Core77 Design Awards 2022

I’m very pleased to see Stuart Candy’s project “Imagination is a Commons” is the winner for Core77’s award for Speculative Design, 2022. Back in March of 2021, I received a somewhat unusual paid request — for studio photography services. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were still out of reach for many, and facilities and institutions remained shuttered, I was suffering from cabin fever isolation and grieving the death of my uncle.

I was finishing up my second Master’s degree, and Pittsburgh had only begun to thaw after a long and difficult winter. Without access to the campus photography studio, Stuart had reached out to his network at Carnegie Mellon, seeking alternatives. As luck would have it, during my undergraduate studies I invested in my own studio photography setup.

My barebones digital photography setup

Scrappy resilience was a constant theme throughout 2020. Students without studio space were constantly finding ways to make do. This was one of those rare moments where few compromises were necessary, and I had everything I needed on hand. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a bag full of artifacts from the future…

T-shirts from a coding festival in the year 2030

Social distancing and staying home (for the better part of a year) had distorted my sense of time. In the first year of the pandemic, there were days and weeks that seemed to vaporize, and weekends that lasted a month. To hold these artifacts, and to focus on them through a viewfinder, I felt as though I had stepped completely outside of time and space. This was a perfect diversion from my mundane existence, and a reminder that this too shall pass.

Thank you, Stuart and Ceda. And congratulations!

Week 14 update: The Late Edition

The final push is now upon us. This past week I’ve been working nearly around the clock with my team, pushing to bring about our future vision. One of the most labor intensive, yet rewarding parts of this project has been the production of a newscast from the future. We’ve made countless script revisions, scraped stock images, sound, footage, and crafted motion graphics elements to bring this story to life. It’s been challenging, but I’m excited to see the final results.

What’s working: our approach to generating a video is deeply grounded in research. We’re incorporating concepts generated with participants — public educators who so generously gave us their time and perspectives on the present and future state of teaching in American schools. We’re also building our story to represent several systems-level shifts, including national legislation, teachers union contracts, and individual school reforms. We used several different futuring frameworks to develop these narratives, including: cone of possibility, backcasting, STEEP+V, Multilevel Perspective mapping, affinity mapping, and worldview filters.

This process has been anything but precise. The future is something we build, not something we predict through careful measurements of trends. Understanding this truth has been very reassuring. Now that we are approaching a conclusion, I feel as though I have been on a long drive through undeveloped territory. The daylight of exploratory research gave way to the twilight of generative research and in the pitch of night we evaluated concepts. With only one headlight, we squinted off into the distance, to read the signs. Sometimes the precipitation of a pandemic obscured everything, but we relished the intermittent moments of clarity.

Those latter kinds of moment were by far the most exciting. “Oh, oh, what if…” was a common preamble to productive yet heady conversations with peers over zoom, as we scrambled together various visual representations in Miro and Figma. 

This workflow has been essential to synthesizing content and a visual language for our video, which we’ve been iterating on through various stages of prototyping. I’m concerned about the overall fidelity and recognize that this will be important to suspension of disbelief for our intended audience — policymakers and various stakeholders connected to PPS must find this artifact compelling enough to act and bring these concepts into a shared reality.

On the technical side, video editing and motion graphics are computationally intensive tasks. I built a beefy workstation prior to starting at CMU, and this machine has been essential to so many tasks and assignments. Nevertheless, I’ve found that this work has strained my system’s capacity. I’ve purged files to make room for temporary caching and rendering outputs. I’ve reset my router in a desperate effort to speed up the transfer of data to Google Drive, and ran my system in a barebones state to maximize resources available to Adobe CC’s memory-hungry apps.

The stress I place upon the tools I use to design are complemented by the stress I’ve applied to myself. My sleep has been intermittent. I take short naps on the couch and found myself on more than one occasion this week working through the sounds of birds before the break of dawn. These late night hours are quiet and free of distraction, but tend to make the day that follows less than appealing. I’m staying awake through this last week of lectures, but finding my mind trailing off into thoughts about the timeline and how I might optimize frame rates for nominal render times. I’m obsessed with getting this video done, but know that this pace is not sustainable.

Week 13: Artifact Generation

We’ve began to generate assets for our final artifacts. This should be an exciting time for us. For the last 13 weeks, we’ve been living and breathing the problem space. The future of Portland Public Schools is not a matter of fate, it is something that will be built — not only designed, but also transformed by external forces and deliberate interventions. This work and our team’s research are only one tiny piece of this larger unfolding process, and we cannot know what impact (if any) will come from what we have done.

On some level, I cannot help but feel a little bit sad as we conclude this work. I have a very real sense of the scope of this issue and understand that fifteen weeks cannot generate anything conclusive. Nevertheless, we must honor this process and the deliverable. There is an underlying contradiction in this work. What this project calls for is “bold humility.” We know that our research is not conclusive, we also know that without bold presentation, we cannot inspire meaningful change or the greater vision by Prospect Studio.

Our primary concept is a news story about PPS holding their first ARC summit, and what it means for the future of Portland schools and teachers. We can use this medium to communicate the most salient details while glossing over the more bureaucratic aspects of our system level thinking. For secondary artifacts, we’re thinking about “swag” that is typical for a professional conference, as well as a custom logo for the ARC council.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to resolve these artifacts to the highest fidelity possible. I know that the success of this project rests somewhat on our ability to persuade others, and we cannot know how this work will be interpreted if the artifacts are not convincing or feel too generic. I’m also worried that we have spent so much time working on the particulars that we haven’t given ourselves room for making these things.

I wish that we had a better sense of what is expected, and how craft will be factored into our grade. This is the first time that I’ve taken a studio class where nothing was made until the last two weeks. I expect that our team will be evaluated on the strength of our research and the clarity of our concepts, but as a studio class, I cannot shake this feeling that we should have been crafting prototypes along the way.

My hope for this week is that the momentum of making and the joy of purely creative pursuits will have a feedback effect to keep us motivated through this final push. I’m excited about the potential for the project even though we are still grappling with an incredibly high degree of uncertainty.

Week 12 Update: Evaluative Research Presentation and Reflection on Reaching The Project's Final Stage

This week our team presented our evaluative research to Prospect Studio (Fiona and other representatives were asynchronous for this session) and our guest, Arnold Wasserman. This presentation is the last before our final deliverable, and represents the conclusion of our research phase. While there are some loose ends for us to address (and further evaluation of our concept has not yet been attempted), we are now in the early stages of artifact synthesis.

The last few weeks have helped our team to understand the importance of user evaluation, what strategies do and do not work well in a remote/online context. In particular, we learned that building a survey is a miniature design project unto itself. The creation of an interactive system, and evaluating the results required significant labor up front and a lot of uncertainty throughout. Nevertheless, I feel that our team was successful in achieving specific goals.

