HW Instructions
I320U Information and Interaction Design
The course has two major components:
- Milestones here These are group activities which together contribute to building a project over the course of the semester.
- Exercises here These are individual activities to help to learn concepts taught in the class.
Milestones
Together, the following milestones constitute a project that determines half of your grade. The whole project divide into 5 major sprints:
- Milestone 1, Project Focus
- Milestone 2, Contextual Inquiry
- Milestone 3, Personas
- Milestone 4, Scenarios
- Milestone 5, Hi-fi Prototype
This is the most important and time consuming part of this course. Past projects groups claim to have spent upto 40 hours in meetings to plan and organize their projects.
The course needs the following submissions: 1. A digital portfolio piece - Should be shared via the web, the website design will not be graded content is what matters. This will be updated with every milestone submission, ideal case a webpage following the structure: - A page for each milestone. - A section showing all the milestones. - A small description of the team and it’s members. - Etc 2. Final information deck - A concise summary of the project this will be used to present during the class, ideally following the structure: - A pdf file (can be styled in any format) not a ppt or keynote presentation. - Project and it’s explanation. - Team introduction - Explanation of each milestone - Learnings - Etc
Create a project website
I currently (at the start of the semester) don’t know of your sophistication level with website creation. We will devote some class time to understanding your sophistication level and may devote some additional time based on your response. Keep in mind that the project website is a container for your project documents. You will not be graded on website design so, unless you are trying to improve your website design skills for some external reason, you should not waste time on the website except to make it possible for me to find the individual milestone sections, the covenants section, and the id section.
Diverge, then converge
You must do two things to develop a creative project and meet deadlines. You must first diverge, then converge. Divergence is fun and, in my experience, people spend too much time on it, then go into a frenzy of convergence. You must decide in advance what fraction of your time is spent on each process and be decisive about switching from one mode to the other when your time comes.
The same is true for gathering ideas and implementing them. If you’ve overused the web for a decade or more you probably remember the meme involving Hitler getting bad news in the film Die Untergang (2004). People would subtitle the scene endlessly with bad news affecting different hobbies, occupations, sports, or celebrity foulups.
Did you know that there were even versions for UX? Yes, UX is everywhere. And UX people seemingly have time to throw up endless websites with internally conflicting advice, eternal truths, urban legends, and the occasional valuable piece of information. During your program here, you need to find a way to better cope with all the UX information coming at you from every direction. You need to share with each other how you get information as well as how recall information when you need it. As you approach a difficult milestone like contextual inquiry, it will be tempting to keep gathering information right up to the last minute. Resist that temptation! You already know too much!
Making a deadline is a convergent process. You don’t want to be open to new ideas. You want tunnel vision near a deadline. Any new information you receive has to be put somewhere you can find it after the deadline. Over half of your classmates probably don’t have a good place to put new information right now. So put it anywhere and concentrate on processing the information you have right now.
Milestone 1. project focus
Establish a website that identifies your team, your customer, the problem, and the general direction for solution. (Onsite version of the course only: Be prepared for a critique of your milestone similar to the widget redesign critique. After you present this milestone, you must summarize the critiques by your classmates on your website. You will need to do this for every milestone, so develop a repeatable process.)
You can use Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005), chapter 2, to help you think about the scope of the project, its stakeholders, and your general approach. That text identifies examples of projects with a small, tight scope that can be done rapidly, such as usability fixes, market characterization for new system concepts, website evaluation and redesign, next generation systems, supporting a coherent task, and reporting. There is also a discussion of stakeholders that can inform you. You should briefly identify your proposed stakeholders and consider the following points about them: goals, worries, ideas, how to involve them, how to communicate progress, how to understand their way of communicating, and how to communicate the design to them. You should include a set of covenants to govern your group. These must be agreed to by all members and must specify grounds for expulsion from the group. Only ten percent of all groups wind up having to enforce these, but they may help stave off disaster, so everyone should form covenants.
Milestone 2. contextual inquiry
Conduct a contextual inquiry for your project on a workplace to which you have access. You can use Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005), chapters 3 through 8 to complete this milestone. Also see Spinuzzi (2000) and Beyer and Holtzblatt (1999).
Revising milestone 1
Your milestone 1 website work is not done. Milestone 1 was about specifying the broad outlines of your project: scope, users, problem statement, solution statement. Those broad outlines are likely to change. There should always be a place on your website where people can look to find out the big picture so I’m not saying that you should do away with that and replace it with a lot of details, but be flexible about it and go back and change a few words or diagrams or whatever that tell the big picture as you go along. Refer to that so that the big picture directs you when you have to decide which details are relevant.
Products
You are likely to find that there are natural products of a contextual inquiry that can be added to your website. Your website should help you as a team. Typically a team has to come together to do some activities, then go off individually to do others. Your website can be used to document the things you do as a group so that individuals can use them, and to document what individuals do that needs to be reported back to the group.
Deliverable Products
You must include a legible version of your affinity diagram and documentation of all your interviews. This includes your questions, your protocol (the procedure you follow), and your interview notes. You should include a transcript if you record the interview, but it should be a written transcript and fully anonymized. Each group member should conduct two interview / observations.
Planning
You will plan your interviews and the interpretation session that follows and the construction of any artifacts you develop like affinity diagrams. This planning can go on the website in the form of a schedule or checklist that individuals can refer to. Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) has several relevant checklists, such as the CI process checklist (pp 80–81).
Interviews
Individuals need to conduct their interviews so they can be used in the interpretation session which, according to Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005), should occur within 48hrs (p 101) after the interview. Realistically, between now and your deadline, you’ll only have time for one of these cycles. By completing an entire cycle, you’ll have a blueprint you can refine for future use. One timesaving feature advocated in Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) is to avoid discussing an interview before an interpretation session (p 101).
