HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN: SMART MEDIA AND DESIGN THINKING

Wednesday, 12:05-3:00pm, WisCEL Lab, 410A Wendt Commons PDF of syllabus

Description

This studiolab course mixes studio, lab, and seminar-based learning to introduce students to theories and practices of human-centered design, an essential skill for both design and innovation across many fields. Human-centered design focuses on the experience of audiences, end-users, and communities, drawing on such disparate traditions as classical rhetoric and aesthetics and modern fields of human-computer interaction, performance studies, and community activism.

Students learn human-centered design through two interrelated activities: smart media and design thinking. Smart media are emerging genres of digital communication, such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and information graphics, forms that can be seen as mashing up traditional scholarship and contemporary media culture in order to create more interactive forms of learning. Design thinking is an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving and innovation used to address social challenges, organizational change, and product development, and it has been applied to education, engineering, and non-profits.

Smart media and design thinking both stress empathy with end-users, creative and analytical skills, and collaborative, iterative design processes involving different perspectives—all hallmarks of human-centered design. Over the semester, students complete two projects and a series of design exercises that introduce them to three powerful design frames that can be used to both analyze and generate projects:

• CAT (conceptual, aesthetic, technical)
• UX (user experience: experience design, information architecture, information design)
• DT (design thinking’s constraints of human desirability, technical feasibility, economic viability)

In the first project, students role-play as design firms to collaboratively research and produce a multimedia proposal for a museum installation of “intimate bureaucracies.” For the second project, students produce individual multimedia proposals for a similar project of their own choice (eg, translate a paper into a media campaign, a method into a service, an insight into a mobile app). Exercises grow out of daily readings and materials and for each one, students will keep design journals with sketches, ideas, images, and conceptual thumbnails (summarizing readings’ main arguments, defining critical concepts, and posing critical questions). Exercises and journals, along with discussion and attendance, comprise the Participation component of the class. Two absences may result in final grade reduction; three in failure.

The final grade breakdown is 33% each for Project 1, Project 2, and Participation. 

Learning outcomes include:

Collaborative problem-solving Divergent and convergent thinking Critical media analysis Information and experience design Storytelling and visualization Media production skills Online portfolio of work

Schedule

1/21	Intro : McLuhan/Fiore The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects Video version by Cultural Farming	smart media installation introduce UX assign exercise 1
1/28	Experience design McKenzie, “Towards a Sociopoetics” 121-138 Norman, “The Design of Everyday Things,” vii-80	play with toys demos of ARIS, SketchUp, Prezi
2/4	Museum of Intimate Bureaucracies Deleuze, “Societies of Control,” Mierzoff, “Experimental University,” djreadies, Intimate Bureaucracies, 1-16	assign project 1 introduce “museum pieces” choose groups STS: InDesign assign exercise 2
2/11	Information Design  –  selections from Tufte, McCandeless, Crimp/Rolston	mood boards, look and feel
2/18	Information Architecture  – Wurman 15-19; Bradford, 62-74; Applebaum 150-161, The Interventionists, Ch 4.	visit WID exercise 3: UX analysis STS: Prezi/ARIS/SketchUp
2/25	Open workshop	project work
3/4	Ask a Trainer	project work
3/11	Open workshop Sample projects: Manifest Leveragers	project work
3/18	Present Proj 1	crit Proj 1 assign proj 2: knowledge remake
3/25	Design Thinking – Brown Ch 1-4 Ch 5-10	exercise: make a statement
4/1	BREAK
4/8	Empathize Visitor: Dee Warmath	exercise: backback redesign
4/15	Reframe IDEO HCD toolkit	Exercise 5: Re/frame
4/22	Ideate	project work
4/29	Prototype	project work
5/6	Test Present Proj 2

 

Required Books and Materials (University Book Center, TechStore, etc.)

Adobe Creative Cloud (free in InfoLabs; home use available through DoIT TechStore for $20/month)

McCandless, David. 2009.  The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia. New York: Collins.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York, Bantam Books.

Thompson, Nato, Gregor Sholette, and Arjen Noordeman. 2004. The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA.

Tufte, Edward. 1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Additional texts as determined by Project 1 groups.

 

Readings (pdf download)

Applebaum, Ralph. 1997. Untitled essay. In Information Architecture. Ed. Richard Saul Wurman. New York: Graphis Inc. Pp. 150-161.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bradford, Peter. 1997. Untitled essay. In Information Architecture. Ed. Richard Saul Wurman. New York: Graphis Inc. Pp. 62-74.

Brown,Tim. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperCollins.

Crimp, Douglas with Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.

Critical Art Ensemble. 1994. “Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production.” From The Electronic Disturbance. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59, pp 3-7.

dj readies. 2012. Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Press. Pp. 1-16.

Duarte, Nancy. 2007. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Grosskopf, Alexander, Mathias Weske, Jonathan Edelman, Martin Steinert, and Larry Leifer. 2010. “Design Thinking implemented in Software Engineering: Tools Proposing and Applying the Design Thinking Transformation Framework.” 8th Design Thinking Research Symposium, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

IDEO. 2011. Human-Centered Design Toolkit: An Open-Source Toolkit To Inspire New Solutions in the Developing World. <http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/hcd_toolkit/IDEO_HCD_ToolKit.pdf>

Kress, G. L. and M. F. Schar. 2011. “Teamology – The Art and Science of Design Team Formation,” in Design Thinking Research: Studying Co-Creation in Practice, ed. H. Plattner, C. Meinel, and L. J Leifer. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer. Pp 191-212.

Lawler, Philip F. Operation Rescue: A Challenge to the Nation’s Conscience. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Books, 1992.

McCandless, David. 2009. The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Consequential Trivia. New York: Collins.

McKenzie, Jon. 2001.  “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, eToys, and TOYWAR.” Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 14:1: Pp. 121-38.

Mierzoeff, Nicholas. 2004. “Anarchy in the Ruins: Dreaming the Experimental University,” in The Interventionists. Ed. Nato Thompson and Greg Sholette. North Adams, MA: Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Norman, Donald. 1990 (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday. Pp. vii-33.

Wurman, Richard Saul, ed.  1997. “Introduction.” In Information Architecture. Ed. Richard Saul Wurman. New York: Graphis Inc. Pp. 15-19.