I’m proud to say that we managed to get several different concepts in front of several educators from around the country as well as from within PPS specifically. We successfully navigated and sorted through feedback to gauge overall patterns of responses to several concepts as well as system-level evaluations. We managed to coordinate and divide our labor effectively, and communicated asynchronously as we brought key components together. This process was mirrored in the creation of our latest slide deck for Wednesday.
We received helpful feedback and challenges to our concept following our team’s presentation. As previously has been the case, our team had a good sense of who ought to respond to specific questions, since our divided labor has granted each team member some degree of specialization and familiarity with the topic we’ve been researching. Specifically, Arnold Wasserman was curious about how our artifacts could communicate these concepts in a compelling and persuasive manner. Arnold Wasserman pointed out that school boards and the people elected to them, have a tendency to be self-serving, to the detriment of the districts they represent. He questioned how our concepts would overcome the significant obstacle of implementation, especially given the fact that school boards and public officials hold the levers of power and the teachers are functionally an underclass in the United States.

This is something I’ve been thinking about since the beginning of this project, and I related back to these thoughts in response. My ideas are largely based on the work of Donella Meadows, and her famous essay on leverage points.

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

In particular, look at points three and four: the power to self organize and the goals of the system are key to understanding the forces necessary to reform PPS to more closely resemble the vision from Prospect Studio. I agree with Arnold Wasserman’s observation regard the school boards and policy makers, but I also see a real opportunity with this difficult and problematic group. They hold the levers, so we need only find a way to align their goals with the reforms we envisions for PPS.

If we accept the premise that politicians and school board members care about their own tenure and individual interests, and do so above all other considerations, then what we need to produce are artifacts that provokes the parents and registered voters of that school district. Once an activated and inspired public knows what they desire, they will vote for and ultimately elect representatives who promise to bring that vision to life. We have seen this on matters ranging from civil rights and infrastructure, to economics and war. Politicians will follow public pressure to keep their own seats warm.

Arnold seemed pleased with my answer, and suggested that our topic relates directly to the fate of our nation’s democracy — so, no pressure at all!

This weekend our team held three meetings to jumpstart this process of future artifact synthesis, and we have been more or less fruitful in this endeavor. It’s exciting to be in the final stretch, but our team has been struggling to maintain momentum lately. The demands of presentation weeks, and the rush to complete our research, often requires long hours, multiple zoom meetings outside of class, and many late nights. This has began to produce negative health consequences for our team.

We’ve been intensely looking at teacher burnout, but have also been confronted with the burnout of a pandemic, and the rigorous academics of a graduate program. Illness, headaches, and signs of exhaustion have crept into our team dynamic, and I’m concerned about what this will mean now that we are heading into the final push for this semester. What we really need at this stage is that spark of creativity and divergent thinking. It’s hard to do this level of work while also pushing up against the steady hum of stress and exhaustion.

Brainstorming session, mapping events and trends to eventual implementation of key ARC concepts

I think it was a gigantic error on the part of CMU to breakup our spring break. I understand the rationale, and the concerns around travel, but this alternative strategy of giving students a random Monday or Tuesday off has not provided the benefits of time off to rest. I simply cannot “sleep faster” when given a 24 hour window, and I cannot catch up when one day of classes is omitted from an otherwise packed calendar. I’m burned out. I’ve got this strange ringing in my ear that won’t let up, and I’m having more trouble concentrating than at any other time this year.

Languishing in the fog of constant deadlines, constant tasks, constant meetings, constant emails, Slack messages, updates, etc., etc., have left me depleted. It has also sucked the joy out of doing this work. I hope this terrible mental and physical state doesn’t last, because I don’t see how I can be productive while feeling this way.

Week 11: qualitative evaluation of concepts

Our online survey is now underway, and while this virtual format isn’t exactly like so-called “speed dating,” we are hoping that it will be able to serve a similar purpose for our research. Creating a meaningful online experience for our participants was a tall order, especially with such tight constrains. There are many risks when created a fully automated and hands-off system. Not being there to clarify or to address questions or concerns in realtime was something we needed to accept as a trade-off. In exchange, we have a dozen unique participants ranging from 2 years to 27 years of experience, and from various districts around the country.

So far, the majority of responses have been from an online community of English teachers, so our data is skewed toward this perspective. On the plus side, English teachers provide excellent written responses. To avoid the pitfalls of statistics and quantitative analysis, we designed an online survey with open text fields, and we framed our questions around hypothetical scenarios. This would provide us with reflection and insights into how teachers imagine these concepts for themselves, and what perceived deficiencies come up for them in thinking about these systems in action.

Screenshot of survey responses, exported into a CSV file

The last 24 hours in particular have been very exciting, as we finally gained access to online educator communities. This process has been slower than wanted, but we first needed to fully develop our survey before we could deploy it. This process in and of itself was a design challenge. 

Last weekend, we decided to use the Tripetto platform. This gave us the same logic capabilities as TypeForm, but without any additional costs. It became clear almost immediately that we would need to prototype and refine our survey before receiving teacher feedback, and this effort was highly collaborative.

With multiple teammates, it was possible to divide this task into several areas that could be worked on independently and in parallel. We first decided on a basic structure  and strategized the division of labor. Carol worked on the text/content based on a logic diagram we crafted together. While Carol crafted this outline, I created a mockup version in Tripetto. Without access to finalized concept sketches, I took some poetic license.

Screenshot of 2nd iteration prototype survey

As Carol and I worked together to refine the text copy, Cat and Chris worked together to create images and descriptive text for our participants. Once all of this content was ready for Tripetto, we began doing test runs, trying to break the experiences. This revealed some quirks with Tripetto’s logic functions and some of the less apparent features.

There are a few honorable mentions; Tripetto has a lot of subtle features that we often take for granted in other online experiences. Things like placeholder text, required fields, multiple choice radio buttons, checkboxes, multi and single-line text boxes. During the refinement phase, these features became essential and it was exciting to discover them—only after they were deemed essential enough to be worth the effort.

The minimalist UI of Tripetto made these features less evident, but not too hard to locate or execute. From start to finish, this experience felt a little shaky and uncertain but viable.

I often found myself this week grinding away on the platform, slipping into a state of mind that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow.” In other words, creating a survey on Tripetto wasn’t easy to use, but just challenging enough to keep me interested in working through obstacles. I think that what helped support this effort the most was building models within platforms where everyone on the team is already fluent. For us, this was primarily Miro, Google Docs, and Sheets.

Screenshot of two representations of the survey, carried across platforms (Miro and Sheets)

First impressions matter, and we didn’t want to put out anything that wasn’t necessarily a work in progress. Even with this in mind, we did have a few last minute tweaks as we adapted our survey to maximize pulling power with other social media environments.

Arnold Wasserman’s desk critique was incredibly valuable for our team, as his feedback helped us to consider the importance of our survey as a communication tool. He recommended that we make the implicit, explicit, to directly communicate to our participants what we expected and why. We were encouraged to explain what questions we were asking, and to share this openly. This kind of transparency can be tedious, especially in text-based systems. I took this to task and simplified statements throughout the entire experience.

This gave the survey a personality all its own; like a casual and curious friend, we asked about specifics but with little pressure. We kept things open.

Open data cannot be calculated, it must be evaluated for patterns. Next week will be a scramble to synthesize patterns and new insights as we work to finalize system concepts into well defined parameters. We hope that through this process we will also identify opportunities to produce relevant and compelling artifacts (our final output/deliverable).