Interpretation session
You should have a lot of data after an interview and it should be a challenge both to share it and to make sense of it. You should review, analyze, and capture key issues in an interpretation session. A natural product of this activity is the affinity note, which becomes a natural input into the next activity, constructing an affinity diagram. Chapters 6 and 7 of Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) give guidance on capturing sequence models, artifact models, and physical models, and using them to construct affinity diagrams. These are different for different projects, especially the physical models, although the use of affinity notes are likely to pervade all groups.
Affinity Diagram
Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) gives very detailed guidance in Chapter 8 about developing an affinity diagram from affinity notes. I won’t reproduce that guidance here but I will give a brief overview. Beware trying to use this overview as anything more than an introduction. Your diagramming session could easily drag on for eight hours if it is to succeed. You really need more detailed guidance to complete it. The following paragraphs give an overview of these steps:
- Add 500 post-it notes to the wall
- Add the bottom level of labels above the post-it notes
- Add the temporary top level of labels and reorganize all the notes and labels to fit them.
- Remove the temporary top level labels.
- Add the middle level of labels.
- Add the top level of labels.
Note that there are four levels of post-it notes. The lowest level is the atomic observation, referred to as an affinity note by Holtzblatt. These each simply copy one thing a participant said. For example, a participant might say “I hate the menu system because it’s so hard to navigate.” The other three kinds of post-it notes are the affinity labels, as Holtzblatt calls them. There are top, mid, and bottom level labels. For example, a bottom level label for the above note could be “challenges navigating the menus”, while a higher level might be “menus” or “navigation”.
The overview of the process is that you use post-it notes grouped together on a wall, preferrably on enough wax butcher paper taped to the wall so that a group of four can comfortably navigate and fill it with about 125 groups of 4 notes. Holtzblatt suggests starting with about 500 yellow post-it notes that represent atomic items (step 1). These are the affinity notes mentioned in the description of the Interpretation session. Your group should stop when you can no longer keep track of the groups of these yellow notes.
Next (steps 2 through 6), Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) describes a process of labeling these roughly 500 notes with three layers of notes of different colors. I find the colors confusing so my brief overview will simply refer to the bottom level, the middle level, and the top level. You start with the bottom level but, confusingly, you next proceed to the top level as a rough cut. Then you remove this temporary top level, build the middle level and finally the actual top level.
Although the labels are also post-it notes, albeit colored differently, be aware that Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) distinguishes between them and the yellow atomic affinity notes by using the term labels to describe the post-it notes at these three levels.
The general guidance for these labels is to write them in the first person, to reveal concrete detail, to use words that mean the same to everyone, to let the meaning emerge from the groups (instead of predefining), and to reorganize hard-to-label groups rather than continue wrestling with unsatisfying label wording.
As I mentioned above, the bottom level of labels is begun (step 2) when the people can no longer keep track of the groups of affinity notes without any labels. The labels at the bottom level should have design relevance and highlight distinctions rather than bringing groups together.
The next step (step 3) is to build a temporary top level, largely because this will help you move the affinity notes around into positions closer to their final positions. There should be only half a dozen or so of these temporary top level labels. Once everything has been moved around then remove the temporary top level (step 4).
The next step (step 5) is to build the middle level of labels. These labels should highlight high level work concepts, such as steps in work, communication strategies in work, tool use, and organizational structure.
The final step (step 6) of the affinity diagram is to add the top level, the level that describes the key issues. These key issues will inform the behavior patterns that will be the basis for the next milestone. Any break in the chain from interviews to these key issues jeopardizes the next milestone and, ultimately the entire project.
Keep in mind that these affinity labels are written in the first person and represent things an archetypal user might say. They certainly don’t need to be things actually said in an interview but they do need to be things someone might say. That way, they can be a concrete basis for a persona. The following figure shows a fragment of an excellent set of affinity labels.
Affinity diagram details
One thing that I would like to add is that you can probably get a lot more done by using a paper process than by using an online tool. It’s harder to document a paper process on a website, though. My best suggestion is that you get four Elmer’s display boards, 36” \(\times\) 48” $3.60 in bulk, $7.39 individually at an office supply store. You should be able to fit 150 3” \(\times\) 3” post-it notes on each board. It will be even easier if you have neat handwriting and use smaller post-it notes.
Use these boards and post-it notes and just bring the results to class to present. One previous semester, the most productive groups found it difficult to fit everything onto one of these boards. Less productive groups found it quite easy and even had space left over. If you find that you have sparsely populated one of these 36” \(\times\) 48” boards, you probably haven’t dug deeply enough. On the other hand, adding more post-it notes until the thing is covered may only mask the problem of not digging deeply enough, rather than solve it. One previous group made the unwise decision to omit pink and green labels altogether so they could concentrate on boosting the number of yellow post-it notes, having discovered that they could not reach the 500 minimum specified in Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005). (The above color scheme is clarified in detail in Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) — basically the above means that they did no grouping of notes into themes at all). As a result, they were unprepared to say anything analytical about what they had found, instead trapped at the individual anecdote level.
There is a lot of software for doing affinity diagrams, but the overhead is significant and it’s harder for a group of people to interact with tools that are inherently meant for one person, one keyboard, one mouse. If you have a bunch of post-it pads and are sitting around a posterboard display on a wall or a conference table, you can generate a lot more material faster. By the way, you could just do stuff on a wall as Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) recommends, but then you have to figure out what to do with 500 – 1,000 post-it notes afterward. The display board gives you something you can fold up. If you tie it tightly enough or cover the surface with fixative spray or tape or staples, you may find that post-its will retain their positioning.
Figjam
One final addition to this section is that students have actually had good luck with a software package called FigJam. This is web-based collaborative diagramming software that all members of the group can access at once from their own machines. I like it because of that and because it looks good on my thirty inch monitor when I’m grading assignments. Although I am generally against software for affinity diagramming, this is a wonderful exception to the rule. And it is free for students!
