Process Blog

W3

1. What did you think of the visit?

It was definitely an unexpected full-filling tour, experienced powerful thought and unprecedented mind flow from these younger generations , having this unique opportunities to have close observations and conversations allow current society and education system rethink and gain a new perspective on how could future educations could revolute. The disadvantage of current days design is we do have enough time and opportunities and have in-depth research and to gain the critical data we need, most of research were finalized thru google which mostly limited in a basic level.

 

2. Was there anything you learned from the interactions with the LCCS Students?

I was assigned to Beck’s team, the time was relevant short, the students were able to extract their daily life thoughts and from an limited resources, the things I learned is how seamless the collaborations were from these students, with each person carried their responsibility.

3. Your general thoughts about collaborating and ideation with this population.

The kids were staggering in terms of imaginations and skills in collaborations, as we learn from learn from research, people usually lost their creativity as their age ascend. With younger generations they are able to connect any possibilities easily and blazing fast,

W1

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 enjoy immersive and dynamic the class offers and multi-dimension activities such as visual, storyboarding and sound creations. unlike other class the expansion of the opportunities is open and reasonable, which allows individual to contribute their best.
2. What did you learn about Design Thinking? 
” Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed by designers and or design teams,  obviously the
critical thinking through team collaborations and indeed important and necessary. thru the first week’s team up, I already realize the amazing outcome of brainstorming and deep think.

Week 6, LCCS vol. 2

And once again we showed up at LCCS. 3 PM sharp, made our way via PATH train all the way to Jersey and then back. In between those two points in time, the time we were at LCCS were highly productive. The structure was relatively straightforward, as we were grouped Parsons/LCCS students to create new/old storyboards on post-it notes to showcase our ideas for, well, stories. It somehow went on a rotational basis and our objective was to merge the stories. As best I tried to do so, I wrote down key points of the stories showcased the students (as at times I was grouped up with a few) and then ultimately it all broke down to a story that one LCCS student came up with that went as a standalone and viral, growing up into Trash Trivia, leading up to which a heated debate sprawled out with not much action taken on my part. This time I was being more proactive but ultimately it came down to being a design facilitator and writing down those ideas. Despite my supporting activity here, other students kind of drove their own, ideas, logos, new students joined up. And ultimately the idea, as sharp as it became with about 6 students involved in this project (rising up from 2 at first I believe), was quite captivating to observe, especially once it was driven to winning the contest by the end of our stay at LCCS.

From the details I have gathered, Trash Trivia is an idea which merges elements from Jeopardy and Family Feud, where the center-point established is the theme of ecology, recycling and being conscious within such subjects, leading towards increased awareness. From what I could gather and figured in my head, well the main ingredients required here would be, well:

Which is kinda nice, as in a way this is a concept entirely doable, from what I see also highly engaging but it needs to keep a certain grit to it, perhaps host prizes, otherwise interest could be lost quite rapidly (surrounding marketing?).

I’ll upload the notes from the stories I transcribed of other students. It’s a bit of a mess as there is a lot but I liked a lot of these stories, as they were quite imaginative, although as these started mixing up with other stories, it was beginning to be more difficult to synthesise all the variety of ideas into just one.

By the end of the week I received a phone call as I was notified, there was a meeting scheduled that I did not attend. I have kind of given up on reading emails, just glancing very briefly at every one and each incoming from all the swarm hitting my gmail shores, especially once I signed up to MFADT newsletter. That, in addition with the rrrreeal sweet mid-term-a-day schedule, kinda did its thing, that I was a bit unreachable for, well, almost an entire week I’d presume. I’m not entirely sure what is my role at this point, from what I’ve gathered I’ll be supporting from the technological part with Unity in particular. I personally really liked the idea of the hydrodrangeas and I sort of created a VR prototype for Monday’s students’ project proposals. It’s just that I was battling hours with Unity, switching between rendering pipelines, reimporting assets and in fact, adopting a custom movement script I have devised with a friend about 2 years back designed primarily for google cardboard VR. Then, also, certain event systems decided to not work in VR for some reason, so I did come up with a prototype that I was ultimately unhappy with. I’ll revise it and perhaps attach it by the end of the day (or early tomorrow with additional supporting material).

The thing with working with Unity in particular but pretty much with any bit more elaborate software, bouncing back and forth from issues related to those can become a nightmare. Whether it’s programming software, rendering lighting, working with Adobe software. One of the designerly pains that just come with the job etiquette.