It still feels like a risk to be so far into a process and to still not have a clear idea of what it is we are making. We instead draw our assurances from what we have already made: an index of relevant articles, interview notes, countless diagrams and visual representations of high-level abstract concepts and maps at almost every level of visual fidelity imaginable, hundreds of presentation slides, dozens of pages of reflective text, and months worth of slack messages, shared links, and drafted emails. We created interactive digital workshop spaces and protocols for our participants, and archives with 256-bit encryption.

When looking at the collective volume of effort from this team, it’s difficult to imagine that we wouldn’t make something meaningful in the end. Is that too optimistic? Ask me in a month.

Week 9 Update: Presenting Generative Research Findings

Fiona Hovenden (of Prospect Studio) was back in class with us this week. Monday through Wednesday blurred together as our team worked around the clock to bring our findings into coherence. Through this process, we found that it was easier than past presentations for us to produce clear and concise summaries of our work. This outcome stems from two key advantages:

• Our team continues to get better at coordination and understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This has accelerated our communication and the delegation of tasks.

• As we continue living and breathing in this problem space, we have gained deep familiarity with core concepts and structures. This has allowed us to develop a kind of fluency in addressing Portland Public Schools as a topic.

There is still a lot that we do not know, but this is something which we must (as a matter of need) become comfortable accepting as a default state. There are limits to what we can and cannot know over a fifteen week period, with limited access to our stakeholders.

Nevertheless, we are slowly inching toward viable concepts.

These concepts are derived from last week’s workshops and diary studies. There was a lot of doubt and uncertainty going into our work last week, as we started with a zero participants. By Tuesday, all of this changed, and we found ourselves scrambling to coordinate with five different participants. Additionally, we coordinated with our counterparts (“Team Ahaa”) and I even took part in one of their workshops—after nearly 11 years of living in Portland, I had some qualified opinions to share.

This accelerated and compressed path from research to presentation ensured that we quickly moved from documentation to synthesis. Our team only had ten minutes to present all of this, and this constraint was helpful motivation to distill everything we learned over the last two weeks. So, what did we learn?

At a high level, generative research helped us to understand how educators see their relationship with various stakeholders. We gained more intimate, personal, and “day in the life of” perspectives from educators. We also got surprising feedback regarding their perception of possible futures. In general, there is not much hope for things improving substantially in the next ten years, but there is still a very real sense of urgency to make things better. This paradox has been with us since our first round of interviews but remains unresolved.

The most salient insights for our team were around issues of resilience and community: 

• Educators feel supported when colleagues show up and help proactively

• Informal but reliable networks among educators support their resilience

• Lack of resources and top-down surprises make teachers feel unsupported

• Quality of life and mental health resources are poorly leveraged

“Empathy” and “Community” are other target areas in the Educator Essentials ring.

In our team’s presentation debrief, we had a lengthy discussion about this overlap, and our concerns about spreading ourselves too thin or not staying on target. This is an ongoing conversation and part of our general concerns for this project. We considered whether or not ARC is a “keystone” goal— resting on requisite conditions, and also essential to achieving other areas. This enmeshment is not entirely incompatible with the brief and Prospect Studio’s understanding of the problem space, but we must carry the burden of interpretation.

As we continue developing and evaluating concepts and potential interventions, we hope to achieve more focus on ARC, and to draw clear distinctions between outcomes and means to outcomes—e.g., is empathy an outcome of ARC, or is it a means to achieve ARC? This isn’t yet well defined, but I have faith in our team’s ability to resolve it.

Coming away from our Wednesday presentation, I can say that this task was both a relief and a source of pride. It was a huge relief to affirm key findings from Prospect Studio’s work, and also a moment of pride to have found these insights through workshops and protocols developed in house. This validated our research methods and demonstrated our core competency. Our protocols and assets were effective and entirely reproducible.

In terms of project management, we also took time to reflect on what was and was not working with our process and team contract. We do this every week as part of our “Rose, Bud, Thorn, and Shoutout” check-in exercise. We still felt more rushed than we’d preferred, and thought about ways to better support each other. We decided to designate “backup roles” to augment the facilitator and note-taker tasks. We hope that this will keep everyone equally engaged, while still offering flexibility and variety throughout the process. There are diminishing returns to these types of reforms, as we are already more than half way through the project. Nevertheless, every improvement counts. 

Week 8 Update: Generative Research and Future Visions of Portland Public Schools

We began this week with a guest lecture from Adam Cowart, a PhD candidate in the transition design program. He introduced us to the concept of CLA (Causal Layered Analysis). We used this framework to better understand the landscape of our problem space at Portland Public Schools. Adam described different facets of the problem space through the lens of “litany filters.” To recognize what futures are feasible, we need to understand the triad of history, present, and future, and what elements in our landscape pull, push, or weigh down progress.

We took some time in class to reframe our insights through this framework, and began synthesis of potential elements to build a bridge toward the future vision created by Prospect Studio. This process began slowly, but after some heavy lifting we began filling out the diagram with great enthusiasm! It was refreshing to revisit our secondary research (which was already categorized under a STEEP-V framework). It was revealing to see visually how much further we have advanced our understanding of this problem space since literature review and background reading.

Outside of class, our team was busier than ever — working to adapt and overcome the obstacles we’ve encountered in our generative research phase has not been easy. I’ve struggled to support these efforts. The external factors of my personal and professional life have been an ongoing source of strain. I feel so much gratitude to the support and encouragement I’ve received from this team, and this week I felt a great deal of pressure to reciprocate.

Sample of generative research protocols

This effort to pay back the generosity I received (when I needed it most) began with a complete/comprehensive draft of our protocols for generative research, and the specifications for our workshop. Working with Carol, we delivered this to the team ahead of schedule. It was necessary for us to draft new protocols and workshop exercises to include a broader audience, outside of Portland Public Schools. We found that last week was somewhat of a dead end for seeking participation from our intended stakeholders (administrators and educators at PPS).

For our workshop, we wanted to know how different stakeholders perceive their relationships with counterparts, learn what different stakeholders prioritize and why, gain deeper understanding of how educators think about the future of public education, and to explore and define preferred futures.

We conducted three separate workshop sessions with educators outside of PPS. This included neighboring districts of PPS (Gresham-Barlow), as well as out-of-state educators. This approach allowed us to glean insights regarding that which is common in the US public school system, and that which is more specific to Portland. While this adaptation is not without its risks to skewed data, it is far more preferable that to remain without any additional insights beyond our primary research activities.

Screenshots of workshop activity

This was my first experience with executing participatory design with stakeholders and it has been such a rollercoaster of emotions. Since Carol and I worked on the protocol together, it was only logical that we also create the visual and interactive components for the workshop. We iterated on our initial concept by practicing with our own team, with each member taking a turn roleplaying as a participant. This helped us to work out the kinks and refine details before putting anything in the hands of our participants.

The first workshop with a real participant was very revealing. Having access to their thought process in real time, their visual associations, priorities, and ideas about the future were peeled back in layers, digging deeper into their lived experiences than we ever got through primary research and conversational interviews. Even the generation of simple sketches gave us glimpses into their inner worlds. I now question how important it was to conduct traditional interviews in the first place. Workshops are just so much more dynamic and active than interviews, and I consistently came away feeling more connected to the participants and their experiences.