Milestone 3. personas
See Pruitt and Grudin (2003). Use Cooper et al. (2014), chapter 3 to complete the persona milestone. The first author of that book, Alan Cooper co-originated the persona concept, so you should regard that as basic required HCI reading anyway.
The persona process involves fewer steps than does the contextual inquiry, so I won’t give an overview here. Let me just remind you that each persona’s behavior patterns are selected because of the key issues at the top of the affinity diagram. Cooper et al. (2014) describes various ways to research the persona but the way you have done it in this project is through the contextual inquiry.
You must generate a primary persona. These are the focus of your prototype and any scenarios that the prototype will satisfy. You should also develop at least two secondary personas, especially if your contextual inquiry has led you to a complicated picture of goals and means.
Finally, you may benefit from inclusion of one or more anti-personas. These personas define behavior patterns you have explicitly determined to be out-of-scope for your project. I mention this because overly broad scope is one of the most severe afflictions to beset student projects. You should welcome anti-personas as a tool you can use to eject aspects of the project that will dilute your focus, sap your energy, and make your direction waver.
Personas sometimes benefit from dashboard displays, displays that were once fashionable in data analytics for their resemblance to instrumention of cars or planes. The point of the resemblance is what matters. Dashboards are meant to be instantly readable. It may be easy to create meters along several behavioral axes showing, at a glance, the difference between personas. This is optional but it has clearly helped some groups.
Milestone 4. scenarios
Inject your personas into scenarios and document a few (at least three) for this milestone. Each scenario should be represented as a cartoon of four to six panels, illustrating a successful use of your product. Not that you don’t need to have developed a prototype of your product to this successfully. In fact, there are four typical kinds of panels for a scenario, a manual step, a user interacting with an extremely lofi picture of the product, a lofi screen closeup, or a sketch of the “behind the scenes” view. These are illustrated here.
These scenarios flow directly from your contextual inquiry and personas. There should be a clear through line between these three milestones. That’s the main basis for grading this milestone. The quantity of work is not apparent in a successful scenario milestone. It may have taken you a long time or a little time to develop the appropriate cartoons. The quality of the cartoons is only important insofar as they are clear and can be used to compare to your later prototypes. The scenarios are a tool to reference during the construction of prototypes. Does the prototype fit any of your scenarios? Does it seem like that your prototype will successfully come into play in these scenarios?
Milestone 5. hi-fi prototype
The outcome of this milestone should be something viable for user testing. You should not have to modify this so you can use it for testing. Therefore, the definition of hi-fi may be relaxed. This may well be a mid-fi prototype. The goal is to prepare something you can use to gain relevant knowledge about the design from users.
You need to show the flow of your application rather than just showing individual screens. You may achieve this with a narrated video or other means you negotiate with the instructor.
The video of your hifi prototype should be a walkthrough of your site or app. It should show the paths that a user takes through the application or site. There should be some narration of the tasks that the user is thinking of while the user achieves their goals using the prototype. It should be clear throughout what the user is doing and why they are doing it. You should state the purpose of the app or site at the beginning, along with the name of the project. This should be followed by each task or path in turn. At the end, there should be some indication that we’ve reached the end, rather than leaving us to wonder if some of the video was cut off.
Final project presentation
The thrust of this presentation will be to have conducted user testing on your hi-fi prototype and to be able to report on that testing. You should briefly summarize your project and spend at least two-thirds of your time discussing user testing and its impact on your design. You will have to have conducted user testing for this presentation to be successful. You will have to connect that testing to your design and tell how your design should change based on that testing for this presentation to be successful.
No slideshow is needed for this presentation but you should add a short page to your website telling what you’ve done to test your prototype.
The final presentation is not graded but you can not receive a grade for the course if you do not complete it. It is your responsibility to schedule it with the instructor in the event that you can’t do it in class.
Milestone critiques
Someone in a group working on a shopping cart device asked whether they should change direction or scale back because I said that I thought it would be too expensive to put a device in each shopping cart. Here’s what I said in reply.
I would like you to think about this in a different way. Instead of trying to decide what to do based on what I have said, try to find evidence that supports or refutes what I have said.
There is a major grocery store chain headquartered near here, Wegman’s. They donate a lot of IT equipment to RIT so I know they are friendly to RIT. When I visit there, I often see the employees themselves shopping for groceries. I’ll bet you could interview them to find out about the needs of shoppers that might be helped by having a device on the grocery cart or perhaps an app that might help.
I’ll try to say more later but for now let me just add that the needs of the shoppers as perceived by the employees may differ from the needs of the shoppers as perceived by the shoppers and ALSO from the needs of the shoppers as EXPERIENCED by the shoppers. In other words, even the shoppers themselves may perceive differently from their experience.
A famous quote from Henry Ford, explaining why he did not listen to his customers was that, if he had, they would have just told him to invent a better horse and buggy.
Project management
Many teachers agree that no project management skills are required to work on a project with a group of four or fewer people. This is a major reason teachers who are not teaching project management advocate groups of four or fewer for class projects. Nevertheless, many students are unaware of or don’t believe this claim, and ask about project management. There are two things I can share about project management without diverting much attention from our purpose. One is the individual interactions between team members. I will discuss that later. For now, I would like to make a few remarks about the practice of project management in the IT workplace.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) has become the most popular focal point worldwide for best practices in project management. For example, a recent recruiter at UO identified the PMI as the source for project management practices at DataLogic ADC, a Eugene manufacturer of automatic data capture equipment. Some universities devote entire departments or even, as in the case of Stevens Institute of Technology, entire business schools to PMI education. PMI practices are inescapable in information systems development.