Week 6

We visited LCCS on Mar.11 for pitching our final ideas. During the class, we shared and ideated our hero’s journies and storyboards with each other. Finally, we got many great stories like Greener Grass, Trash Trivia, Polluters and Protectors, and the Ocean Odyssey, we Parsons students also presented our first draft prototypes to LCCS students, all of our projects provided immersive experience to the audience. Qiyao and I want to keep testing and exploring our idea during spring break, our final goal is to create this engaging underwater experience inside of the dome in order to bring up awareness of ocean plastic pollution.

Week 6: Final Ideation

This week was very productive and busy. After arriving at LCCS, we storyboarded and ideated with each other. Because we ran out of time near the end of class, we chose were able to choose the four main projects and formed rough groups but the details still need to be figured out. In addition to the four projects, Olivia and I will also be forming an additional group creating an underwater game inside the dome utilizing colors and colored lenses. We will be needing the students from LCCS to create the visuals and if possible, we wish to incorporate information from the other games to give our project more depth. We have a good idea of how it would look like but the technical details still needs to be figured out. We look forward to working on this project.

ideating with partners
voting for our fav project ideas!

Final Ideation Session! Wow!!!

As a teacher, a class like this is formed through years of practice of what works and doesn’t. There are flaws in the process of ideating together in a short amount of time. One thing that happens is that everyone becomes very excited and talkative through the process. The end of the class was a bit messy but we achieved our aims. OK–they are still going to go through quite a bit of:

  1. Research for inspiration and accurate information
  2. Creative exploration so that we can arrive at playable and fun experiences.
  3. Aesthetic development of the look and feel for each project
  4. A common thread that will tie the entire arc of the stories together. What does a farmer (Greener Grass) who at first fouls the river with his farm chemicals have to do with a game about Trash Trivia? Or how can we tie the Ocean Odyssey to the Polluters and Protectors?  We have to all think hard on this and come up with entertaining and educational answers.We also have to settle on final venues so that we can organize the kind of production that each experience needs.  In two weeks, we should have answers…

Fifth Week Thoughts

Honestly we should’ve just had class… It was even sunny.

But well, took the day off to visit family friends in Brooklyn, and technology is so amazing I was able to be in the Zoom class while at the same time being out with my cousins.

It was important to know what we were gonna do next time we met with the kids and listen to the ideas everyone presented. I learnt that my ideas since we are doing something public I should take into account things such as copyright. I really loved that a girl from LCSS is really into The Beatles so I wanted to do something in relation to them and my story was about them but I’m probably gonna have to go more Beatles-inspired rather than using them as the vehicle for an experience. Also I hadn’t thought of the medium in which I’d present that story and since it was brought up I feel now like I gotta take the interactive experience into account when thinking of the story rather than come up with the story and then translate it into an activity. I’m excited for what’s to come.

SELF ASSESSMENT:

  1. In Ed Tech and Design Thinking I feel that I am making the most progress with:
    Having an actual experience on building something with a group, researching with a group and making progress in something similar to how design is, in a team. My classes are all about personal projects and group projects are in the best case conformed by 3 people and they are terrible. I love working as a team for a focused design project. 
  2. I need more assistance with:
    Probably learning the ins and outs of all the software we talk about. We go about Unity, AR with the cube, the VR software and it is interesting to know about them but probably some deeper diving might be necessary to fully realize what’s goin on, like get my feet wet with the things, like more studio play-time but honestly there’s no time in this little class, I wish it was a six hour class honestly.
  3. Write a short paragraph: in the first five weeks of Ed Tech and Design Thinking, I discovered/learned…….
    That working as a large group in design is really exciting. I’ve learned about systems, about procedures in teaching, about methods on learning, about the world in ecological ways, about personal stories my classmates have, about software and gadgets I didn’t know existed. But most importantly I’ve learnt that there’s a bright future ahead because there’s wonderful kids with the spirit and the mindset to change the world.
  4. Comments on the studio? What is working or not working for you?

Time is so little this studio feels encapsulated. My big six hour studio is a huge waste of time whereas this should be so good for that. Love taking trips, love the interesting lectures, love the class activities, love how we are a group.