This weekend was highly reflective. With new insights in hand, we spent over five hours evaluating what we discovered. There was so much for us to consider and it was only once we had the chance to pick it all apart together as a team that we could begin to make sense of it all. Many of our initial assumptions were blown out of the water. Our newfound perspective gave us a real sense of how important relationships are in the field of teaching. We also learned that technology is probably the least important factor for educators — with the exception of a desire for students to have high-speed internet at home, there was little to no interest in improving access to technology generally.

I’m still getting used to applying so many different approaches and methods so quickly.  I feel like I’m only occasionally operating with a sense of clarity. There has been prolonged fuzziness that’s difficult to describe or ignore. It seems as though new insights provoke deeper questioning, while offering little in the way of certainty. I think this is just the experience of progressively revealing collective and individual ignorance. Before learning enough to act decisively, we must first gaze into the vast abyss of what we still do not know.

Week 7: Expanding scope of generative research

This week, our in-class sessions were dominated by guest lecturers who provided insights into our current work in progress. On Monday, Stacey Williams and Richard The asked us for our team’s “elevator pitch” and then asked us a few questions about the work we were doing:

• Is the artifact(s) part of the intervention, or just a representation?

• Is there a conceptual map that anybody should be working on to provide a system?

• Can we design a process that will unify the decision making process at PPS?

• Creating space where they can reflect on their own lives and experiences, and present a different model for education?

Carol was quick to respond regarding the relational mapping from our last presentation, and how our understanding of the relationships between administrators and other stakeholders has revealed a potential leverage point for meaningful interventions, but that the artifact should be something that inspires change.

Peter added that we’re separating the artifact from the process, but will develop an artifact that is representative of the depth of our research and understanding of the problem space. We then spent some time brainstorming out loud about some form of “ARC Institution” in the future could help to achieve the goals outlined in the Prospect Studio brief. A couple interventions we may want to prioritize:

• Leadership development curriculum, teaching design and reflexivity.

• Summer courses that are paid separately from the 9-month salary.

Peter reminded us that “future is fiction” and that it is our job as designers to bring that fiction into high enough fidelity that we make a persuasive argument through form. This ultimately means that we must situate the proposal within a fiction, and build from there.

Richard The wanted to know what other communication materials might inspire this. While not suggesting that we need to answer such questions with any degree of immediacy, we should put onto our horizon a few questions around how the ARC Institute might talk about these goals. For example, this could be a poster that says what life-long learning looks like.

Stacey’s other comments tied in well with the reading that Peter provided (Rutger Bregman). Specifically, this strange mismatch between education and the typical way we encounter work: i.e., in school, each subject is divided and compartmentalized, whereas in our work, often we must apply mastery of multiple subjects and do not have the luxury of flattening our problems into a single subject matter. Stacey pointed out that we (meaning educators, but also society) are boxed into binary thinking whereas other cultures have non-duality, non-binary ways of thinking.

Knowing that this entanglement is an obstacle to change, we must also consider what other sudden changes (from external factors, such as a pandemic or climate change) might present opportunities.

On Wednesday, Liz Sanders ran us through a series of role-playing exercises, where we considered the differences in priorities for stakeholders. This was confusing at first, but eventually we sync’d up and began negotiating as if we were in fact those different people in a school system. I was representing the thought process at a district level, while Carol played a student. I recognized that there were basic needs that were not at all address in our hypothetical scenario (a hackathon to create new and sustainable transportation for the future).

This was eyeopening and made our team think differently about our own approach to generative research…

Oh, our research. It has been challenging these last two weeks, and we’re worried about getting stuck. Despite so much cold calling/emailing acquaintances, we’ve found that right now in particular is a bad time to solicit any participation. PPS is migrating to a hybrid model, with teachers having stated a great deal of concern about safety. Additionally, this next week is their spring break, so any activities that require reflection on their daily lives will not capture work activity. This is also the only week of respite they will be afforded before summer break.

Nevertheless, there is some scintilla of joy to be extracted from this obstacle. I’ve had more motivation to reach out to people I haven’t been in touch with since graduation. Some of them are doing really great, others not. Some are starting families, others are starting careers. Much to my surprise, two acquaintances are actually in the process of becoming K-12 educators. This was not expected, but it was heartening to know that such alignments exist.

Our team is also struggling with external pressures: wrapping up mini courses, midterm expectations, job hunting and interviews, design challenges, personal struggles, and more. One of the things we specified in our team contract was transparency for such events. My team has been supporting me the best they can while I navigate these struggles and diversions. I too have been supporting them the best I can.

This weekend was very productive, as we generated new protocols and refined our workshop to included a broader range of participants. I’m especially excited to try out some of the techniques we’ve been considering, including: “Thing From The Future” based on the work of Stuart Candy, prioritization card sorts, and relational mapping. That last exercise was directly inspired by our conversation with Liz Sanders.

Thanks to a 20 oz. can of Red Bull, I was able to power through my very packed Wednesday, and I’m glad I made it that session, since we ended up monopolizing Liz in our breakout room — she seemed to be genuinely interested in our project, which was very, very humbling.

On the personal side of things, I’m glad to have my job interview and design challenge behind me. It’s been difficult to juggle so much, especially while still grieving the loss of a family member. I’ve been more emotionally raw, and feel less focused than I’d like. Some of this is due to a loss of sleep and not the workload. I seem to be “fine” during the day time, but when the sun sets, and the world gets quiet, I still think of him. I miss you, Uncle Ron. I’m sorry I won’t be there to send you to your final resting place. Like so many we’ve lost this year, you deserved better than this, and sending flowers to those left behind feels insufficient in the face of so much loss.

We’re about to cross the vital half-way mark in the semester. Normally this would include a spring break of our own, but due to concerns about increased student travel, we instead have pre-scheduled “off days” to (at least in theory) provide some periods of rest. It is something like having a nap instead of a full night’s sleep. We can make do, but that doesn’t mean we need to like it.

Week 3: Portland Public Schools — Reflection on Researching Educator Essentials For a Vision of Teachers Who Are Resilient, Adaptive, Open to Change

“In sum, if you can set yourself up with a definite question for every day in the field, find a solid, reliable way to get the data you need to answer it, and feel confident in the insight that emerges- you will get where you need to be in the long run.”

—Christena Nippert-Eng

This week, our team took a deep dive into secondary research. Using the STEEP analysis framework, we assembled a large collection of articles, relevant URLs, case studies, and much, much more within a relatively short period of time—the power of scale is in play for reasons I’ll illuminate soon. Close reading of this text was then distilled into short summary statements. Hat tip to Dr. Elaine Gregersen, for this wonderful article on how to make use of spreadsheets for research. This approach had several advantages:

1. a clear division of labor.

Specifically, our team was able to divide our secondary research along discrete domains/categories while also sharing any incidental discoveries. This “yes, and” approach to research lowered the stakes and allowed for maximum contribution by every member of our team.

2. expanded exploration and discovery.

We were given a specific focus of our own choosing, and this was based entirely on our affinities, curiosities, and professional backgrounds. A clear advantage of having such a diverse group was our ability to apply personalized knowledge toward an information gathering process.