The main reference guide to these practices is called The Project Management Body of Knowledge Guide. The required reading for this section is an excerpt from an earlier edition of that guide, offering some general definitions for project management. In addition, the Guide lists all the non-controversial processes in project management and provides lists of their inputs and outputs. By non-controversial I mean all the process that the project management profession agrees upon as a baseline. Innumerable project management consultants offer proprietary extensions to this body of knowledge and these extensions are not covered in the guide, nor are the basic processes covered in any great depth. The Guide simply serves as a brief summary of the current state of agreed best practice in the field.
The significance of project management for information systems is that most information systems activities are organized as projects. Productive organizations may be managed as functional areas, operational areas, a matrix of these kinds, or entirely as projects. This latter category is extreme but it can be seen in the organization of Hollywood movies and in the activities of BP, one of the world’s major oil companies.
I had the good fortune to interview a vice president of BP in 2006 and learn that BP was then trying to discover best practices from Hollywood blockbusters in order to reduce its exposure to operational management by outsourcing as much of each oil rig as possible and treating each oil rig as if it were a Hollywood feature film. Each oil rig is as large and complicated as a 70 story skyscraper, although it is meant to be used for far less time and for only one purpose. Interestingly, BP had just experienced a catastrophic oil spill (6,000 barrels) at the time and I could not help but wonder how large a role exposure to litigation may have motivated its project focus. Alert readers will note that, just four years later, BP experienced a vastly more important oil spill (5 million barrels), known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That event and its aftermath are far too complex to even summarize here. I just want to note that the project management approach to organization may be tied to other considerations but that they feature prominently in contexts other than information systems.
An alternative to thinking with a project management focus is to think with a devops focus. Devops is a contraction of development and operations and is popular in organizations whose primary product is software. Thinking from a devops perspective is often seen as contradictory to project management thinking because devops preaches continuous improvement of processes rather than seeing the delivery of software as primarily the product of a lifecycle. While an organization practicing devops will typically have projects and project managers, they are not the primary concern. The primary concerns are (1) the flow of work from development to operations to customers, (2) the flow of feedback from customers to operations to developers, and (3) a culture that fosters innovation, trust, and continuous improvement. Additionally, devops is concerned with reducing work in process and unplanned work. You can read more about devops in books with either devops in the title or titled with the related term release engineering.
Exercises
This section has four parts, which are the following:
- Completing Exercises here - How to complete and submit exercises.
- Exercise List here - List of all the exercises that will be happening this semester.
- Post Submission Reflection here - Suggestions and activites post submission to improve your learnings outcomes.
- Exercise Objectives here - Some exercises have additional examples and suggestions, these could be helpful if you are stuck during completion.
Completing exercises
The following paragraphs give general guidelines about your sketchbook, your process, time constraints, and a storytelling model for exercises.
General directives
When submitting your assignments please the keep a few things in check, for the sake of example we will be considering you are submitting the assignment called “Picking up a key”:
- The file name should not have any spaces and no need to include your name in the file name.
- If the submission has only one file then name the file as PickingUpAKey.jpg.
- If the submission has multiple files then name the files as:
- 01pickingUpAKey.jpg
- 02pickingUpAKey.jpg
- 03pickingUpAKey.jpg
- And so on….
- Do not combine multiple files submissions into a zip or folder, upload them one by one.
- Accepted formats are (Please stick to these formats ONLY):
- jpg
- png
- Every exercise must be accompanied by two hand-drawn sketches of good design. These will serve several purposes: (1) improving your hand-eye coordination for sketching at the whiteboard, for instance (graduates often tell me they spend 2/5 of their time at the whiteboard!), (2) refining your idea of what constitutes good design, (3) recording your progress in sketching, and (4) sharing examples of good design with others. Please note that design is created by humans, so pictures of trees or mountain ranges are not acceptable. Each sketch should be of one good design, rather than, say, a street scene with many designed artifacts. It should be apparent at a glance what you mean as a good design.
Using your sketchbook
Michael Smuga, studio manager, Windows Phone 7 Development HQ, is seen relaxing while the press photographs him to show that Microsoft is no longer uncool as part of a large publicity campaign prior to the launch of WP7, circa 2010. Note what appear to be hand-sketched storyboards behind him and I dare you to tell me that this is not an advertisement for doing sketchbooks in this class!
Diverge then converge
For each exercise, you must diverge or your ideas will be boring. Then you must converge or you will not meet deadlines. Another way to say this is that you must spend part of each exercise trying to play followed by some time trying to produce.
How do you know whether you have played and produced? We spoke of the concept of flow and you know that you have that you are playing when you have achieved flow. That is an internal measure you may assess for yourself. An external measure might be a judgment of creativity. Your output is more likely to be assessed as creative if you have played but beware. Your output may be assessed as not creative for another reason. If you fail to converge, you will not have adequately conveyed your creativity. Thus you may find converge a necessary but not sufficient condition for others to appreciate your creativity.
Leonardo was a terrible example of failure to converge. He rarely finished his work and much of it only began to attain prominence centuries after his death. Mona Lisa, for instance, was not widely touted as the greatest example of oil painting until about the past hundred years.
It’s easier to see the outcome of convergence than divergence since you have a series of sketches that people can or can’t understand. You have to ask yourself whether people get the message you conveyed.That is separate from whether or not you conveyed a good message. So your creativity may be judged by how good the message was. Your convergence can be defined as how well you conveyed the message you intended to convey.
Allocate your time
In each exercise, you should try to work within a severe time constraint and prepare a presentable artifact in that time. You should improve your ability to complete each step so that you have something to show at the end. You have to get to know yourself well enough to know what you need to spend the most time doing. Do you struggle with the problem definition? Are you indecisive about which aspect to tackle? Do you struggle with rendering your ideas? Each exercise should contribute a little to your picture of what you need to do to grow.
Tell a story
Every single exercise from the picking up a key exercise until the last exercise offers the opportunity to tell a story with your solution. Storytelling is one of the oldest and most defining human activities. You must be a good storyteller to be a good designer. People expect to experience stories and you can take advantage of our human predisposition to experiencing storytelling to communicate your design ideas.
