of the submission, which is still highly speculative since visual making has only just begun.
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Alberto Rigau
Graphic Design Master’s Candidate
College of Design
Advisors: Meredith Davis / Martha Scotford
In what ways can design address consumption induced behaviors and provide a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities?
Credit cards have become an essential financial tool for individuals and families. In 2004, the Census Bureau reported that there were more than 1.4 billion credit cards for 164 million cardholders—an average of 8.5 cards per cardholder, out of which 115 million carry a balance at the end of the month. In the pre–credit card era, households used a pay–as–you–go accounting system. Today, if there is no cash to fill up the car, there is always the credit card. Such a reliance on this payment method generates experiential patterns, more than often translating into family debt. This investigation studies behaviors and patterns associated with credit card use to identify moments in which design intervention can bring about reflective thought about spending habits.
Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, in The Unmanageable Consumer, argue that our actions and experiences as consumers cannot be detached from our actions and experiences as social, political and moral agents. They claim that the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary consumption are part of the fragmentation and contradictions of contemporary living. It is not the case that at one moment we act as consumers and the next as workers or as citizens, as women or men or as members of ethnic groups. We are creative composites of simultaneous social categories, with histories, presents and futures. The authors see consumers as central characters of stories, many times exhibiting varied behaviors, such as those of explorers, choosers, communicators, identity-seekers, hedonists, victims, rebels, activists, or citizens.
This research focuses on evaluating some of the ways in which design can address these consumption induced behaviors and on proposing a set of tools to help consumers manage, control, and personalize fiscal activities.
At the end of the fall semester I made a presentation to publicly share with classmates and professors my thoughts, process, and ideas of what I will make my final project to be.
What follows are the slides of such presentation, and the text after each slide are the notes of what I said on each one. This represents my moving forward on this final project, which I hope to conclude by the end of the semester. Read the rest of this entry »
So the big question after getting the button machine was: what was I going to do as a first button set to share with others? I decided to make a gift to my classmates, and I made a button out of every single one of the Design Thinking Posters that we each made for this semester’s studio class. The set has all 16 concepts represented.
These are some images of the installation that was part of our first semester studio project where the class attempted to define design thinking in terms of a series of thinking strategies and cognitive frameworks. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently there has been much talk of corporate cultures —and other disciplines— engaging in the practice of “design thinking“. Such announcements are usually paralleled with ideas of creativity, innovation, and user-centeredness; associations that sound cool and hip but many times result in superficial, inaccurate, and vague information. Wether we like it or not, the buzzword of design thinking is everywhere.
On a recent article in the New York Times, Unboxed: Design Is More Than Packaging, the author, Janet Rae-Dupree, makes an effort to unbox “design” by concentrating on this thing designers do called design thinking. She says: “…design thinking usually involves a period of field research —usually close observation of people— to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used. The results can be startling.”
On another article in the Fast Company website, Design Thinking… What is that?, its author, Mark Dziersk, defines design thinking as consisting of four steps: defining the problem, creating many options, refining selected directions, and picking a winner for execution. He says: “At this point enough road has been traveled to insure success. It’s the time to commit resources to achieve the early objectives. The byproduct of the process is often other unique ideas and strategies that are tangential to the initial objective as defined. Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered.” He concludes the article with: “Design thinking describes a repeatable process employing unique and creative techniques which yield guaranteed results — usually results that exceed initial expectations. Extraordinary results that leapfrog the expected. This is why it is such an attractive, dynamic and important methodology for businesses to embrace today.”
While these two examples, noble in their intentions and approach, describe a bit of what design thinking can be in terms of a traditional object-oriented approach where processes conclude in tangible objects, they do not elaborate on how design thinking operates in this contemporary landscape of information and ever-changing job descriptions. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s that time of year again… it’s back to school time! The adventures of my graduate class continue as we enter our second year of the master’s program. Exciting times are these…
Last year already came and went. The first semester was intense. The second was considerably busy. The third? I can’t wait to find out! I am not at all worried though, for Meredith Davis and Santiago Piedrafita are leading the way…
This semester is special though. Not that the previous ones were not, but this semester I begin to articulate my research interests towards the development of a final project. This experience will force me to concentrate my interests into a series of researchable questions which I will later investigate and work on. About time I got started on this…
As part of the independent study, I had understand how to scale a system such as a blogging platform across the NC State curriculum. This chart presents one of the proposals suggested for a possible implementation.
As part of my academic charge this semester, I underwent an independent study with Santiago Piedrafita. In it, we explored various possibilities on how to develop, build and maintain a common curricular system between the different faculty members and the students of the department. What follows is just one of the many presentations since the final work is still underway.