3. Rapid synthesis.

After gathering our sources and insights, and taking time to discuss our findings as a group, it was easy to recognize patterns and apply our newfound information to the task of formulating dozens of relevant interview questions. This process set us on a clear path from secondary research and lit review to primary and ethnographic research.

4. Clarity and transferability.

This information has been collected in a manner that will potentially benefit other teams; the indexical structure of the information we’ve collected, when paired with short summary statements, will enable others to quickly browse a significant amount of research in a relatively short period of time. It’s a buffet of relevant information!

We’re on the precipice of a convergent process, and we can now begin to glean some visions of the future of PPS beyond what was offered in the brief. The most dramatic insight revolves around “The Great Reset” brought upon us by COVID-19 is revealing unseen potential futures. We often cannot see what is possible until it happens, and the sudden shift to work/study from home is no exception. American schools are strained by unique technological and social needs. People are isolated, but also finding new and compelling ways to communicate and collaborate. We are working from within the context a novel problem and circumstance, and in doing so revealing new methods of organization and interaction.

There is a window of opportunity that I fear might be closing as vaccine rollout accelerates and we embrace a return to “normalcy” (a pre-pandemic world that we want to believe, desperately, still exists). If we return to this sleepy shadow of what once was, we risk a deep and terrible slumber that our children will never forgive us for—a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If we return to old habits and old ways of thinking, we will do so at the expense of those most negatively impacted by COVID-19. The underlying power structures and inequality that we cannot ignore under current conditions will be something we’ll be very tempted to sweep back under the rug once people are able to return to work without a deadly virus burning through our communities unchecked.

We need clear visions of the future; we need that clarity so much more now than before the pandemic.

Next week, our plan is to setup times for interviews. Now that we have a general landscape of what is known and documented, we have lots of questions to ask and new insights to gain. I’m very pleased with the work our team has been doing and have absolute confidence in our ability to make these interviews a success. The curiosity is palpable at the moment and we’re eager to begin connecting general and specific knowledge. These first-hand insights will fill so many gaps if we can just ask the right kinds of questions.

The current pace seems to be sustainable and the progress that we are making has been very satisfying, but I’ll admit to having symptoms of “Confluenza.” The opportunities afforded by a job fair are not something I can ignore, and while I have done my best to take advantage, I do find the experience a needless distraction. Last year’s “open studio” was downright nauseating. The contradiction of values and actions was disturbing and felt like an intrusion into an important space: the studio was a haven for critical thinking and offered a high degree of psychological safety. The presence of so many “talent seekers” and alumni felt like an intrusion in 2020. This year, those same people were viewing me from a camera inside my home.

Simply put: from a personal perspective, the online/remote format of 2021’s Confluence wasn’t an improvement. The people I spoke with were professional and generous with their time and engagement, but I could feel their fatigue through the screen. There’s just a cloud of general burnout and I admire the way so many people manage to push back against it.

Our team selected Educator Essentials because we recognized the value of educators as vital tissue, making the rest of the body of education whole and capable of movement, growth, and change. Knowing that our ultimate goal is to produce an artifact that inspires an image of educators that are resilient, adaptive, and open to change, I am both grateful and terrified of the flood of countless examples I see every day, through every interaction I share across cameras and screens. I see people who work diligently, compassionately, through these screens.

If you want to get some sense of what I really mean by this (because it is always better to show than to tell), then just watch how these children self organize when an educator is temporarily absent from zoom.  The teacher, Emily Pickering of El Paso, Texas, exhibits these traits, and it is evident in how her students responded in her absence. The future is now and we should marvel at the efforts we are seeing in our daily lives. This moment is so much bigger than all of us. The future isn’t something we can wait in line for. It is something thrust upon us with all of its dazzles and horror. What we are seeing from educators and students is just one piece of a larger picture.

We are not “making the best of this” we ARE the best of this. All of us. For better or worse, everyone is doing the best they can. This was true before the pandemic, but it’s easier to see it now.

Prototyping Cutlery

For one of my final projects this semester, I’m interested in creating a set of eating tools that help account for involuntary muscle movements (e.g., Parkinson's disease or tremors) and other mobility difficulties that limit the enjoyment and consumption of foods; I'm interested in exploring simple solid shapes, living hinges, and assembly forms derived from explicit advantages of additive manufacturing techniques.

[I want to make a really nifty spoon.]

Fabricating physical prototypes will be a challenge (…)

Seriously: fuck you, COVID-19.

This is not the only challenge, however. Finding access to food-safe materials, conducting a series of user tests, iterating forms, and self-directed research will also require creative workarounds to overcome the limitations of working while under “shelter-in-place” orders due to global pandemic.

I have decided to go 100% digital. instead of building various forms and testing their ability to hold fluids under rapid motion, I will instead conduct a series of simulated physics tests to evaluate forms. For the first part of this project, I am required to conduct an A/B test or evaluation. I have decided to conduct dual testing using different 3D programs.

Method 1:

Maxon Cinema 4D includes a variety of physical simulation abilities—including particles and fluid dynamics. I intend to leverage this software’s capacity to test various designs and forms. Tests will be designed to evaluate fluid retention under repeated multi-axial movements. Cutlery designs will be tested against traditional forms (e.g., standard soup spoons).

Method 2:

Blender is a free, open source platform for creating 3D models, rendering, animation, and more. Among the built-in features is a fluid simulator. Combined with rigid body and gravity physics, it should be possible to evaluate a variety of spoon shapes and (potentially) even different forms of cutlery.

Considerations:

By using two different simulations, it should be possible to more thoroughly evaluate a design’s fluid retention abilities.

Timeline:

Week 1 — Cinema 4D Workflow: Since I am already familiar with Cinema 4D, I have decided to begin this project by constructing my first simulation with this software. I will use Fusion 360 to generate original spoon designs, as well as a “traditional” spoon shape to compare performance.

Week 2 — Blender Workflow: Using the assets from week 1, I will spend week 2 developing and executing a comparable test running under Blender’s fluid simulation engine.

Resources:

Blender Tutorial - Realistic Fluid Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmw-BTCbWMw

Cinema 4D Tutorial - Water simulation Animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JehbYBAZw7c

What does Day 1 look like?

Let’s just say I have a lot to learn.

Interactive Design Prototyping

THE TIME HAS COME TO…PUSH THE BUTTON

Wireless communication between Arduino #1 and #2

My current project in IxD Prototyping involves physical computing (i.e., “interactive systems that can sense and respond to the world around them.”) I have worked with Arduino before (Restricted Area, 2017) but this newest project is expected to have a daily use. In my head, I keep a long list of annoying technology interactions—this gets updated frequently. We are saturated with unsatisfying technology and devices that cause more problems than they solve. We have inconveniences stacked upon inconveniences, and if we were to step outside of this environment, you would inevitably conclude that most electronics are made to punish the buyers. I am looking to improve just one such interaction.

Back in 2012 I bought an HD video projector. If you love to watch movies, there is something magical about having “the big screen” at home. I love it. Do you know what I don’t love? Using an infrared remote control on a devices that is mounted above and behind me. Seriously, Epson: what where you guys (and yes, I’m assuming it was a team of men, with their dumb penises getting in the way of common sense) thinking?! The primary function of the remote control is to simply turn the projector on and off. I would gladly give up the remote control entirely if I could simply move the power button to the armrest of my couch. Instead, I must contort my arm in Kama Sutra fashion just to find the right angle to get the sensor to recognize the POWER-ON command from the remote.