Many, perhaps most, great stories are not told in linear time. Stories do not unfold stepwise, like appliance manuals. (Actually, Ikea does assembly manuals that approach storytelling.) You have to develop a way to tell story that takes the viewer’s experience into account. This is often starting with a detail and expanding to a big picture or starting with a big picture and drilling down to a detail. It may start with a use case and end with an argument. However you plan a story, you must plan a story.
Exercise list
Here are two lists. First is the list of exercises mentioned in the syllabus. These are mandatory, graded exercises. Second is a list of exercises used in the past or proposed for the future. You are welcome to try these exercises but no class grading credit is available for them.
Mandatory Exercises
The following exercises are compulsory for the completion of the course:
Draw a face
Draw two horizontal lines to divide your notebook page into three parts, so each part is about 2 and half inches high.
Step 1 is to draw a human face in left-facing profile in the top third of the page. It is important to do this before looking at steps 2 and 3. Looking at those steps will affect how you do this step, so quit reading this now and draw the face!
Step 2 is to first make sure you have already drawn a face in left-facing profile before reading further. Quit reading! Draw that face in the upper third of your page. Are you sure you’ve drawn it? Really? Okay, then, step 2 is to draw another face in the middle third of the page but, this time, make one change. Carefully plan this head so that the eye is halfway between the top of the skull and the chin.
Step 3 is to draw a third human face in left-facing profile in the bottom third of the page. This time, use a dime and a half dollar as aids. (This exercise was conceived in an era when half dollar coins were common—your teacher can supply an appropriately sized disk as a substitute.)
This exercise is drawn from the 1964 book Thinking with a pencil by Henning Nelms, Nelms (1964), a great book that was just reprinted in June of 2015 for the first time in 30 years. The picture captioned step 3 of drawing a face is a photo of my copy of the book.
step 3 of drawing a face, from Nelms (1964), page 17
Picking up a key
Your task is to produce a comic strip of 7 to 9 panels based on a five sentence story, where you alter the last of the five sentences and the identity of the main character. The exercise comes from McCloud (2006), Chapter 1. On page 13 is a five-sentence story, told in 8 panels. The character is supposed to be a man. Change the character to a woman or creature or a different man. Change the last sentence (about the lion) to a different ending. Choose your own number of panels, anywhere from 7 to 9 panels.
Tell the story your own way. The five sentences are (1) A man is walking. (2) He finds a key on the ground. (3) He takes it with him, then he comes to a locked door. (4) He unlocks the door. (5) Then a hungry lion jumps out. The first panel and part of the second panel are shown in the picture captioned fragment of making comics, p 13.
Widget redesign
For this exercise, define a widget to be an object on a device that permits the user of the device to change its state in some way, such as the ubiquitous five way rocker switch on classic feature phones or a knob. Find a real widget in one of the following contexts and redesign it: automobile, department store, kitchen, parking lot, public transit (these are overtly physical contexts, as distinct from cultural or other contexts). Present it to the class and receive critiques from other students. Produce a picture in your notebook as the focus of the exercise. The picture should include 1. a rendering of the widget as you found it, 2. a rendering of the widget as you redesigned it, 3. some text explaining the problem, 4. some text explaining why the redesign is a solution to that problem, 5. directions for interacting with the redesigned widget, and 6. a list of other real widgets that are similar due to either human interaction or system input.
The pictures will be assembled into a file for the entire class to see. Critique the work of other students according to three criteria, selection, solution, and craft. Selection means to critique the selection of the particular widget. Question whether it really is a widget and whether it warrants redesign. Solution means to evaluate whether the redesign really does improve the widget. Craft means to critique the visual appeal of the picture. Question the picture as a communication design.
(This exercise was developed by John Zimmerman at CMU.)
Record interaction
Spend a total of 25 minutes interacting with an app and documenting your experience, using mainly a series of about three dozen to four dozen pictures, each about 2 cm to 3 cm square. The interaction itself may last only a minute of the 25 minutes or perhaps it is used intermittently during the 25 minutes. Employ very few words. Pictures should tell the story. Make it clear how the app display changes and what your interactions with the app are. Be specific. I should not have to wonder what the consequence was of pushing a particular button. I’m not looking for impressionism as much as something that the developer of the app could learn from. Only include enough about the surroundings to clarify the interaction. In other words, if it is a jogging monitor app, I don’t need to see a bunch of pictures of a person running around. One at the start and end are probably enough unless you have issues caused by the surroundings.
One strategy might be to start with a screen recording and then to determine which frames are critical to understanding, then to draw only those frames and use drawing skill to make them come alive so that we see action rather than stasis.
Ambient notification
Develop an ambient notification device to improve email. Notification can be of anything related to email.
Device means a physical device. This device is not a PC or phone or smartwatch. It is a device that blends into the environment and provides some kind of notification of something related to email. You have a lot of discretion because I do not specify the environment, only that it has to blend into some environment. You must choose some specific environment but it is fine if that environment is kitchen, bedroom, office, car, or something else. The device will presumably be able to receive signals of some kind, such as wifi network or other but do not assume that it is a multipurpose device receiving signals for other reasons. Just limit yourself to its ability to provide something that relates to incoming email. The notifications may appeal to any or all senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Bear in mind that all interruptions have a cost to attention, sleep, social activities, or whatever is being interrupted. You must record the device in situ in your sketchbook and upload a photo or photos to the dropbox.
(This exercise was developed by John Zimmerman at CMU.)
Captions
Create a series of about eight panels to illustrate the following paragraphs from the novel 1984 by George Orwell. Select captions from the following text. Don’t use all the text (!) and don’t use any text that is not in the following excerpt.
