2015-2016 Carissa Carter
Methodical
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About This is a collection of design methods from the 2015-2016 academic year that I’ve tried, loved, and want to keep in my teaching practice. I make this magazine with myself as the main target audience. It is not a comprehensive curation of all of the neat methods used in d.school courses. Experiential design education produces ephemeral artifacts and often involves in-class facilitation that’s hard to codify. Creating the Methodical helps me synthesize, evolve, and share. I find that if I don’t make an effort to capture the tools, I lose them. It also makes me feel accomplished. I taught two courses this year, From Maps to Meaning and Advanced Design Studio. Some methods spawn from those courses, others come from guest visits in other classes, time with our teaching teams in teaching design sessions or simple hunches I have about content that I want to create. Everything in here is a work of collaboration. In each case I’ve attempted to list everyone that helped develop and/or test the tools on a range of different levels. For many of methods in here, I had a big hand in creating them, for others, everything was created by someone else and I used the method in one of my courses and loved it.
Methodical User Research Empathy Portraits................................4-5 Empathy Pathfinder..............................16 Tether...................................................20-21
Synthesis Why is it Interesting?...........................6-7 Map Your Neighborhood..............10-11 Reality to Representation............24-25 Image Perspectives 2....................28-29
Making + Sharing Prototyping Zine.............................18-19 Zines....................................................26-27
Reflection + Awareness Tree Reflection.................................12-13 Learning Journey Maps.................14-15 Group Learning Maps....................22-23
Working with Others Make Muffins..........................................8-9 Critique Muscle......................................17
Carissa Carter carissa@dschool.stanford.edu 3
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Empathy Portraits Start and end with story
I’m perpetually interested in developing new tools to help students understand the power of empathy-based conversations. Inspired by the ease with which the Story Deck, created by Scott Doorley and Dan Klein, gets people sharing unique and telling experiences, I worked through the arc of creating Empathy Portraits. In class, we use a few Story Deck prompts in pairs to first show the power of story. Then, students immediately craft portraits of their user or partner. These portraits might be drawings, but they may also be based in prose. The idea is that we want them capturing their users in an immediate and colorful fashion. Essentially, we send our students looking for stories from their users and then have them capture those stories using
story. Tran and I used this method in our maps course this year and it worked well as a crash course introduction into user research where we wanted students to get deep, seek meaningful information, and capture it in a way that they were set up to mine their notes and begin to infer to insight. Check out “Why is it interesting?” for the next step in the process. Developed with: Tran Ha. Story Deck by Scott Doorley and Dan Klein. 5
Why is it Interesting? Using inference to unpack
This is as simple as it seems. When having students unpack their user research observations or Empathy Portraits, have them translate highlighted material from their notebooks onto sticky notes as a first step — one item per note. Line those notes up across the top of a white board. For each note, have 6
the student ask himself or herself, “Why is this interesting?� Ask them to write the answer on a new note below it and repeat. The exercise helps students practice making inferences about their users and stretch their designerly hunches. This can be done solo or with a partner. Developed or tested with: Tran Ha and Thomas Both
Why is this interesting?
Why is this interesting?
Why is this interesting?
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I had a nice practice going in the fall where I would write a blog post based on some quirk of inspiration in my life and then create a design exercise based on that inspiration. One of my posts was on muses and collaboration. I created this zine for students to try on different collaboration styles with a partner. With each of the five collaboration styles students talk out and act out the process of making a batch of does wha muffins. It’s improv. They reflect on each style before making a new one. t an eded d .”
