Schemas confused by a failure in design thinking

Last semester I taught a seminar course at NC State University’s College of Design where I asked the students to identify, as part of a weekly assignment, two instances: one where design thinking had thrived and another where it had failed. Towards the end of the course, students had collected a series moments that proved that only a simple nudge was required, many times at no extra cost to anyone, to set a series of problems right. Recently, I came across one such example.

Last week, due to the birth of my nephew Gonzalo, I got to spend some time in the maternity wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. It was indeed a short time, yet most of it was spent waiting for the baby to make its appearance. I had time to look around. A few things came to my attention, but this particular emergency door stood out the most out of anything else that caught my eye.

An Emergency Door in the Maternity Wing of the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The subject in question is located on a hallway directly across from the nursery of newborns. As you can imagine, a lot of people congregate in this area. Upon further investigation, four things were of interest to me:

1) The standard, internationally used emergency exit sign;
2) An ink-jet printed sign which informs that this door does not provide access to the ground floor;
3) The familiar red sign that indicates to use this exit in case of an emergency; and
4) A photocopy which explains, in paragraphs, what to do in case of a problem.

Can you imagine what would happen, God forbid, if there was an emergency in this space?
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Wings on Wings Recipient

During the graduation ceremony of the College of Design I was awarded with one of the three Wings on Wings Dean’s recognitions. Better than explaining what it was all about, I have included the original text as read by the College’s Dean, Marvin Malecha, FAIA:

On occasion there are individuals who stand out among the graduating class for outstanding citizenship in the College community and academic excellence. For this reason I have established the Dean’s Award known as Wings on Wings. It is inspired by the constructivist painting of Natalia Goncherova depicting the Archangel Michael, the good citizen angel, astride Pegasus, the ancient symbol for opportunity. It is a fitting symbol to recognize individuals who have taken advantage of the opportunity that the College presents and acted as a good citizen.

It is the practice of the College that nominations come to me from the academic units and since it is the dean’s award I make the final choice. There have been ceremonies when no award is made, very infrequent thankfully, but our usual custom is one, maybe two recognitions. Perhaps I am becoming soft this year because I could not make one, or even two choices. I have chosen to recognize three outstanding individuals from our graduating class. This is a reflection of just how good our students are!

The third recipient is graduating with a Master of Graphic Design, Mr. Alberto Rigau. In the nomination Professor Denise Gonzales Crisp observes, “Alberto has been a tireless contributor to the design community as a T.A., a teacher at the College Design Camp Program for aspiring design students, as a designer for the Student Publication and for the University undergraduate information publication The Brick. His enthusiasm is responsible for new curricular ideas in the Graphic Design Program. He was a student leader in 2007 for the Graduate Graphic Design Symposium, Option-Shift-Control. He has consistently had papers accepted at professional conferences around the nation. Most recently, he has won the first prize at the NC State University Graduate Research Symposium for the Humanities.” Alberto, please come forward to accept your much-deserved recognition.

Thank you Denise for your faith and support!

Social Studies Conference: The presentation

Photo by Caroline Prietz

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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Social Studies Conference: The event

Ellen Lupton welcomes us to the conference.

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.
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Social Studies Conference: I’m in!

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.

Social Studies Conference at MICA: The Abstract

Screenshot capture of the Social Studies Conference’s website.

A typical scene in my life…

April 2008… I decide to submit a draft for the Social Studies Conference: Educating Designers in a Connected World to be held at MICA this upcoming October. Deadline for submissions… July 15th. Yup, I got time.

July 14th: 6:00pm… Dammit! It’s been raining all day, internet connection has been down, and I have to submit the abstract! Tic, tock… Tic, toc…

hehehe

I submitted the abstract on time (see below)(and I even got a happy confirmation e-mail from the conference).
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Design Camp 08: It’s a wrap…

Design Camp 08: Parent’s visit…

As conclusion to the week… a small exhibit of all student work was made for parents to see and for the students to pick up their projects to take them home.

Design Camp 08: Projections

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Design Camp 08: Collaborative Posters

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Design Camp 08: Airplane design

A little afternoon break… Since students basically worked on the poster from 12:30 – 4:00pm… around 3:00pm I had a little exercise where we sent airplanes over into the landscape architecture area. Landscape never retaliated… hehehe

Design Camp 08: Working on Poster

• The poster had to announce a new feature of the CAM museum
• Each team member had to be traced onto the posters

I was very happy to see how this project got groups working together almost instantly. The engagement level was very high and the atmosphere just felt positive all time around.
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Design Camp 08: Post-Its

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Design Camp 08: DVD Covers

These are some of the DVD Covers designed by the students during the last three days of camp. Half of the samples are scanned directly from their work, while the other half is photographed inside a case (you know, to give it a more realistic look). Most of the movies should be easily recognized, and those that are not, may just need a bit of a creative push… :)
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Design Camp 08: Working on DVD Case

In this new version of my camp session, students now designed the cover for a DVD of their choosing. It was very interesting to see the movies that this generation cited… (I felt a bit old)
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Design Camp 08: A small change…