Do not try to reveal every detail in the following excerpt—it’s purposely long to promote some flexibility and variety between the approaches of different students. Make choices that convey what is happening in the scene. This should require some design compromise on your part. You should choose what is important and leave out what is not important. This exercise is largely about sharpening your ability to choose what is important. After you have completed the eight panels, do the exercise again, using exactly the same captions but a different series of pictures.
This exercise is from McCloud (2006), Chapter 3, page 157, exercise number 1.
Begin excerpt from 1984
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mous-tachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste–this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous province of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak1—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHThe Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
End excerpt from 1984.
Thousand floor elevator
Design an elevator for a building with 1,000 floors. This is a single elevator compartment that can travel to any floor from ground to the top. You must design a system for selecting floors and for displaying selected floors, as well as for displaying the current location of the elevator. You are free to imagine any inhabitants of the building, any users of the elevator, but not any extraordinary speed of the elevator. In other words, assume only current technology is available to physically move the elevator compartment. As with the previous exercise, present this to the class and receive critiques from other students.
As before, create a poster for your elevator. The poster should include:: 1. renderings of any displays and controls, 2. some text describing what the displays mean and how to operate the controls, 3. some text about the users of the elevator and their destinations, 4. some text about any problems related to the extremely large number of possible destinations, and 5. some text about how you solve any problems related to the very large number of possible destinations.
As before, you will critique the work of other students. Consider roughly the same three criteria, problem and user statement, solution, and craft. Question whether the poster really addresses problems with a 1,000 floor elevator and its users, whether the presentation offers genuine solutions, and the craft of the poster.
Other Exercises
These exercises are not mandatory but you can attempt these to get feedback and learn more.
Harrison Bergeron
In class, someone advanced the claim that we must design for the lowest common denominator if we design something that will be used by people of all levels of technological sophistication. I can think of many arguments against this claim.
Two of the arguments I can think of are advanced in the Kurt Vonnegut short story Harrison Bergeron, 1961. Be aware when you consider it that it has been interpreted literally and as meaning the precise opposite of its literal meaning. In other words, it has been interpreted by some as warning against the dangers of catering to the least common denominator and by others as warning against the dangers of worrying about catering to the least common denominator. The former interpretation is favored by Fox News. The latter interpretation is favored by literary critics and the author of the story. I do say that in the hope of prejudicing you in favor of the latter interpretation but the fact that the story functions to support two opposing points of view serves to illustrate the fact that a device can serve two completely different groups of social commentators with two completely different kinds of analytical skills and abilities.
Please discuss the notion of a design target population and reaching them with respect to this least common denominator idea and alternatives. Please produce some written assertions in a Google Drive document. These may contradict each other but should come to some kind of resolution in a summary. When I say resolution, I don’t mean that you must agree. That resolution could be that there are two (or n) points of view. In such a case, the summary will enumerate and briefly descrbe them. If you are in agreement, then describe that upon which you agree.
Extreme Emphasis
Draw about eight panels in your sketchbook from the Robin Williams monologue in the file extreme-emphasis.mp3. This has been sometimes available on Youtube under the title, Good Morning Vietnam - First Time on Air. Your goal is to letter the monologue in a way that conveys the extremes of expression in the comedian’s voice and face. The drawings and continuity are not the issue here—any eight moments from the sequence will do. Note that you are not asked to draw pictures of a person, a microphone, a room, nor any other representation that the comedian mentions. You are being asked to draw pictures of the words themselves. Icons or pictures that support the words are okay, but the depictions of the words is the central theme.
This exercise is from McCloud (2006), Chapter 3, page 157, exercise 5.
Identify domains and skills
As a group, create an interface to help you select project groups. This interface should help you understand each other’s domains of interest, as well as each other’s skills. Assume that you want to form project teams with similar domains of interest, but different skills.
As you work, think about how you approach this as a design problem and how you cope with the constraints on the problem.
As an example, last semester’s students created a table with one column for each domain (or, eventually, each possible project), and rows for each identifiable skill. Each student was free to enter his or her name into as many cells as they wished. When this table was printed, one could develop a project group by drawing a squiggly oval around the people interested in a domain, but with different skills.
Last semester’s solution had a lot of drawbacks, some of which did not become apparent until many people tried to use it. One problem was that it became difficult to identify exact rows and columns as it expanded. Another problem was that people wanted to describe their skills or domains in greater detail than was practical in the margins of a table. For instance, several people felt they had differing levels of skill using Photoshop, so that a Photoshop row was too generic to be useful. A third problem was that some skills were discovered to be universal, causing needless clutter as everyone announced that they could do xyz. A fourth problem was that students could not edit the table at the same time and all the relevant information was contained in the one table. It was very useful to have all the information at a glance, but very difficult to manage all that information in one big object.
I can think of a design that might be better suited to the wiki you have available, but I prefer that you discover your own design.
Business card calendar
This exercise comes from a blogger whose 48 year old mother complained that she could not read the tiny business card sized calendars given away by her bank or other businesses. The blogger noticed that the same numbers were repeated 12 times on the card and proposed a design challenge to improve this design for readability and instant recognition. Design a business-card sized calendar for a blogger’s 48-yo mom. It should be immediately understandable. maximize type size or meaningful features. It must span 1 year. For any date number, be able identify which month, weekday. Minimize steps to know a date’s data. Holidays / special days should be easy to mark. Be able to count days between nearby dates.
Signifier matrix
Before class, take pictures or collect pictures of signifiers on devices that afford pushing, squeezing, or turning. Arrange the best of these pictures in a 3 \(\times\) 3 (or 4) matrix, with pushing on the first row, squeezing on the second row, and turning on the third row. Bring your matrix to class for critiques as to how well these signifiers suit the named actions, how well you have documented the signifiers, and whether your matrix is pleasing to look at. In class, form a group and develop a best of matrix for your group, including only the very best of your individual matrices. This is part one of a two part exercise, to be done with the same team throughout.