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This is the only method in here that I haven’t yet tested with students. It’s neat though, and I like the pictures, so it made the magazine. Developed with: Stacey Gray and Charlotte Burgess-Auburn 9
Map Your Neighborhood A Decibel to introduce mapping
I was super-lucky to get the opportunity to make a Decibel with Scott this fall. We began with an assignment I’d made for From Maps to Meaning, entitled, Map Your Neighborhood. The exercise was originally in zine format, but was perfectly suited for the audio learning experience that is Decibel. Students are coached through the process of making three maps in the one hour 10
experience. The first is of their neighborhood from memory. It brings awareness to their perspective as a designer. The second takes them on a dĂŠrive, a sensory walk, and helps them craft an infographic of their observations. The third flexes their extrapolation muscles and asks them to craft a map that bridges the real and the imaginary. Try it at http://mapstomeaning.squarespace.com/map-your-neighborhood. Developed with: Scott Doorley and special thanks to Tyler Winick
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Tree Reflection
Building awareness of creative growth
This winter, we asked two of our Experience Assistants, Matt and Mo, to do a research project to understand what we are teaching our students and what they are learning. Their research is interesting on many levels, and one of the artifacts that resulted from the work is this Tree Reflection tool. Their driving metaphor was around students as trees, and in this exercise students fill in both tree rings to articulate their journey with creativity, as well as tree outlines, to express the inputs, outputs,
nourishment, and structure of their creative system. We tried versions of the activity with teaching teams as well as in Advanced Design Studio. It helps students express their creative foundations from all over their lives. Developed by: Matthew Horton and Andrew Molina 13
Learning a lot Feeling great
time
Not learning too much Not feeling great
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Learning Journey Maps Looking for productive struggle Low emotion but high learning — evidence of productive struggle?
Sarah has used reflective journey maps for a number of years and this year I adopted it into my teaching practice. Students are given a template that includes a timeline on the x-axis and the y-axis indicates magnitude. Students are asked to plot two lines, one that indicates their learning journey through a class or project, and a second that indicates their emotional journey. Sarah’s hypothesis is that moments where emotions are low and learnings are high are indicators of productive struggle, a necessary hardship that when worked through provide students with long-term learning benefit. In, From Maps to Meaning, Tran and I had our students chart each of their three projects in this way as well as
the class as a whole. I think I see productive struggle on their maps, and I definitely see the benefit in the exercise as a reflective tool. In the future I might ask students to first draw their learning journey, and then add the emotional layer as a second pass. I think the more that they annotate, the better, and will request that in the future as well. Developed by: Sarah Stein Greenberg 15
Empathy Pathfinder Check in before you reach out
Emi began developing the Empathy Pathfinder during the Design Guild sprint sessions the winter. I was lucky to be partnered with her during those sessions and got to see the evolution of this tool. Essentially, it’s a folded workbook that prompts students through a number of reflective questions before they set out on their first experience doing user research. We used it in From Maps to Meaning and several students found it extremely beneficial. One student in particular was very nervous about talking with users. He thought the tool was a game-changer for him. I’ll be using it in every course in the future. Developed by: Emi Kolawole and used in class with Tran Ha
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Critique Muscle
Master feedback for yourself and others
This year our Teaching Fellows created an excellent series of content and courses entitled, Practicing your Design Muscles. They taught each muscle in various formats and packaged them for use by other teaching teams. In Advanced Design Studio, Thomas used their Practicing Critique content, reshaped it for our context, and created a one-pager. We used this as a skeleton for class critique. Additionally, we had two students act as metaobservers of the critique and comment on how it might be improved. They rotated through this role. I’m looking forward to using more of the muscles content in my classes in the future. Developed by: Hannah Jones, Andrea Small, and Nihir Shah, and modified by Thomas Both.
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Prototyping Zine A hand-held primer for making
Thomas, Kerry, and Alex taught Design Thinking Studio this fall and I visited the class as a guest presenter on a day when they were practicing prototyping. I created this zine for the class and have used it again with the Design Thinking Studio class taught by Hannah, Andrea, and Nihir in the winter. I made a short video using Adobe Voice that explains how to use it. Developed or tested with: Thomas Both, Kerry O’Connor, Alex Scully, Hannah Jones, Andrea Small, and Nihir Shah 18
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Tether
Practicing patience
In design thinking we tell our students to spend time observing people and places before jumping into conversations, but it’s an easy step to skip. The observe is boring. It can feel useless, slow, maddening. In “The Power of Patience� by Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, she shares an assignment where she has her students stare at a painting they are interested in 20
researching for at least three hours in a gallery. The students are required to make sequential notes on what they notice in the painting as they stare. I adapted this exercise and one taught by Michael Barry in his introductory Needfinding class into Tether. Thomas and I used it in Advanced Design Studio as a way to immerse students in the space of the Cantor Arts Center before they began crafting design interventions. The assignment is self-contained into a notebook. Developed with: Thomas Both
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Group Learning Maps Get spatial to help retention
As an add-on to standard debrief this year, and partly inspired by the Learning Journey Maps created by Sarah, in both courses I’ve taught this year we’ve asked students to tell us specifically what they learned, and then proceeded to map these learnings. In From Maps to Meaning, we had them map what they learned at different moments in the course, and then plot those learnings across a timeline of the class. In Advanced Design Studio, we had students first write out all of their learnings, and then build a group affinity map with those learnings.