The way the semester’s work was structured, we worked on smaller segmented explorations which lead to the final piece of interaction leading to learning. Depending on how we worked during the semester, we each ended with a complete project or with various smaller projects. In my case, I redesigned the earlier explorations to make them fit under the same umbrella. I realize that it is hard to understand what I did without undergoing the user interactions, but here I made some screenshots of the overall system which show the general aesthetics and parts.
After spending some time with the community and the information derived from the concept map, it was the moment to understand how to define an exchange of information between some of the members. This insight lead to a crucial part of the semester’s design 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. Read the rest of this entry »
My concept map of undergraduate students engaged in software learning.
As each of us began to research into our chosen communities, Meredith and Amber introduced us to concept mapping. We read Joseph Novak, D. Bob Gowin and Hugh Dubberly, all proponents of using this strategy as a mean to create understanding between members engaged in performing a common task.
In order to carry out the projects of the semester, we were advised to select a group or community with which we would want to work all semester long. Since I am currently a co-instructor at the sophomore level of the undergraduate program, I am particularly interested in the student’s software learning curve. Illustrated here is the charter that I devised after spending some time trying to understand this group. I found it interesting that one could look at the group solely based on the physical interactions between the members or take their online interactions into account and experience a completely different audience.
This semester is about learning communities. It’s about using interaction to bring together a group of people performing a common task.
To kick start the creative insights and interactive explorations, Meredith invited the design anthropologist Elizabeth —Dori— Tunstall to make a presentation on her work on communitas. As part of her visit, we had to select an online community that we thought could be analyzed thru the lens of the various aspects of what makes up a communitas: historical consciousness, life goals, organizational structure, agency and relationships. I chose facebook, and what follows is my study of some of the key features which bring the community together.
This semester is different, quantitatively different. The 5 month experience of spending every class with 11 other points of view now mutates into a 6 person interactive boot camp with Meredith Davis and Amber Howard as our drill sergeants. As the first activity of our new found family, we had to clean the room and rearrange the furniture. This was our initial render of what the room should come to. We tried it for a few weeks and then decided to change it again. Santiago then came to the rescue with a new whiteboard to help us in our creative transition into the world of interaction and learning communities. Read the rest of this entry »
The current undergraduate graphic design curriculum at the College of Design, like others in the country, introduces its students to the field through a fundamental year of art, form, rules, exploration, and little or basic software use. As the pedagogical experience progresses into sophomore year, students move, within the timeframe of 2 months, from custom methodological ways of working within a handmade environment into an automatized, software dependent sterile digital scenario.
Design concepts are still explored through the making of artifacts, yet this very process now relies on the manipulation of software tools for their very execution. Previous experience on creative software platforms shapes many of the student’s individual experiences, some having an easier time than others. No matter the case, the commonality between all levels of expertise becomes them having to learn it.
Learning software moves to the forefront of the student’s interests. Pressure is exerted on the professors to teach the various platforms required for successful execution. Teaching strategies, ranging from in-class demos, to online tutorials, and even reference books, become a hindrance to the students, while one-to-one gesture based exchanges between them seem to provide a more stable source of growth and understanding. How can online digital tools help with this learning process? Could such tools offer a possible platform for pedagogical reinterpretation? Would a grassroots approach to software instruction lead to a flourishing of its understanding?
The last few months I’ve working around these issues. All of my projects have concentrated around the struggles of sophomore graphic design students at the College of Design as they experience the initial steps of learning software. Community, values, needs and outcomes have been studied, tested… and hopefully address. As final review gets near, now its time to polish the projects into presentable shape. More to come…
What the point of having a blog if I am not going to post on it? Furthermore, what is the point of researching blogs and not embracing my own?
I know. I’ve been bad. I have no excuse, other than to say that the semester has been a busy one. Final review is already near (3 weeks down the road) and preparations for it have already begun.
Click image for high resolution.
I’ve began mapping back the work done so that I can prepare for the final event (which will become bearable if denise brings donuts ;)
Soon detailed posts of my work in the past few months will come.
ps. Marty… I promise to get this on the road again :)
It’s here, the end of the semester is here. Contrary to undergraduate times, (when this was a time of exams, final projects and memorization as premonition of Christmas partying) graduate school’s end of semester calls out for (and brings about) reflection, introspection and self-evaluation.
What if motivation was me translating between others to improve their communication?
Option Shift Control is almost here, and in one of this weekend’s sessions we will be exploring the idea of motivation, and the role it plays in design planning, projects and execution.
Armando Rigau currently pursues a Master in Architecture I at Cornell University. He received his bachelor's degree in Philosophy with History and Spanish minors from Georgetown University.
