Monday, January 31, 2011

Still lots of questions

Who should call your shots?

How do we find out what the project scope is?

Should we package something first? Our proposal?

What is the communication method that makes sense for everyone's schedule?

What role is the next innovation in museum staff?

What experience is the ideal for parent and child?

What is the culture of Thanksgiving Point with respect to volunteer core?

Do we focus on volunteers?

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Stephen Ashton visits

Stephen Ashton visited class.

What is the project? Our task is to design interaction between roaming workers and patrons of the museum.

New idea from Stephen:
The ambassador program...training for Thanksgiving Point ambassadors (staff and volunteers). People who come to Thanksgiving Point should have a good experience. The ambassadors facilitate this good experience. This is Blake's program.

The museum of natural curiosity will be the 4th main venue at Thanksgiving Point. Open summer 2012 depending on donor activities.

Monday, January 24, 2011

What really is the catalyst role?

We need to define a group of actions that are good and a group of actions that are bad. The catalyst role needs to be well defined. What other industries can we emulate? Nursing? Amusement park? Car dealer? Education? Cruise entertainment director?

What are the dimensions of the catalyst role?

Friday, January 21, 2011

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Questions for Thanksgiving Point

Questions:

What age of kid are we targeting with the museum?
How should the parent engage the child? What is the ideal?
How do you treat age groups differently? Exhibits?
What draws the interest of the parents?

Personal thought: Aspen Grove family camp creates family teams and activities revolve around the family team.

Action plan:

Literature review (Assign out each piece, divide and conquer)
Observations (Volunteer)
List of questions for Dave, Mark, and Blake

Thanksgiving point map


Dropped in the deep end

Too often novice designers move quickly to prototyping with easy to use tools before asking all the design questions.

Where should we start?

It would be helpful to gather some data about what is happening currently. It would be helpful to talk with the client about their expectations.

Scoping the project started with getting the phone numbers of the contacts and calling to set up a visit with them to talk about expectations.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Trajectory review

Moving up the trajectory creates more vision, more social contribution and commitment, different design issues, more continuity of use (mulitple use), and more risk of failure; and expands design terms and thinking.

Recommended reading: Baldwin and Clark, Design rules: The Power of Modularity

Recommended reading: Mythical Man Month (Article)

Modularity is almost never used in instructional design. Instructional design is in something like a back water. It has stopped progressing. Modularity could be a way to move forward.

Barriers for modularity include existing theories are deeply rooted in practice.

Ergonomics was a study of interfaces by fitting the human to the machine and make the interface liveable.

Products, Goods, and Interfaces can be used by one person alone. The next step and above needs more than one person.

Project design focusses on multi-user contribution in solving a problem or achieving a goal.

Personal thought: Discourse is sharing meaningfulness. How do you design that?

Monday, January 10, 2011

Modularity


Trajectory of Artificiality


Real design problem

What is the real problem to be solved with our design?

The client may not know the "real" problem. They may even think they know. Designers should attempt to escape a structural mindset. We are not just designing a manual with sections and pages, etc. We are not just defining a role with characteristics, tasks, behaviors, etc.

Mass customization - made possible by modularity of goods.

Using existing infrastructure introduces constraints to be accounted for in the design.

Read chapter 1 of Krippendorff.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Whiteboard drawing


Project description

Prayer brings unity to a group. Singing has the same effect on a group.

This is a designer's log. It includes class notes, outside of class planning meeting notes, and personal idea notes.

Project details:
Thanksgiving Point Museum of Natural Curiosity. A major goal is to get parents and children learning together in an enjoyable experience. The museum will have multi-disciplinary exhibits. How does a person help to facilitate, kick-off, and stimluate parent and child togetherness in learning through the exhibits? The project is centered on the person with a role of wandering around and help learning happen without become the teacher. It is like the idea of a catalyst. Catalyst is not changed by kicking off reactions in other chemicals.

We are writing a manual for the catalyst role to help something happen between parents and children exploring the museum.

This wandering catalyst should be semi-invisible and unrecognizable and transparent. This person creates an impact and then moves on. This person is an interaction stimulator, but does not really participate in the interaction.

We are creating a manual and a training system.

Metaphor: Performer/Agent in a setting/environment. Performer acts on the environment or artifacts in the environment like a system. The environment and systems respond to the performer in a cause/effect ways or orderly. "Acting in the world" Learning takes place through acting and seeing the response. A companion can be added (catalyst) to the environment for learning efficiency, danger mitigation, and focus (suggest interpretation and provide models).
Catalyst could be an evaluator, facilitator, teacher, conversationalist, etc.

Personal thoughts: Perhaps the catalyst role can be patterned after the way God interacts with us.

What are we going to have to know?
Read chapter 1 of Ten Faces.

Introduction

This class will be a group project with Thanksgiving Point. Part of the class will be to learn the skills of working as a team. Also, it will be an innovative design. According to Dr. Gibbons, innovative design is the gold standard of design and incorporates most if not all designing principles.

Design history:Gagne - reduce the cost of education, adopt standards/formulas/terms/categories/taxonomies, make it easy for everyone to become an instructional designer, technology, and formulaic design.Behaviorism was failing.

Glaser - because we have a limited idea of how people learn, no formulas possible, social dimension of learning, cognition, and instructional psychology.

Gagne and Glaser diverge and continue to diverge.Gagne is joined by media researchers, TV, movies, teaching machines, graphic, sensory, audio, and computers. ISD and ADDIE and authoring systems (remove the programmer, artist, writer, etc. "everyone can be a designer, artist, programmer, etc. with a system") started in this group.

Gagne gave theoretical grounds for the media research.

Glaser is joined by social learning researchers, anthropologists, and artificial intelligence researchers. Resnik and Schank joined this group.

A bridge between these two groups is needed.Outside of these groups is Design Studies.

Design Studies is interdisciplinary that includes fashion, automotive, architecture, etc.

For next time:
Read syllabus
Client is coming to class (Museum of Natural Curiousity)