As they grouped their statements together they also added headlines to each group. These headlines were the main takeaway, or the insight of the group. I thought both of versions of this exercise went really well. Developed with: Tran Ha and Thomas Both 23
Reality to Representation Abstraction practice What’s one piece of your data?
Reality to Representation Start with one piece of your data:
What are all the ways you might abstract on it? LIST AND DRAW
What are all the ways you might abstract on it?
Now, given the full set of data, what are a few ways you might represent the set? START WITH SIMPLE MAPPING FRAMEWORKS. EXPERIMENT WITH LEVELS OF PRECISION. TRY OUT THE ARTISTIC.
Select one of the above ways, perform the abstraction on the other pieces of data in your set, and organize them using a map framework.
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TITLE
TITLE
TITLE
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Reality 1 this is your data
Abstraction 2 “Let’ s think about what’s
interesting with this data, and how to show those interesting things.”
Representation 3 “Let’ s move the data
around and discover what we want to show.”
extract isolate detach separate
patterns points of intersection mapping frameworks
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This map by St
This is likely the hardest exercise to explain in writing, but it worked quite well in From Maps to Meaning as a way to help students understand how to abstract on their data. First, a student selects a piece of data from a pile. Let’s say there is a pile of fruit and the student picks up an orange. Then he/ she doodles all the ways to abstract it — a circle, the color orange, a drawing of the mottled texture, a graphic of how it fits in your hand, the way it makes you feel when
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you eat it, how it grows, etc. Next, the student selects one of those methods of abstraction and uses it on all of the pieces of fruit in the pile, arranging his or her representation using a mapping framework. For instance, the student might make a continuum of hands holding fruit organized by least comfortable to most comfortable. Or, the student might use the Venn diagram to map the types of satisfaction provided by each fruit. We had students do the exercise both with the fruit data set and then with an intangible data set, a group of stories. I like this activity. I want to keep tweaking it and trying it with students. Developed, tested, and evolved with: Ashish Goel and Tran Ha. 25
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Zines
Form factor of the year
I began to obsess over zines while I was on maternity leave last summer. I did a Skillshare by Kate Bingamon-Burt, one of my favorite graphic artists, and I haven’t looked back since. Zines are fantastic vessels for information, assignments, stories, ideas, the list goes on and on. I’ve made them to launch design challenges, teach concepts, and to advertise classes. Seamus has made a number of neat zines for storytelling content as well and Natalie made one for the d.school website RFP. Though the 8.5x11” single sheet zine is my favorite, I’ve done some experimentation with varying sizes. Tested with: Seamus Harte and Natalie Whearley
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Image Perspectives 2 Pattern finding and perspective crafting
I’m including this exercise again this year because Thomas and I made some changes to it that led to significantly better results. Students still started with a deck of images and needed to select and sort them into a curated perspective. However, this time we then asked them to write down their perspective and state why it was meaningful and interesting. They followed by crafting a physical response to their perspective with paper cones and washi tape. We did this activity as a DP0 on our first day, and then the next two assignments in class were versions of the same process. First, students did a one-day version of the assignment at the
Cantor museum using a space inside as their starting point, and second, they did a longer version also at the Cantor. It was the repetition of the assignment that I feel hammered in the importance of perspective-crafting. Developed with: Thomas Both
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Want to use these methods? Please do! I ask that you share back what you learn, modifications you make, new worksheets you craft, etc.
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