Getty Images: the various methods for turning on an Epson HD Projector.

My girlfriend’s method to bypass the projector is more elegant: she retrieves a step-stool from our utility closet and presses the ON/OFF button on the projector chassis. This works well, but … well, let’s just say, it ruins the mood. I began to explore other options, and realized that the primary issue is that IR remotes are directional. The IR sensor is part of the assembly, and cannot be relocated. Arduino is capable of IR communication, it is also capable of RF communication. Radio frequency is far less dependent on line-of-sight, especially within the context of indoor and residential use. Imagine what WiFi would be like if it worked over infrared. Consider also that Apple abandoned their IR remote interface for the Mac.

Enter the Arduino

I found a few open source projects that utilize IR and RF communication:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ir-communication/all

https://www.electroschematics.com/ir-decoder-encoder-part-2-diy-38-khz-irtr-module/

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/electropeak/use-an-ir-remote-transmitter-and-receiver-with-arduino-1e6bc8

https://learn.adafruit.com/using-an-infrared-library/hardware-needed

https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/nRF24L01_prelim_prod_spec_1_2.pdf (PDF Warning)

https://www.deviceplus.com/arduino/nrf24l01-rf-module-tutorial/

https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=421081.0

https://howtomechatronics.com/tutorials/arduino/arduino-wireless-communication-nrf24l01-tutorial/

All of these resources are excellent. I want to call attention to one more link: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/muhammad-aqib/nrf24l01-interfacing-with-arduino-wireless-communication-0c13d4

I have a bone to pick with this one. Take a look at the wiring diagram:

Diagram created by /u/Muhammadaqibdutt

Note the LED pin-out for the receiver. This diagram shows the positive leg of the LED connecting to Pin 3

Now, lets take a look at the code:

The devil is in the details: “digitalWrite(6, HIGH)” condition turns the LED on. Pin 3 does nothing.

This made for some very “fun” troubleshooting. I’ve since ironed out all the kinks, and have successfully pirated the IR remote signal from an Epson brand projector (on loan from the Design Office at CMU), and have moved on to making an enclosure. Will I 3D print or laser cut? I have not yet decided.

Here is some sample code for my RF triggered IR emitter:

(NOTE: this code is just one half of the project, and by itself cannot do anything. You’ll also need IR and RF libraries to make this code work on your Arduino)

#include <SPI.h>
#include <nRF24L01.h>
#include <RF24.h>
#include <IRLibAll.h>
RF24 radio(9, 10); // CE, CSN
const byte address[6] = "00001";
boolean button_state = 0;
int led_pin = 3;
IRsend mySender;
void setup() {
  pinMode(6, OUTPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);
  radio.begin();
  radio.openReadingPipe(0, address);   
  radio.setPALevel(RF24_PA_MIN);
  radio.startListening();
}
void loop()
{
  if (radio.available())
  {
    char text[32] = ""; 
    radio.read(&text, sizeof(text)); 
    radio.read(&button_state, sizeof(button_state));
    if (button_state == HIGH)
    {
      digitalWrite(6, HIGH);
      Serial.println(text);
      //Arduino Remote On/Off button code
      mySender.send(NEC, 0xffa25d);
    }
    else
    {
      digitalWrite(6, LOW);
      Serial.println(text);
    }
  }
  delay(5);
}

Playing Catch-up

Thinking fast vs. looking back

Season 2, episode 1 is easily the most famous episode of the 1950s TV series, I Love Lucy. Ethel and Lucy go to work at a chocolate factory, while Fred and Ricky take on their respective housework. Whether or not you’re familiar with this comedy, chances are you probably know (or are about to know) where this is headed.

I Love Lucy, “Job Switching” (Season 2, Episode 1), 1952

Lucy and Ethel are assigned with the task of wrapping chocolates on an assembly line. Having already disappointed the foreman with their poor performance from earlier in the episode, this is their last chance to avoid being fired. Their task is simple, and repetitive: wrap the chocolates as they come down the belt, and don’t let any chocolates through unwrapped. At first the speed is manageable, but it quickly speeds up, and the quantity of chocolates increases dramatically — and that’s what makes this episode so damn funny. Lucy and Ethel panic. They begin setting chocolates aside, but eventually resort to stuffing the chocolates into their blouses and mouths. At the end of the episode, Fred and Ricky realize that they are terrible housekeepers, and decide that they want Lucy and Ethel to return to their traditional roles. As a token of appreciation, Ricky gives Lucy a gift: a box of chocolates.

What does any of this have to do with LxD, civic engagement, elections, or the unaddressed hazards of 21st century technology? Not much. It is however, a great analogy for my schedule last week. I managed to stay on top of things through the first few weeks of the semester, but then the belt sped up, and I had too many “chocolates” without the capacity to wrap them. I’m now looking back, instead of writing and reflecting in the moment. This shift in perspective has been fruitful, I along with the rest of my team have made significant strides toward our goal of developing a learning experience.

What is still missing are my posts on Medium and this personal blog. I want to document this process, but am doing so one week later. The next two posts (06-11 February) are dated to correspond with the class schedule and for their prompts. This is done for clarity, and not a deception. The advantage of writing from this vantage point is that I now have the benefit of knowing how these ideas unfolded. I can write about what was done, and how it changed things.

Who are my learners?

What can we teach about civic engagement?

Last week our teams mapped out the stakeholders for our chosen topic (citizenship and grassroots).

Our stakeholder map was stolen from the studio. This was the last picture taken before it went missing. If have any information, call: 1-800-STOLEN-MAP No questions asked if you return it. Really, at this point we all just want closure.

By looking at the tension between groups, we can easily get overwhelmed. What was most helpful was to recognize where common interests exist between stakeholders. These should provide opportunities for engagement, or perhaps even leverage points between groups in conflict (or perceived conflict). Additionally, we identified a disturbing aspect: asymmetry. While there were mutual and shared interests between our three groups, there were also some goals that actually provided benefits at the expenses of others.

The easiest way to understand this dynamic is to think about big tobacco. Smokers want and desire cigarettes. They are willing to pay for them, even when discouraged through taxation. They smoke throughout the day, despite knowing that it has a negative impact on health. Who benefits the most in this relationship? In the short term, the smoker benefits. In the long term, the tobacco companies benefit. These relationships are exploitative, but also difficult to break.

Reactionary politics benefit a minority of the powerful at the expense of everyone else, but it also provides validation to a cynical and disengaged citizenry. For those who insist that politics is self-serving, and incapable of providing value to the public, it is very easy to be proven correct, even if the outcomes that produce that validation are not beneficial.

Considering stakeholders

Civic engagement: how grassroots movements make lasting impact.

As I continue to think about what citizenship truly means, I am disturbed to think about the lack of participation in western democracy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the 2016 general election saw a 20-year low in voter turnout. It is tempting to shake my finger and to blame systems and policy (I still do this, in private), but when you pan back and look at the tension between discrete categories, it becomes much clearer what the stakes really are. I have heard from many of my closest friends and peers, that the election of Donald Trump has sparked an ad-hoc civics class. The Washington Post even launched a podcast whose title illustrates this phenomenon: Can He Do That?

