DD+D was invited back, this month, to Columbia College's Visual Presentation class to deliver our Design Empathy workshop. The workshop was held at the Steelcase show room at the Mart.The design brief for the project required the student designers to create Ipad apps, and Ibooks for early childhood education teachers. Our goal was to help the student designers to empathize with the needs of all stakeholders including; teachers, young students. We created personas and acted out scenarios to understand the client's needs.
Here is the design brief, breakdown of project activities, and student designer feedback on DD+D session....
New
opportunities are constantly opening up in the various educational environments
as digital technology and new media platforms emerge. In colleges and
universities we’ve been using virtual classroom tools (blackboard, skype,
basecamp, google docs, etc.) for more than 10 years to deliver material to
students both synchronously and asynchronously. In elementary, secondary, and
high school many of these tools are also used. However in the early childhood
environment where children are learning very rapidly to do so many things from
manipulating physical puzzles to developing crucial social skills, technology
has not been as vital or necessary.
With
the increase and growing sophistication of mobile technology, earlier access by
more and more children, although certainly not all, and genuine curiosity with
the devices and the apps/games they afford, we are witnessing a paradigm shift
of technology down into the pre-school, kindergarten and early elementary
school years. This simple phenomenon when combined with the emergence of
intuitive authoring tools like Ibooks author and InDesign allow for educators
to develop teaching tools for the ipad that augment established books and other
support materials. The process can be fast and the results can be tested and refined
right in the classroom.
As
product designers we are trained to be generalists and to explore emerging
opportunities like these through direct observation, interviews, and primary
research posted on line or in journals.
In this project we will be collaborating with Early Childhood Education
students to develop teaching scenarios for their classrooms. We will be using
many of the visualization skills from previous assignments as well as new ones
to develop scenarios that will lead to storyboards of interaction, and finally
tasks/games that can be quickly built and tested on an ipad using ibooks
author. The project will involve several stages and require
interaction/collaboration with the Early Childhood Education students led by
professor Mary Quest. Because the respective courses do not occur at the same
time the groups will be communicating as much as possible through a range of
cloud-based collaborative tools.
INITIAL BREAKDOWN OF
ACTIVITIES:
Task
1: Setup collaborative space
Task
2: Review video documentation of
student teaching (before 3.18.13)
Milestone
1: Develop initial
scenarios around a range of topics for review
Task
3: Get feedback from
student teachers
Task
4: Bodystorming
workshop withh DD+D
Milestone
2: Create storyboards to
define either existing problems or opportunities
Task
5: Transform
storyboards into videos as communication tool (upload)
Task
6: Get feedback and
refine scenarios.
Milestone
3: Develop concepts for
testing using ibooks author and ipads.
Student designers' feedback
"It was nice working in groups and coming up with personas and scenarios to put ourselves in other people's shoes."
"It helped get us to visualize the process of research. Also, really getting involved with it creates a better understanding.
"Exploring where the teachers and students are coming from and experiencing was a great way to do research."
"The workshop helps encourage all to step out of their own mind and into an empathetic state."
"It was informative yet entertaining and engaging."
"A great work environment to work and learn"
"Today's session was very effective. Empathy can be difficult. It was very helpful to learn some theatre tools to help."
"It was great to warm up and take on the empathy challenges. Stand up,sit down, moves my mind also body."