Well, after the first two days of design camp, I decided to make a change in strategy. In retrospect, I wonder how many of my concerns were legitimate, or me just being hard on myself, but no matter the case, the end result came out for the best. During the last three days I had the students design a DVD cover in the morning, then we would break for lunch, come back, work on the ideation session, and a collaborative poster. The results were amazing…

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Design Camp 08: Exquisite Corpse

about the time that I sensed that making the students work individually was not working perfectly, this particular group ended the exercise ahead of time. I had an extra hour with them, so we carried out an exquisite corpse exercise. Some of the notebooks ended up looking amazing!
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Design Camp 08: Projections

At the end of every work day, once the posters were ready, I would ask the camp counsellors to take the students out on a walk for 20 mins. During this time I would scan in all of the posters and prepare them for on-screen projection. When everyone came back, I would hold a small feedback session were each student explained what they had done. At the end of their explanation, we would have a small chat about how graphic design can be re-purposed from one media to another, and as a fun example, I would project their posters onto themselves.

Pedagogical reasons for this decision? Design lesson? More than anything, all I wanted was for the students to understand that graphic design is not only about photoshop or computer work. It is much more. With this exercise I hoped to at least introduce such idea into them.

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Design Camp 08: Posters

The idea behind this poster was art that could be interacted with by the audience.

Here some examples of the posters that various students from different groups did during the first two days of me teaching the exercise. The originals are 8.5″x11″.
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Design Camp 08: CamTeen

As part of their office group dynamic, I asked them to design logos or marks for CAMTeen, a made up program that would address their age group.

Here some more examples.
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Design Camp 08: Poster work…

After the ideation session… (during the first two days of me teaching the exercise), I divided the groups to work on their posters. It’s a bit confusing (and it involves math… hehe) but this is how it worked:

• Every office was made up of 4 students, and all of them participated in the ideation session together. (The less engaged groups must have come up with about 20 ideas, while the more engaged ones generated over 60).
• Students where then asked to pick the 2 ideas that they liked the most from all of the post-its and which they thought would work best for the museum. (Remember, some of these were pretty wild… like anti-gravity chambers to experience modern art.)
• The 4-student groups were then divided into 2-student teams, and each of the subgroups had to work on one of these two chosen ideas. Each student made their own poster, so in the end, we had two posters on every idea.

Following are more images of the students working.
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Design Camp 08: The mistake

At this point is where I committed the teaching mistake for the week.

For the first two days of the week, after the ideation session, I divided the students to work individually on their posters. In retrospect, this was a bad call. The momentum that I had gained with the office and ideation exercises was suddenly completely lost. Students still made posters, and actually some very good ones too, but the energy level dropped substantially.

Having gone from group to individual was not a good call. For the last three days of the exercise I changed it a bit… and had them work as teams, which not only kept the energy levels going, but also produced larger scale work.

Design Camp 08: Ideation…

One of the biggest challenges of my design camp experience circled around getting teenage strangers to work comfortably with one another.

I remembered how hard it was to speak and share ideas with others at that age, specially others whom you not know (not that it is really easier now, but at least I’ve gotten better at hiding the awkwardness). In order to attack this problem, and in anticipation to the larger project of the afternoon, students were divided in groups, pretending to be offices, and in five minutes they had to come up with a name and gesture sketch to serve as their logo.

At first, I was skeptical of my own strategy. Part of me thought that separating them into offices was to be received with critiques of being lame or stupid, but actually, students surprisingly engaged very well at the opportunity of creating a name and a mark for themselves. I gave them only one rule: anything was allowed other than pornographic. I even joked with them a bit to get them loose. I gave them an example: if they had be dumped this past weekend, they could call their office I Was Dumped Design. It was impressive to see how they came up with names. Some of the ones I remember were taken from: the brand of the pencil they were holding, the initials of their names, their favorite foods… to name a few.

After their office inauguration, I gave them a wall, which became their work space for the day, and the first exercise was a moderated ideation session. During this portion of the day, I gave them a topic (always related to the CAM museum) and they wrote ideas on post-its and placed them on the wall. This session was high energy and moderated a bit crazy, to get them thinking wildly about museums. Some of the recurring ideas were a petting zoo in the museum, water slides, night parties, coffee shops, better shopping stores and more do it your self art.

I have to say that this was a hit. It may not have generated a pool of realistic ideas for the museum, but it got all team members talking and working together.

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Design Camp 08: Working time…

After the t-shirts were made and various ice-breaking games were played, it was time to get started. In addition to all of the visual materials available on the walls, students had a photocopier, stencils of many kinds, color patterns, different color cardboards, black and silver sharpies, crayola markers, x-acto knives, glue sticks, elmer’s glue, scissors, post-its, and (only later in the week) glitter paint.

Design Camp: The beginning…

The official start for Design Camp, once it has done the initial orientation, really happens once the students separate into their groups to customize their camp t-shirts.

This year I was particularly proud of the t-shirt design for the Camp since it was last fall’s Practicum GD 400 class that I TAed with Santiago Piedrafita who designed the content for it, while it was Stewart Bean and Nick Schlax from the sophomore Imaging Class I taught this past Spring who actually produced the final piece. I was very involved in the whole process, which produced a great feeling once I got to see the actual shirts.

The shirts are customized with spray-paint, cardboard templates and sharpies.