One of the factors that prevents people from engaging with politics in a meaningful way, is the pervasive feeling of uncertainty. When you do not understand the mechanics of government and politics it is easy to be discouraged. The first amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right to petition government for redress of grievances. This principle makes sense, but government is not a monolith. Government is not a person or a place, so who or what do you call upon when you have a valid complaint? When there is an emergency, you can call 9–1–1, but what about the slow-moving emergency of climate change, wage stagnation, the rising costs of education, childcare, or medical services? We the people might be pissed off. Many of the people who voted for Trump were voting with their middle finger — people often make poor choices when acting in anger.

Grassroots movements have historically been the most successful when groups form durable solidarity toward specific and appropriate goals. If we can find a way to synthesize a learning experience to form coherence with groups who share common grievances, we can make real impact. The 2020 election presents a unique opportunity to pressure elected officials. This is an ideal setting for researching this wicked problem.

Decoding a learning experience: a case study of factitious

One major area of concern going into the 2020 election is the role of social media in spreading disinformation. While I firmly believe that social media companies (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) need to take a more proactive role in combating fake news (and other propaganda), users and community stakeholders can also help to fight against the tide. One helpful tool is an online game, factitious.

Source: factitious.augamestudio.com

The rules are simple: players are presented with a headline, text, and images — is it real or fake? The correct answer will be rewarded with points, while incorrect answers will provide helpful tips for how to spot a fake. Why is this game important? One of the hard-learned lessons from the 2016 election year was that people often share a news story without ever vetting the contents. Even worse, many Facebook users were willing to share a news story without ever having read the article.

What works: the game is simple, informative, entertaining, and free to the public. What could be better: the game is low stakes, and while that certainly encourages players to give it a try, it doesn’t have any replay value, or real incentives for competition. This could be improved.

Related links:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/05/09/how-misinformation-spreads-on-social-media-and-what-to-do-about-it/

https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/

https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/protecting-ourselves-teach

https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/anti-misinformation-actions/

Citizenship and technology: questions and hypotheses

This week we continued to explore citizenship from the lens of learning experience design (LxD). This issue is complex, affecting countless individuals, institutions, systems, and more. It was helpful to visualize the issue with a team (we continued a second day of whiteboard sketching, with post-its for card sorting. Ultimately, this helped us to identify the categories of “Five Ws” (Who, What, When, Where, Why) and How.

Who: voters (including potential voters). In 2016, voter turnout was at a 20–year low. Nearly half of voting-age Americans did not cast a ballot in 2016. It could be easy — even tempting — to look at this group and condemn their inaction. After all, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but lost the electoral college due to roughly 100,000 votes spread between three so-called “swing states.” If we ever are to have a health democracy, we need more people to vote, and they need to vote consisently. There are no “off years” for civic duties.

What can be done to increase voter turnout? This varies from one state to the next, so this question cannot be addressed at a national level, unless we first address the specifics of each state. Since the focus of this class is not public policy, we should instead look at voters and what resources would help them to understand the election process. There are many competing ideas, and it is likely that not just one policy or change to our elections will do the trick. Ultimately, we need voters to understand the necessary steps in the process, from registration to the act of casting a ballot.

When? Now.

It is not particularly helpful to only look at voters during our election years — every year, all year is what we need. Voting is only one small piece of civic responsibility. Volunteering in your community, military service, writing and calling your representatives, participating in demonstrations, jury duty, and even paying your taxes are major areas of concern, and these activities happen every day (if not to you, then to someone you know) in the United States.

Where can we reach eligible voters? One of the challenges with an always-online culture is that attention itself has become a commodity. There is serious competition for clicks and participation. This constant battle for your attention leaves only razor-thin margins for the less exciting, less sexy areas of real life. Combating distraction presents a real challenge.

Why is voting turnout is low? This question is more difficult to answer. Voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering, apathy, and public misperceptions and attitudes about democracy are major factors.

How can we change that? Before we can answer that question, we must first understand what factors determine a person’s level of political engagement. This should be a serious area of focus for further research.

Further Reading:

Voter turnout (https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html)

Swing state voter margin (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/)

Voter suppression (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/)

Gerrymandering(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/what-is-gerrymandering.html)

Topics of interest: challenges in exploring the design of learning experiences

After the results of the 2016 election, many Americans (including a candidate who received nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump) wanted to know: what happened? What has unfolded since then has been an endless firehose of scandals, breaches of public trust, attacks against journalists, amplification of white nationalism, and a polarization of politics unlike anything seen in recent decades or even generations. For many, this question has been more about whether we are reliving 1968 or 1934. Depending on what happens in this year’s election, we may have an answer to that dreaded question.

I believe that recent events and how we interpret them are dangerously subjected to a “fragmentalization” of narrative: this happened, and that happened, because (?). It is in our nature to seek out patterns — we depend on them to make sense of our reality — but just like Rorschach tests, cloud formations, tea leaf and palms readings, what we *think* we see is often much more subjective than we are willing to admit. These truthy relationship between separate parts can easily deceive us, and make it harder to see firmer (but much less pleasant) truths. The facts remain the same, even if our interpretation of them varies wildly.

This is why I am choosing to engage in two important topics this semester: technology and citizenship (i.e., civic engagement). I believe that in our ever-increasingly digital world, that it makes no sense to separate these two topics. They are deeply interlinked, (from our political discourse online, Tweets by the President and his feverish supporters, the sharing of stories on social media, cybersecurity, data breaches, electronic voting, online privacy, and so much more) technology influences politics, just as politics influences technology. What we do to one, through innovation or policy, will affect the other. In other words: to understand 21st century politics is to understand the fifth dimension — cyberspace.

Here are some specific questions worth exploring: how can we combat disinformation, fake news, state-sponsored propaganda, bots, and trolls? If we are living in a post-truth era of hopelessly tribal politics, how do we exit from it? Is that even possible? Voter turnout in general elections has been flat (around 55%) since the 1970s, how can we get more eligible voters to engage in their civic duties? How can we promote a more confident and informed public? I have some ideas about all of this, but will wait until class tomorrow where we can discuss. I hope to get some good feedback.

Designing Experiences For Learning

What excites me about diving into designing experiences for learning and why.

During my undergraduate studies, I took an elective on Design Thinking, and nothing has been the same ever since. I began to rethink what it means to solve problems, and became acutely aware of how easily and often products and services fail to address human needs. This journey lead me to volunteering at a “Design and Innovation” classroom at Ockley Green Middle School in Portland, OR. Working with these young minds helped me to appreciate the value of fresh perspectives, and exposed many of my own gaps of knowledge. I was gobsmacked to see people half my age building interactive prototypes for mobile apps, and completing design challenges with intuition and glee. In many cases, they were even doing more compelling work than some of my peers in the Art School at Portland State. The craft was often lacking, but their concepts were rich and deeply human — solid evidence that their imaginations were still unspoiled and wild.

