I’ve been pondering how to help others determine if they are designers. I believe sharing this handy flowchart will do the trick.
Semantic Technologies in Learning Environments
Interesting slides (56-58) listing challenges for developing learning tools, via elearnspace:
Teaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology
A good read on Internet literacy and Wikipedia via First Monday:
Holiday Data Snapshot
This is a short write-up about a month worth of pageviews on the Gottesman Libraries’ Pressible site. There’s a lot more one could do with the analytics, but I was just sharing a brief analysis.
Programming as a New Literacy
I’ve just read Douglas Rushkoff’s shortbook Program or Be Programmed, wherein he shares “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” Though his portrayal of various “biases” of digital technology (e.g., timelessness, abstraction, depersonalization) is polemical, he succinctly describes major challenges of new technologies in 144 pages.
His main point is to describe a new literacy – a digital literacy he says we must achieve to continue to shape our world in positive ways. He argues that the consequence of not being able to “program” (or, he allows, at least being familiar with the scope and power of programming) would be to allow digital technology – and those who wield its powers – to overdetermine our lives.
I am sympathetic to this message, but reading his argument served as a good exercise to review the larger picture – and consider how well this kind of story about “digital literacy” hangs together.
One area Rushkoff’s book helped me reflect on was the design of online learning environments. In line with his descriptions of digital biases, current learning management systems are often positively shaped around the “advantages” of digital technologies. Asynchronous discussion boards are favored. Students are asked to use their real identities. There is “space” for collaboration.
So far, so good. But Rushkoff helps us ask: what about the “speed” of dialogue and collaboration? It seems to me that instructional designers (teachers or their assistants) could make the mistake of hoping that student interactions (with the course, and with other students) only increase. Or, similarly, that the administrative evaluators of such courses favor more frequent interactions.
As Rushkoff points out, such desires could be our ill-considered adoption of digital biases, and in fact, slower, less-frequent interactions could be preferable. While he harkens back to the “early days” of online bulletin boards, and points to the “depth” of discussion that came out of less frequent “logging in and signing on” (p. 24), I think it could more simply be a case of “less is more” – that writing and editing take time, and focus can help one achieve better communication. I wonder, therefore, how we could sharpen the design of online discussions to favor more reflective engagement.
There are already great examples of this online. From the way sites like the New York Times aggregates Comments, to the way tools like Disqus track one’s diverse contributions, there is a lot of good thinking about shaping online discussion. How could educational designers incorporate these and other strategies into a “course” experience?
The New Coffee Trailer at Columbia University
It clashes with surrounding buildings with a modern defiance. It serves the community in deeply important and practical ways. And its cold, metallic surfaces reflect orange sunsets with a surprising warmness. What is it?
A coffee trailer in New York City, of course. But also: it’s Columbia University’s new $200 million interdisciplinary science building at the intersection of Broadway and West 120th Street.
When the freshly-poured sidewalk opened yesterday, the local coffee trailer (or is it a stand? or cart?) rolled back into place. As I approached the intersection, it was plainly clear to me: the starchitech José Rafael Moneo has created a monumental tribute to the community’s humble source of caffeine.
Over the course of its construction, and before the comparison to the coffee trailer could be made definitively, the building appeared as a large air conditioning unit (a feeble response to climate change?). But with the trailer back in place, the building’s stark, patterned, mechanical form struck this new, friendlier note.
The building likely mirrors the coffee trailer that historically made its home on the corner. I imagine Moneo visiting the site for the first time: after travelling to campus, he walks north up Broadway. It’s a cold, rainy November day, and he arrives at “his” intersection for the first time. It’s a little before 9am (the subway was pleasantly on time), and he has a moment to himself before his team arrives. There’s a coffee trailer parked on the sidewalk – no bigger than a large refrigerator – with two men inside, back to back, serving coffee and preparing hot breakfast sandwiches on a small grill. “That’s it,” he says to himself, with all the determination and confidence of an experienced architect. “That’s my building.”
According to The New York Times, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger asked Moneo to:
… support, and make a statement about, Columbia’s commitment to interdisciplinary science; to open the university to its neighborhood and animate its backyard… although the building also needed to get along with its immediate neighbors…
Moneo clearly followed Bollinger’s “complex set of mandates” very closely, as it certainly doesn’t get any more interdisciplinary than caffeine. Aesthetically, the result is glorious. And the neighbors? Now back in place after a nearly two-year-long displacement (to a mid-block location), the coffee trailer has assumed its new role.
Who are you designing for?