Signifier device
This is the second of a two-part exercise. Work in the same group with which you developed the signifier matrix. Before class, create an interactive object in the shape of a cube that invites the user to push it, turn it, and squeeze it. All three of these should be interaction modalities for the cube-based object. develop the physical object itself during the week between classes and be ready to share it with your classmates at the beginning of the class listing this as the exercise. During class, put the device into a central location and take the device of another group. You will introduce that device to the class without any input from the group that created it.
Your device should have the general look and feel of a cube, even if you choose to add or subtract from its shape so that it is not precisely a cube. People should think cube when they see it. The signifiers you choose should show what you learned in the signifier matrix exercise. The signifiers may be visual, aural, or tactile. Although you have taken them from instrumental examples, do not reproduce the actions caused by the interactions. This is probably obvious in the case of a steering wheel, to which you do not need to attach an actual automobile to demonstrate the effect of steering (and which may complicate your presentation!). It may be less obvious in the case of a switch, where you may want to include a light that acts as a signifier but not a light that acts as illumination (the purpose of the interaction). Do not work on the actions that will be accomplished by pushing, turning, or squeezing it.
Revisit picking up a key
Earlier in the semester, you storyboarded a five sentence story about picking up a key and using it to open a door. Using what you have learned since then, improve upon that storyboard. Work in pairs or trios and either refine or replace the elements you used before when you did the exercise alone.
Anti-signifier matrix
A 1 square kilometer toxic dump must be marked so it will remain undisturbed for 10,000 years. Create an anti-signifier matrix of 1 square kilometer. The components of the marking system should be robust but have little intrinsic value (note that this does not mean that it will be cheap to implement) so that they will not be destroyed or recycled. Use a Gestalt, so more is received than sent, use a systems approach, so elements of the communications system link to each other, index to each other, are co-presented and reciprocally reinforcing, and use redundancy, where some elements of the system can be degraded or lost without substantial damage to the system’s capacity to communicate.
Waiting in line
Create an approximately eight panel comic of a person waiting in line and using mobile technology. Connect the mobile technology to what the person is waiting for or to other people waiting along with the person. We should understand what the person is waiting for and experience the entire wait from start to finish. (This exercise is not in Making Comics.)
Favorite movie
Tell the story of a favorite movie in pictures alone with no words. A peer should be able to tell us what happens in the movie without having seen it. Do not write the name of the movie on it! This exercise is from McCloud (2006), Chapter 1, page 56.
Packing
Create an approximately eight panel comic of a person packing. It could be a person packing for a daily commute or for a vacation or business trip. Do not include any dialog. We should be able to identify the kind and duration of the trip and should be able to learn a good deal about the person doing the packing. We should experience the entire time of packing from start to finish. (This exercise is not in Making Comics.)
Unoccupied room
Draw an unoccupied room in enough detail that a peer can tell ten meaningful things about the person who lives there. Again, this exercise should be completed in a picture alone with no words. Except the date of completion and the name of the exercise. This exercise is from McCloud (2006), Chapter 1, page 57, exercise number 7.
Two characters
Create two characters, one with five key life history aspects that are the same as your own and one whose life history is different in every one of the five aspects. Include at least two sketches of each character. This exercise is from McCloud (2006), Chapter 2, page 127, exercise number 1.
Exercise reflection
After you complete exercises, reflect on them. Please don’t read this section until you have completed your exercises. Reading it first will diminish the value of your education. I would rather you give me your tuition to waste on brandy and cheap cigars than to see you waste it by going to college and looking at the answers before you do the thinking. Think of yourself as flushing the tuition money down the drain and waving goodbye to it if you become one of those people who looks at the answers right away.
Critiques
Critiquing design choices and implementations is among the most difficult and important activities any designer practices. And I do mean practices. You can only be good at this through practice. You can only practice with other people. Young people often overestimate their talent for this activity and fail to learn and apply techniques.
We can approach critiques in several ways. The way we will approach them today is to just jump right in and try. In golf, a pro once told me that so much is going on that you have to have a swing thought for every swing. You can not possibly bring everything you know to bear, at least not consciously. You have to pick one or two things you need to think about right now.
Each time you offer or receive a critique, you may find yourself in the same position as the golfer. You can read and discuss and think about the critical process but you can not think about too many things at once. So let’s start with a few things likely to come up during this critique.
Domination
Some students abhor silence. If I ask people to answer a question, studies show it takes students an average of at least 45 seconds to formulate an answer. Some students squirm during that 45 seconds and wind up answering every question. These very few students, usually only one or two per class, get a lot of experience speaking in class, but others do not. It is often better to allow the uncomfortable moment to continue than to be the student who speaks most in class.
Parochialism
You may be surprised to find out about the diversity of user experience and the variety of reasons for design choices. Students often say that no one does this or no one wants that. Often, students supply anecdotes showing how everyone does things one way. Plenty of research shows that anecdotal evidence is more persuasive than statistical evidence. It should be easy to peruse a blog that covers new products like Engadget and see in the comments that every new product was designed by idiots who have no idea what is going on in the world. It is even possible to dig through tweets from celebrities to show enthusiastic greetings for failed products and damning criticism of what later turned out to be game-changers.
THINK acronym
My eight-year-old’s class is being inculcated with the admonition to THINK before speaking, asking if what they propose to say is true, helpful, inspiring of confidence, necessary, and kind. I would be happy if I could just figure out the helpful, necessary, and kind parts.
A famous quote, popularized by William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch and in the game Assassin’s Creed, and sometimes attributed to 11th Century thinker Hassan Sabbah, says Nothing is true; everything is permitted. Some discussions of the meaning of this have to do with our shifting perceptions of truth. We can not learn everything all at once. Sometimes we use scaffolding to be discarded after we use it. This includes a lot of assertions that are helpful but not true.