When given permission to try “crazy ideas,” while also being properly supported by mentors and educators, there is earnest potential for groundbreaking innovation (this was evident, even in a K-12 context). Through many exchanges and observations along the way, I knew that I wanted to be a part of this process, to educate and support this kind of growth. My own experiences with public education were less than ideal, and I never saw this sort of potential before. I became deeply interested in the learning process, and wanted to know why some students succeed while others fail. I wanted to know what methods and environments helped people to become better versions of themselves. Most of all, I wanted to know what role Design Thinking could play in these developments.

Prototyping for IxD - Case Study

Information Architecture: Frankie Bunz

Pittsburgh, PA

One other component worth considering in the context of the customer journey and user experience (see my previous post), is the Information Architecture of the food menu. Let’s take another look at the menu:

There are a total of three menus at Frankie Bunz: one in the window, one on the ordering counter, and a handwritten banner inside the restaurant.

The Food

There are eight standardized options:

The Frankie Bunz

The Don

The Hyman Roth

The Fredo’s Frank

The Sonny Special

The Henry Hill

The Mr. Miyagi Doggie

The Grateful Dog

The Chairman of the Dog

Customers choosing a standard dog still have the option to add additional toppings (more about this later), and must choose from one of four bun types*:

White

Wheat

Pretzel

Onion

*The only exception is the “Mr. Miyagi Doggie” which is an Asian Fusion spin on the classic corndog - featuring a tempura batter and side of slaw with special “dragon sauce.”

There is also an option to “B.Y.O.D” (Build Your Own Dog) with six dog options:

Smith’s Natural Skin Casing Hot Dog

Jubilee Farms All Beef Hot Dog

Hebrew National

Spicy Beef Dog

Turkey Dog

Veggie Dog

Toppings

There are two categories of toppings*:

“Frankie’s Fresh”

Premium

*The premium incurs a $1 charge per selection.

There are eleven “Frankie’s Fresh” toppings:

Ketchup

Mustard (Yellow, Dark, and Honey)

Siracha Mayo

Fresh Sauerkraut

Pickles

Onions (sweet vidalia)

Hot Peppers

Relish (sweet and dill)

And there are seven Premium toppings:

Chili Sauce

Bacon (candied)

Avocado

American cheese

Shredded, aged cheddar

Swiss

Pepper Jack

Sandwiches

If hot dogs are not your thing, they also offer large sides as well as grilled cheese sandwiches.

Grilled cheese sandwiches offer three options for bread:

White

Wheat

Sourdough

and four options for cheese*:

American

Swiss

Aged Cheddar

Pepper Jack

*Customers may select any combination, up to and including all four on the same sandwich

Customers may add any of the fourteen (fresh and premium) toppings offered for hotdogs to their grilled cheese (see above).*

*Customers can also add any choice of the six dogs (see above) for $2

There are also five standardized grilled cheese (with choice of bread), offered as a “daily special” Monday through Friday.

Sides

The only side offered are their fries.

There are four options to select from:

Regular

With melted cheese

“Da Woiks” (i.e., chili cheese fries with bacon)

"Poutini” (i.e., cheese curds, house gravy, and scallions)

Drinks

There are six fountain drinks (one cup size) and sixteen bottled drinks available. I won’t list them here; they offer Pepsi products, and you can see the options for yourself:

Information Architecture

As you can see, there are many, many choices for customers to make. However, the choices have a logical flow and can be reduced to discrete categories with a linear progression.

A minimum of five choices must be made to complete an order.

Design For Service - Case Study

Case Study: Frankie Bunz, Pittsburgh, PA

I moved to Pittsburgh in August, 2019. Since moving here, I have eaten at only a handful of restaurants; Frankie Bunz (i.e., mobster-themed hot dogs) is easily one of my favorite local places to grab a bite. It is in Squirrel Hill, on Murray Avenue.

I have a weakness for anthropomorphic food.

While this restaurant does offer some dine-in seating, it is primarily designed for grabbing food to go. In evaluating their services, I opted to dine in.

Customer Journey: Phase 1 - discovery

Customers are most likely to be attracted to this restaurant if they are on foot. The sidewalk immediately outside of Frankie Bunz advertises daily specials. There is a full menu in the window, as well as flyers promoting their most recently added items.

Their vegetarian chili (not pictured) is also quite good. Last week they were advertising egg rolls.

Customer Journey: Phase 2 - Entry

When you walk into Frankie Bunz, it immediately becomes clear that they do not have a large seating capacity, but they still provide an inviting atmosphere. Additionally, they provide a large banner-type version of their menu.

The interior is somewhat “cozy” and prioritizes a space for ordering and waiting over dine-in seating.

Customer Journey: Phase 3 - Ordering

I arrived for a late lunch (this first week of the semester has started out with many plates for me to spin, including this evaluation), and the only other customers were take-out or app-based delivery workers (e.g., Grubhub). The ordering and checkout process is reasonably frictionless. They use a touchscreen POS machine with contactless (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) and chip-reading capabilities.

Customers can either choose one of the standardized hotdogs, or build their own. The staff takes the order, unless the customer is ordering via a delivery app. Customers ordering a standardized hotdog (e.g., “Fredo’s Frank” or “The Don”) are still asked what kind of bun they’d like. Options include: wheat, white, pretzel, and onion roll. In addition to their buns, they also offer a tempura battered, fried dog on a stick (i.e., a “corndog” minus the cornmeal); they call it the “Mr Miyagi Doggie” and it includes an Asian Fusion slaw and special “dragon sauce.”

Customer Journey: Phase 4 - Payment

Despite the cluttered appearance of the equipment, the system works fairly well. On the left, there is a mobile phone that receives app-based orders, while the customer-facing touchscreen provides simple instructions to complete the transaction. The order information, prices, total, tip amount, and tax are easily presented without complexity.

The only substantial flaw with this setup is the counterintuitive chip-reader.

The icon on the lower right corner of the bezel doesn’t clarify the card orientation, so the owners added a post-it note, which adds to the confusion. Also: you cannot have my credit card number. 😘

The arrow is pointing away from the slot, but this doesn’t necessarily clarify card orientation. The affordances of the device allow for both correct and incorrect insertion. In total, this card-reading device allows no less than eight card orientations and interactions (four in the card slot, and four in the slider), and only one of these actions is correct. To be generous, there is at least an 87.5% chance for error, even with written instructions. This is terrible design.

Despite this minor annoyance, the process is still supported by staff, and any errors can be quickly observed and corrected.

Customer Journey: Phase 5 - Fulfillment

Once the order is placed and the payment confirmed, customers have a brief waiting period while their meal is prepared. The open floor plan is reassuring, and promotes trustworthiness with customers: you can see your meal being prepared, and know that their kitchen is clean and safe.

There is nothing to hide. Even their supply room is open and visible.

While waiting for food, customers have a few options to occupy their time: there is a television, artwork, and a gender-neutral restroom.

By Executive Order, all hot dog artwork in the 21st century must be in 3D.

Customer Journey: Phase 6 - Value

To extract value from the transaction, customers must receive and consume their food. I think this was worth the wait.

Order: one vegetarian hotdog on a pretzel bun, with onions, brown mustard and ketchup, and a side of shoestring fries.