What are your goals for graduate school? What are your goals for this class? How do you see them intersecting?
Grad school is a way for me to make a career shift from social research to technology design. I picked the LDT program because it seemed like a great bridge to make that happen. I've spent this year fleshing out my design skills and gaining confidence in my ability to come up with innovative ideas. I grow as a designer every time I'm in a class that forces me to come up with creative ideas. Working in a creative team is also excellent practice for me. While I'm not sure that I will end up as an educational designer, per se, I do think there is value in learning how educational designers think. I'm also terrible at spacial design, so I hope this is a way to build some proficiencies in this area.
Dan - Dana, thanks for your reflections. I hope that this course can 'force you to come up with creative ideas'. i also hope that increasing your skill set with one set of design thinking skills will help you with others. I hope what you can get out of this class is the skills to advocate for kearners in any setting you might find yourself in.
Carrie - Hi Dana, I completely empathize when you say that spatial design is not your forte. While I can work decently in 2D, I have trouble reframing 3D spaces (especially thinking of new ways to organize an existing 3D space). However, I think that your creative eye and comprehensive background in graphic design will definitely be applicable to the 3D realm, so you might find spacial design more intuitive than you predicted!
Barnard I like the idea of learning to think how educational designers think. Not only will it make us see how to create for an educational setting, but it will also allow us to see their shortcomings and where they have failed in the past. I hope you get better at spacial design, but I'm sure you're already good at it. I'm also a fan of working in these creative teams. I already feel more creative, just by going to Flax to shop for pens.
Rolf - Dana, thank you for your thoughts. What type of technology design are you interested in? I think we'll definitely cover some tools and techniques to think about designing spaces - even things like lego toys can help in the prototyping of spaces...
Tirzah - Dana, I totally feel you on appreciating being in a class that forces you to come up with creative ideas. Even if you're not going into educational design, it's cool to see how educational designers think and perhaps to be able to influence or facilitate learning in areas, even if they're not intended to be educational, or to understand why some spaces/tools are user-friendly, and others are not.
What have you learned in graduate school? How do you know that you have learned it?
Working in Groups/Collaboration
Before grad school, I had experience working with others in an office setting. In those collaborations, everyone had a specific role and there was a clear hierarchy-- generally not much debate over who does what. This is the first time I have consistently worked on teams where roles are mostly fluid and there is no clear hierarchy. This type of collaboration feels very different from working with a supervisor and support staff. I can tell I learned something because my groups are running more smoothly than they did when I first started. I think what I learned was how to be more strategic when selecting tasks to take on in group projects. Basically, getting better at sharing tasks and playing to my strengths.
Exposure to Design Processes
Every quarter I have taken at least two courses with heavy design elements. So far, I have been exposed to backwards design, d.school design practices, designing for future technology, human-computer interaction design, design of graphic novels, and curriculum design. I could demonstrate learning by listing elements associated with all of these. Some of them I have learned well enough that they are now part of my design practices and I actually use and think about them on a day-to-day basis.
Skills Related to Applications
Before grad school, I did not know InDesign, facebook, or really how to use wikis. Now I do. I can give performances of understanding by making stuff with them as well as help others learn how to use them.
Sarah - Dana, it sounds like you have really learned a lot in grad school so far! I hope you can take this knowledge with you where ever you go.
Jim - Dana, its great to see you've learned so much about design. Open question- have we in LDT learned anything about education or technology?
Field Trip to Y2E2
On May 16, my project team and I ventured over to the Y2E2 building for our Learning Spaces field trip. We'd heard that it was a cutting-edge environmentally engineered (themed?) building and wanted to check it out for ourselves. This also seemed like an appropriate place to visit since our project for the CDM is tied to the environment and conservation.
One of the first things we noticed was the beautiful breezeway and courtyard between the buildings. It was an extremely hot day, but the courtyard was a noticeably cool, comfortable temperature; a real feat of smart environmental engineering! I'm pretty sure this temperate outside area was an intentional part of their design, but I couldn't find any posted information that confirmed it. On the other hand, I am not an environmental engineer and their target audience-- environmental engineers-- probably already know why this area was so cool.
It was clear that the inside of the building was also designed principally for environmental engineers, and not lay people, as well. When we were inside admiring the clear glass roof, we noticed that the panels in the ceiling looked like they could possibly be opened. There we were, gazing at the ceiling and having a pretty intense conversation about how the ceiling panels open, why they open, and who opens them, when an environmental engineering student passed by. Sarah asked him if he knew and he explained to us that because hot air rises, they put windows a the top to draw the hot air up and keep the building naturally cool. The panels have sensors and automatically open at certain times of the day. This wasn't posted anywhere; he just knew the answer. Before we talked to him, we had all sorts of hypotheses, but his answer was so clear and reasonable. Duh! He was obviously their target user. Any info posted about this feature would have been for our benefit and not for the benefit of any of the students or professors who regularly use the building.
Overall, I didn't really observe any explicitly engineered learning materials. There were wall-sized bulletin boards that were almost completely empty. There were a couple of confusingly designed donor plaques with concept maps (I wish I took a picture-- they were truly baffling). This makes me think that this building is more implicitly a learning space-- their engineering principles in practice; the example, but not the textbook. This is totally acceptable if their only target audience is people who already know about environmental engineering. On the other hand, if they want to spread the world about environmental engineering-- to "create the spark," as the CDM would say-- they might need a few exhibits or a few building feature maps with some explanations. I'm pretty sure we didn't even scratch the surface of all the interesting learning about environmental engineering that was possible in that space.
In terms of implications for design at the CDM, I think being explicit about design choices is helpful. My teammates are all grad students at Stanford and none of us were able to articulate the hot air thing as well as the environmental engineer. This makes me think about including detailed explanations about most things; don't take it for granted that people know (especially children who may have such different levels of exposure to content).
Dan - Thanks Dana for sharing this. I liked your anecdote about the differences in understanding between the CEE student and your team, nice example of how experts see a situation differently from novices - it was also nice that you were able to get this student to explain it to you in terms that made sense for you. I suspect if I asked you about this principle in a few months you'll have remembered it quite well. I also like your connections with CDM and the ability for a space and/or the people inside that space to 'create a spark' I wonder if the CEE gropus could connect this space with one on the fuzzier side of campus to create that spark and get peoploe interested in environmental issues on campus. Thanks also for including the need to be explicit in your desigbn process, this is something I am always trying to get better at.
Library Visit
I visited the Art and Architecture Library in the Cummings Art Building. My visit started off on the right foot-- when I came into the building, I noticed an exhibition by a classmate from my graphic novel class last quarter. So cool to see her paintings! While this library is pretty empty, it's one of the louder ones. People at the front desk in the education library usually whisper their requests; people in the art library talk in full-voice. I'm not really annoyed by this, it was just different. On the whole, this is kind of a boring library-- the books are old, there aren't that many computers (though I have a laptop), there aren't many interesting conversations happening. My favorite library so far is the multimedia library in Meyer. I like the low buzz of voices and all the people engrossed in their multimedia projects. There's a lot of creative energy in that place. The art library, on the other hand, ironically doesn't feel like it has a lot of creative energy.
Dan - Nice comment here about the irony of the art library not feeling like a creative place. What do you think users of that space would say?
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