Author: Christina Choi

The School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) was founded in 2013 as a passion project by artists who code (or vice versa). One of its founders, Taeyoon Choi, showed us around SFPC—what he defined as an alternative arts school. Especially considering this latest election, Taeyoon said he considers “alternative education as an activist activity.”

The focus of their 10-week intensive course is art, literature and computation. They generally run this non-degree program a couple times a year, with sporadic 2-4 day topic-based workshops throughout the year.

Much like ITP, the “core” curriculum itself focuses on code and hardware/pcomp, but unlike ITP, it also includes critical theory/history. Their unique bent on the subject matter is that code is largely used in service of language design and generative poetry. They look for the poetry in the mechanics of code. This makes it distinctly different than ITP. For example, their showcase (similar to ITP’s) is about showing works that are explicitly poetry and art, less about product or experience demos.

SFPC is run like a nonprofit and is “open source.” Its financials are fully transparent and published online, along with high-level curriculum. Its relatively low cost of $5,500 makes it a great primer or refresher, and highly accessible to New Yorkers. As a result, they’ve made the decision to not offer scholarships. They’ve also historically seen poor results from scholarship students, including less effort and attendance. Taeyoon attributes this to the corroded social contract when no personal, financial investment is not involved.

The school has a freedom to it, as they are not beholden to outside funding, their management is lightweight, and instructors don’t rely on SFPC for their income.  They also severely limit their class size to maintain the quality of the education and engagement of the students. In Taeyoon’s words, it doesn’t have to function like “a corporation like NYU.” This allows them the flexibility to rethink curriculum, tuition, and space regularly.

The space itself isn’t very “designed,” but it does have visual reminders of the intent and goals of the program—flip chart pages full of (what I imagine are) student-defined learning goals. Generally, these students have worked in engineering previously and discovered the art school through word-of-mouth or events-based publicity (conferences, panels, publications, etc.).

Though not driven by profit, the school is very focused on scaling, not in terms of class size or revenue, but in terms of impact. Essentially, how to become more effective at idea propagation. To this end, several SFPC alums have now created their own international alternative arts programs (School of MA, for example).

As I continue to work on Content Crumbs, I’ve decided that I’ll prototype the UX/UI flows for 2 primary use cases:

• A learner or educator placing classroom content in the world
• A learner pulling content from the world for use in the their work

Next steps:

• Finish write up
• Finalize wires
• Design in Illustrator
• Mock up in Pop App
• 30-second demo of two use cases?

“Content Crumbs” is an interactive educational tool that helps users take new learnings or bits of information, teach it to their future self via a short audio clip or “Content Crumb”, and virtually place it in relevant locations for future use. Think augmented reality but with audio.

Problem statement

Often, educational content isn’t contextualized in the real-world or is hard to summon up in a moment of relevance or need.

Concept description

This concept is essentially to help make pieces of educational content accessible on the go. As the student learns different modules, they (or their instructor) make an 1-2 minute audio recording or “Content Crumb” of their learnings and tag it to a specific geolocation where it might be useful later. As the user goes about their life, with the Content Crumbs app running in the background, when they bump into a place that has a virtual Content Crumb, they’ll be notified and able to revisit past learnings. The hope is that this both summons up past knowledge and helps solidify the lesson in their mind.

On the flip side, the user can take photos out in the real world and bring them back into folders on the app (or whatever it is), for inspiration back at their desk/office/workspace. Kind of like Pinterest for the real world.

I’ve decided to create a timing/scheduling module—something that might be a plugin for a Google calendar, a newclasses-type environment, or a future-state online university.

I did some research into similar tools for business and found many—Projector, Wendia, Resource Guru, to name a few.

I’ve established the following design criteria:

On teacher side, I’m creating standardized intake fields for every task assigned, including time estimate and due date. Teachers can also have visibility into other class’ assignment scheduling, and the student’s calendar, in case they choose to publicize other life events like work or religious holidays or other critical engagements.

On the student side, features will include the ability to modify tasks, automate or customize calendar blocking, and customize to calendar view versus to-do list view.

Some defined and scattered thoughts, and project status.

defined user:

• graduate school students in non-technical fields

defined problem:

• learning happens in silos, whether outside or inside the classroom, and learners must rely on their memory to summon up the right information

defined design challenge:

• how can we help bring relevant or complicating information to learners in the space/time when it’s actually relevant/needed?

defined objectives:

• takes burden off users
• can be used for both students and teachers
• is enjoyable to use
• is easy to use
• enhances applications of academics, doesn’t replace them

defined constraints:

• uses two different memory pathways

defined KPI:

• regular student and teacher usage
• longer students and teachers engagement in the subject matter
• more integrated thinking from students and teachers, rather than linear module- or unit-based thinking

defined project plan:

• formalize project and goal 11/7 – 11/14
• gather research + inspiration, sketch + prototype 11/14 – 11/21
• iterate 11/21 – 11/28
• tell story 11/28 – 12/5

scattered ideas:

• geofenced information modules, either bringing information from classroom contextualize in the room, or things you’re learning out in the world, to complicate/advance ideas at your desk/home
• virtual world, “mind palace”
• social aspect, other people adding things for people to find?
• visuals versus audio output
• randomized or frankenstein-style ideation games
• instant picture to inspiration card
• more about mental notes, journaling
• time integrated schedule, addressing the whole person, whole living radius
• being able to work wherever, through designed friction
• project management tool
• open question/answer service/community/forum
• open question/answer self-service tool

First and foremost, I’d ensure that the environment is more conducive to work and collaboration. This means fewer people or twice the space. In that space, we’d need many small, reservable rooms to facilitate deep work sessions for group work.

