1. What did you learn about what we are doing in this studio for the semester? Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?

This semester we are partnering with several nonprofits/organizations to carry out a project centered around educational technology and co-design. Specifically, we will be collaborating with students from the New Jersey based Learning Community Charter School to design experiences/projects that will be showcased during Parsons Play Tech on the 13 April and Earth Day on the 20 April. The possible topic/theme we will be exploring is The Hudson River ecology as one of the project partners is the NY/NJ Baykeeper organization. During this co-design process, we (including students from LCCS) will be teaching and learning from each other using innovative tools such as the Rumii, the virtual classroom platform, and Mouse Create, an online educational platform by a nonprofit dedicated to making technology education accessible to children.

Personally, I am fascinated by the fact that learning and teaching is increasingly moving into a digital, or virtual, space. This is opening up opportunities for learning in under-served areas around the world but it also presents unique challenges of its own around internet connectivity, device availability etc. The opportunity to experiment with both Rumii and Mouse Create is very exciting and I can see this experience later informing my work in the nonprofit sector. There are definitely many questions I would like to try to answer through this class in relation to where best designers today should invest in if education is where they would like to contribute to. Additionally, working with real-world stakeholders – the students, the school, those creating new educational technologies, and a community partner – is going to be an invaluable experience for any designer who wishes to act as a bridge between disciplines and stakeholders. I’m excited by this challenge.

2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?

I think originally ‘design thinking’ was referring very much to the unique thought process of designers that is reflected in their making; hence the ‘thinking’ in the phrase? It consists of initial surveying (research) of the problem/focus area, iterations of possible improvements/changes, with evaluations of each iteration. But more recent uses of the phrase seems to have a more action-focused explanation – that you’ve got to start making something even if you cannot foresee a perfect solution no matter how much you think everything through beforehand. At the core of the phrase, though, is the idea of breaking down a problem into smaller pieces (part systems thinking as explained in Thinking in Systems: A Primer) that can be easily ‘processed’ and ‘digested’. It is generally encouraged in many problem-solving contexts because together the smaller components make up more than just their sum (e.g. an effective solution!).

I think the ‘design’ part of the term is interesting because although the iterative process described above is present in other disciplines – say, engineering – perhaps it is called a ‘design thinking’ process, as opposed to an ‘engineering thinking’ process, because in design there is more room for mistakes and failures. As well, designers know that they cannot know everything, and cannot have all relevant data before they make a decision. Part of the task of being a designer is to follow their intuition, and part of design thinking is also about making the whole, and then analyzing its impact on the world to learn from it, before fully understanding, or knowing, what the smaller components do/should be. In effect, it’s a forward thinking process that enables you to get unstuck from an unfamiliar and ambiguous situation.

1. What did you learn about we are doing in this studio for the semester? Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?

From the first class, I have learned that we will be working with the Learning Community Charter School with the goal of innovating learning for children through creating an Earth Day experience for for the Community Partner Baykeeper. What stood out the most to me was the amount of opportunities and possibilities this project will provide. It is both exciting and daunting but I look forward to being challenged.

2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a processed in which a problem is confronted. I learned that before going in for the solution, steps should be taken so that the problem and is well defined and sufficient research is done. Also, I learned that it is a continuous process of prototyping, testing, evaluating, and then starting over from prototyping. I found the exercise from class useful in understanding the process of this technique.

1. What did you learn about we are doing in this studio for the semester? Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?

I have learned that we will be working with middle school children in tackling with environmental issues for Earth Day for which we will be involving different sets of tools, all the way from physical computing to augmented/virtual reality and co-designing solutions with the children to design and develop proposed solutions in the forms of an MVP-grade solution.

So far there is not that much that I can tell that I like or dislike, I’ll need to learn a bit more about what we will be doing. There is also the question of what our roles will be, whether the facilitators for what the kids will ideate and to what degree will the kids have to take over the workflow.

There are some parts that are quite interesting and I do not quite exactly know about, such as the virtual learning space as I comprehended it. Is it a virtual space in which we will be interacting with the children? That would be kinda cool but I didn’t know the technology was here yet, to be in an interactive world and actively create prototypes within such world (except for people going crazy in building computers in minecraft etc.)

There is also the question of how does the Design Thinking pitch into this project, how strict it will be and how structured it might become, I’m referring more in relation to the time spent on each component of the UCD Process, all the way from research to prototyping. Despite it is an iterative process, how much time should be spent on researching the topic? And then once the ideation takes place, how will that impact the prototyping so that all the stakeholders are happy with the MVP?

2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?  – Julie

I recall design thinking as a process, researching another person’s feelings in multiple steps by the use of an interview about a specific subject, extracting the more distinct: obvious, tacit and latent knowledge, in order to rapidly come up with potential solutions via sketching and storyboarding, eventually leading to the prototyping phase with the use of provided set of tools and materials.

What in a way was new for me, was the speed with which all these steps were executed and despite the very tight timeframe, an appropriate solution was generated that suited not only my interviewee but also at least one other person in the class, who knew exactly what I have created based on my description and demonstration of a very low-fidelity prototype/mockup of the actual solution.

Regardless, I know Design Thinking as a powerful tool to create solutions that are just simply going to be useful for the end user, whether it’s just the designer who’s driving the process or if it takes places in some configuration ie. by co-design etc.