Week 5: Snow Day

This week, we were not able to visit LICC due to the snow day. Instead, we had a zoom meeting online with the Parsons class and discussed our ideas so far. There were ideas for treasure hunts, role plays and more. Listening to other’s idea, I was inspired with an idea of a game using the characters from on of the middle schooler’s hero’s journey. The story was of three characters who were living in a dump and talking about their views on trash. One said that he liked it while the other said he didn’t. The third one told them they have to work for their desired future. So for my idea, I want to create a dome filled with wastes, especially plastics to represent the feeling of living in water filled with trash. Participants will be met the three characters and choose the character they agree with. The corresponding button would add/subtract the numbers of waste on the screen of the dome which will have a record of the fluctuation in waste. At the end of the day, we will be able to compare the number of waste throughout the day. I look forward to proposing my idea to the middle schoolers.

Week 5: No snow snow-day & Initial Project Ideas

Haha, this week started off really funny. I was in NYC last year and have witnessed some serious snow then, so I was expecting there to be a decent amount of snow on Monday, but…

Surprisingly, I think attending class from home through Zoom was actually quite effective. I was trying hard to catch everything everybody was saying so that I don’t miss out on anything interesting, and I think because of that it (the bad connection coupled with the virtual experience) made me more attentive. The downside was of course that we could not collaboratively make anything physical during class but I think overall we did well in organizing a makeup class over Zoom.

 

Thoughts on Homework Readings:

I have been thinking a lot about the readings we have been doing and how they relate to the readings I have done in the past. Below is some analysis I have done over the last couple of weeks which I also included in my self-assessment.

As Seymour Papert put it in Mindstorms, “Piaget has demonstrated how young children hold theories of the world that, in their own terms, are perfectly coherent.” In other words, their model of the world is no less developed than the model of the world adults hold. Here, an analogy could almost be made to machine learning where you have different machine learning models that are optimized for different end uses.

Additionally, Papert goes on to say that “one of the more subtle consequences of [Piaget’s] discoveries is the revelation that adults fail to appreciate the extent and the nature of what children are learning, because knowledge structures we take for granted have rendered much of that learning invisible.” There is a certain joy to teaching, or just being around, children because children do things differently than us. Often adults see actions performed by children as naïve, or as some less informed version of what they would have done themselves, but this could be the result of adults imposing their own worldview, and own learning model, onto children, when in fact a very different kind of learning model is at play in children.

In CC Lecture last semester we read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. In the book, Bostrom explains in detail where artificial intelligence stands currently and what main hurdles we are facing before superintelligence, in any kind of form, can be achieved. In his explanations, he discusses about very specialized machine learning models that perform one task extremely well while completely failing at others. The challenge is to construct a machine learning model that can handle all kinds of tasks including highly creative, abstract tasks. Since human superintelligence has not been achieved yet, understanding how those with different learning models than ours learn, work and play would serve us well in building a much more holistic picture of how learning takes shape in our minds. Observing and learning from children in this sense is a step we should not skip.

 

Initial Project Ideas:

While looking through the links in the syllabus, I noticed that there is actually a great reference on the RiverKeeper website to data on the amount and type of trash found in and around the river. Each year the Riverkeeper Sweep takes place on the Hudson River estuary which involves cleanups, invasive species removal, and shoreline restoration. An impressive number of volunteers contribute to this effort annually – more than 1,700 volunteers.

 

As starting points for our Earth Day projects, I had the following ideas:

  • An interactive and educational data visualization connecting the hidden cause and (often hidden) impact of using non-biodegradable products
  • A fake news fantasy story about the wacky, dangerous and promising aspects of synthetic biology, specifically gene editing, for species preservation. Inspired by the following two projects:

– A real-life project about using gene editing to bring back extinct species: https://reviverestore.org/

– An online science fiction story about growing your own sneakers using gene editing: https://www.nextnature.net/projects/rayfish-footwear/

 

During the Zoom session, it was helpful to discuss about our ideas as I think two really important points emerged from the discussion. These were:

  • We should consider how an ordinary person can understand and take action locally
  • We should focus on the specific collision/conflict points and aim to educate the public about these

 

Additionally, the user archetype interviews that were mentioned sounded like a research technique I would like to learn more about. In my opinion it’s challenging to conduct any kind of accurate user study in the design world, regardless of whether it is quantitative or qualitative study. Learning to do these well is a great skill to have for any designer working with users/clients for whom they are designing.

 

Low-Res Prototypes

Here is the low-res prototype Raquel and I prepared for Week 6.