For example, you may have been told to sit with a straight spine. This has the helpful effect of distributing and reducing stress on the muscles that support your head. On the other hand, no one has a straight spine. The s-shaped curve of the spine is a remarkable shock absorber and to straighten it would mean disaster for your physical well-being.
From time to time, you have to think more carefully about what will be helpful to say rather than what will be immutably true. You can not always tell immediately what will be helpful. Sometimes you have to listen and watch very carefully to see the effect of what you say. Have you ever told someone to calm down? If not, let me warn you that such an admonition usually has the opposite effect.
Identify interactions
You should be using the exercises to refine your picture of what constitutes interaction and what is outside the boundaries of interaction. How much of the user do we need to see? What aspects of the user do we need to know about? Does the user have arthrities? Can the user hear? Do we need to know that an ironing board is set up in the kitchen precariously close to the table where the user is wearing headphones and conducting an online conversation? Every sketch reveals something and hides something else. You must be conscious of both revealing and hiding details that matter or don’t matter.
Display information
Information comes in many forms and has many characteristics. You should be thinking, since the corporate directory exercise, about the characteristics of information. How is information best stored, transmitted, and processed? Is information hierarchical or tabular? Is information structured, semistructured, or unstructured? Is information personal or relevant to a group or to a community or to the public? What visible characteristics of information are most salient to consumers, color, position, texture, shape?
Exercise objectives
Following are the objectives for exercises.
Graphical self intro
I was once asked for clarification on the parameters of the graphical self intro.
I want you to express yourselves as fully as possible. If I give you a list of parameters, I’m afraid that the graphical self intros will all look alike. It would be as if I told you how to dress and how to cut your hair so that you would all look uniform. That might please me if I were running an army, but that is not a good way to start a graduate design class. Learning to follow instructions teaches you to follow instructions. Is that really what you want from a graduate design class?
Of course, there are always constraints in design. In fact, it has been said that design is all about constraints. But don’t ask for more constraints than are already imposed upon you. For this assignment, I want to make a nice pdf of all the submissions. That gives you an important constraint to make it easy to view. You’ll want to use really good lighting to get the best picture of the page you draw. That should be constraint enough. (Some people really struggle to meet that constraint despite the widespread presence of sunlight!) Another constraint is that the picture should be in focus. (If you can’t figure out a way to focus a picture, or don’t care enough to do so when you’re given a week to do it, I question your commitment.) That is constraint enough. Whether it’s landscape or portrait is really up to your creativity and how you want to lay out the elements you draw. Whether you illustrate yourself, or objects meaningful to you, or words that describe you, or something completely abstract that puts your feelings in the foreground, or something that I haven’t imagined yet—all that is completely up to you. You should be glad of this freedom and use it to make something you really like!
Drawing a face
Show that you can improve your sketching by technique. Show that I don’t have talent is not a valid reason to refrain from sketching.
A portrait print by Sharaku, sketched by Eisenstein, from Eisenstein (1949), page 33.
A further objective is to reflect realism and naturalism in drawing. In Eisenstein (1949), translated by Leyda, Sergei Eisenstein sketched a portrait print by Sharaku and made the following observations. … the proportions of the portrait print are simply impossible. The space between the eyes comprises a width that makes mock of all good sense. The nose is almost twice as long in relation to the eyes as any normal nose would dare to be, and the chin stands in no sort of relation to the mouth; the brows, the mouth, and every feature—is hopelessly misrelated … he repudiated normalcy … proportions have been subordinated … He set up the essense of the psychic expression as the norm for the proportions of the single features.
Eisenstein seems to highlight the difference between a realism that can be measured by instruments and a naturalism that appeals to the psyche. When you sketch, your work may consciously or unconciously reflect one of these aims: to represent for instruments of measurement or to represent to the psyche.
Here are a child’s instructions for drawing a face, based on writing the word dojob first and embellishing after. Is this trick any different from Nelms’s use of coins?
Picking up a key
Develop narrative progression using pictures. Use imagination to change the viewer’s perspective. Use storytelling. Simplify pictures. Sharpen the focus of a message by simplifying pictures. Work within time and space limitations. Find a way to show sequence in a series of simple pictures. Show the order in which pictures should be viewed.
Widget redesign
Learn to identify signifiers and the lack of signifiers. Take the environment around an interaction into account. Work on your sense of which problems are worth solving.
Record interaction
Learn to describe interaction. Notice how difficult it is to isolate the interaction from its surroundings. Try to disambiguate what you are communicating in each picture. Plan the narrative.
Small interaction
See how much difference a single constraint can make in a design. Improve the clarity of a picture by removing some elements. Consider the number of pictures required and the amount of information conveyed in each picture. Plan your time.
Corp directory
Understand that the medium, a tiny square, is not suited to the message, a large outwardly fanning tree. Learn some characteristics of one of the two most frequently occurring information structures (trees). Think about users in identifiable groups. Think about user characteristics such as the number of users, frequency of use, purpose of use, nearness to other users, and power and influence.
Model work
This exercise did not have an objective in the sequence of the other exercises. This exercise was simply meant to improve your milestone 2 preparation.
Elevator
Work on a problem for which the obvious solution model (existing elevators) is inappropriate or intractable. Think about a completely unfamiliar situation and try to identify its salient characteristics. Think abstractly. Narrow your focus to a subset of possible users, situations, and relevant problems.
Ambient notification
The following two graphics come from an article called … Notification Hell.
It may be worthwhile to revisit your ambient notification exercise with this in mind. Also, you may want to consider the article, Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Product, which describes a problem that startups in the Internet of Things seem to exhibit when they try to apply design to their efforts.
The problem exemplifies the long-standing clash between holistic design as described in the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and analysis-based design, more concerned with enumeration of features than with user experience. IoT startups may be the latest in a series of feature-lists-as-design victims.
References
Footnotes
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.↩︎