I ran across this interesting frog design deck while reviewing trends in design research – a summary of the Design Research Conference 2010 (DRC) last May. A quick glimpse at the slides provides a snapshot of how designers continue to grapple with user needs, and how they respond with both simple and sensible strategies (and more than a handful of rhetoric, too).
RSS is the Musician’s Band of the Internet
Just sayin’.
Selling Magic, Not Technology
“Magical” seems to be the best way to describe technology products in 2010. Behold Apple’s iPad:
And now Google, upon launching Instant Search, claims that their search tool “should feel like magic” (0:16).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4
Should technology feel like magic?
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, magic is “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”
If that’s the intention of technology companies, then that’s pretty sad. It’s the equivalent of giving up on a certain kind of technological literacy. In these ads, we’re seeing the marketing departments of two of the most influential technology corporations in the world deciding that people are more comfortable in the middle ages. Indeed, it’s a little too reminiscent of recent marketing campaigns in other sectors:
Couldn’t technology literacy be an exciting marketing strategy? Imagine:
“The iPad. It’s a step forward in software/hardware integration.” Or: “Google Instant Search: Searching ought to give you more results.” For example:
I guess literacy just doesn’t make for a good ad campaign. But when it comes to buying technology, are a majority of folks really hoping to buy magic? I’d love to see a company challenge this pathetic state of affairs with ads showing that excitement can come with understanding.
Design Process Essentials
What do you value in a design process?
At EdLab, our teams often have great latitude in structuring our design processes – indeed, we can change almost every aspect of project management, from inception to final outcomes (and ongoing documentation and reporting). As a consequence, the teams I am a part of – creating diverse software, video, and exhibitions – all work a bit differently. What are the good and bad effects of this freedom? What amount is worth having? To paraphrase Stan Lee:
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
In my everyday work at the lab, I often feel and see the emotional and intellectual effects of shepherding a project through a design process – and negative examples easily come to mind. In considering project work in this way, it is not always clear that it’s a design process per se that leads to each and every outcome (e.g., the emotional response of a team member who feels his or her idea wasn’t adopted), but it seems helpful to consider many (and diverse) aspects of a work environment as part of a design process. In doing so, I hope to assess what structures or freedoms can be articulated as being worth having with a wide range of desirable outcomes in mind.
Consider a common situation: when is a team responsible for documenting its progress on a product? – Every day? Every week? To what extent? And how? What is the cost of this? What is the purpose? What decisions will or could be made as a result of such documentation? A team that has more latitude when it comes to responding to the need for documentation can tailor it to fit the nature of the project. A ready-made rubric, on the other hand, might not allow for the nuances that the team can account for, but I suspect organizations often favor consistency over specificity. In doing so, I wonder what, on balance, they lose. But also: what is the strain on the team that is left to weigh many variables? Such a rubric is a good example of what kind of components constitute a more structured design process.
To better understand the cost of such structures (i.e., monetary cost, but also their effect on goals like creativity and innovation), I have found it helpful to reflect on characteristics of design processes that I value. A few of those characteristics:
- Sustained Dialogue: Sometimes it’s hard to keep the conversation going. It’s natural to welcome closure – get back to one’s desk, grab a fresh coffee, check a few items off one’s to-do list. If these external pressures cause a dialogue to end too soon, a lot of momentum can be lost. Worse, the more difficult a conversation is – the more diverse the viewpoints, for example – the more a team might want to close it down. Keeping a dialogue open through (and past) the point where a maximum amount of progress can be made is a challenging task.
- Emergent Perspectives: If the goal is to make a new thing (or even revise an old one), it’s often hard to understand what’s possible at the beginning of the project. It is important to have flexibility to learn as you go, though changing directions usually comes at the cost of revising past goals – goals that at least someone on the team is attached to. Perhaps the hardest part of holding up emergence as a component of a design process is knowing when to decide to “stay the course” and deliver a product as-is. There are many examples of how making too much room for change can go wrong.
- Discipline: There are a lot of ways to be distracted on a project, but two extremes stand out: 1) being too focused on a small task, or 2) being too focused on the “big picture.” A disciplined designer knows how to weave between these extremes in an iterative, cyclical way. In my mind, he or she carries the weight of at least two traditions at once: a tradition that allows him or her to excel on a small task, as well as a historical perspective that connects the task to a larger purpose.
Short of following a structured design process, cultivating one, or attempting to cultivate one, I expect an organization would articulate habits, dispositions, and behaviors that are valued. But, I wonder, could these characteristic be understood as part of “a process”? And is it beneficial to frame them as such?