I’d like the space to feel much more like MAGNET—a place where quality, compelling work is created, rather than creative chaos. That’s a personal preference, but the environment often influences the style and finish of the work produced there. This would probably help also help improve the vibe of the floor so people aren’t constantly sending out nasty, patronizing emails about cleaning up after yourself and what it means to be adult (though the mess is super frustrating). An easy near term fix? Make the floor look less junky so people don’t treat it like junk, and hire a full-time cleaning staff.

I’d like furniture and the spaces to be more conducive to learning different subjects and working different ways. This means modularity. No bolted-down, massive tables or unweildy chairs. Everything small, and reconfigurable, and stackable, and on wheels.

Similarly, all flat surfaces should be white board materials (walls and tables) and have cleaner at the ready. This will both make the space feel cleaner (the black tables are always so gross!) and provide a prompt to student to constantly be thinking and connecting dots (something that often comes AFTER prototyping). Each room should be equipped with brainstorming materials like pens and post-its and flipcharts.

I think staging desks should be eliminated from the general workspace and the kitchen should be separated from the general workspace.

I also think there should be a display gallery, that is highly public (at the front of the floor) and highly curated. Each item would need a placard to force students to refine concept and subject matter, like real artists/designers must do.

I’d make staging space be a separate area, that doesn’t encroach on the general work space and create the “have” and “have-not” subtle dynamic. This would prevent 2nd-year students from boxing out the newer (and less grabby) students, who aren’t as aggressive or pre-emptive enough to book (or squat on) permanent (often unnecessary) staging space.

The main changes to my floor plan would be:

• Twice the space.
• A separate quiet room to work.
• A separate kitchen to eat and socialize in.
• A separate staging space to temporarily set up permanent shop.
• Rentable work rooms.
• And then a 2-section truly egalitarian space for people to work and collaborate in—one part for loud work like the shop, and one part for less equipment intensive work like coding and design.
• A curated public display gallery.
• All rooms with modular furniture.
• All rooms designed for brainstorming and concepting with white-board surfaces and cleaning supplies, geared toward brainstorming.
• All rooms clean and creativity-inducing.
• The floor structured from “quiet” to “loud” : gallery to quiet room to staging space to rentable rooms to normal workspace to kitchen to loud workspace.

not pictured: missing embankment for classrooms

I’ve started to loosely define my user as the college or graduate-level student who is going into a creative and/or strategic field. I have access to these people both at ITP and at work, so testing and validation would be possible.

For my research, I’m looking into ways to help place information in situ, so it’s not as siloed in specific knowledge banks or academic contexts. Being less familiar with education, I’m looking into common learning theories for adults. Here’s a start.

• Adult Learning Theory posits that adults must understand the applicability of information to their life to learn best. I’d like to lets users literally contextualize information in places that seem relevant to their own activities and goals for the future.
• Anchored Learning Theory suggests that putting a subject matter within a realistic situation will embed it with more meaning. I’d like to virtually anchors content to context, so that in a specific situation where information might be useful it will resurface.
• Constructivism is the idea that learning is an active construction and learners learn best when they make connections between experiences and ideas. I’d like to help users attain two paths to long-term memory retrieval by creating two modalities for learning.

Next, I plan to look more into persuasive design and HCI.

Nothing to say about the UX sketching articles—it’s something I think everyone at ITP has done at this point (or at least I hope so!). I was surprised by the fact that there’s a website usability.gov, and it looks the way it does…

I found the assertions in the Science Daily article interesting. Fully agree that “we have to focus learning to a greater degree now, rather than jumping from one trend to another.” At this point, I’ve learned the basics of design and design-thinking in almost every class at ITP (something like 7 times), but never gotten to a deeper level. It’s frustrating, and part of my issue with the curricular model here. I disagreed with the implication that we must double-down on things like “how to write code or be a doctor, or any of the things that require time and effort.” I doubt those two jobs will exist in the future. Plenty of coding is on its way to becoming obsolete. Robot surgeons are already becoming more accurate and safe than human surgeons. I think it’s the creative and strategic and caring jobs that will be the future. We need to develop our muscles to innovate/imagine and collaborate/care, not just invest in the things that require “time and effort.” Because if time and effort (computational power) is all that’s required, then machines have us licked! This is my premise for my 2nd design challenge.

I decided to explore two territories, pending feedback from Greg et al. I’m leaning toward the second direction—having some interest in how tactics for long-term behavior modification might affect long-term learning.

Design Challenge 1: Applied Learning

Design Challenge 2: Creative, Strategic Thinkers