Assignment

You are rebuilding ITP to encourage some important aspect to learning in the future. You have limitless resources and spaces. What kind of layout would you imagine? Furniture and appliances? What kind of technology capabilities would be offered? Share sketches and describe your decisions on the class blog.

While I do believe ITP works well I think there are areas that could be improved. Most issues are a result of too many students and lack of space. I think the lack of space is the biggest issue, so if ITP could expand to two floors it would help out a lot. I’ve also noticed from my time here, that people are at various levels in terms of programming and physical computing, what might it look like if there was an accelerated track for those who are already fluent in programming, so that the people who are knew to it can have more time to focus on concepts. Even if there was an option to take Phys Comp and ICM in different semesters so that the student isn’t overwhelmed by all of the knowledge.

After defining my design challenge, I interviewed two people and wanted to hear some voice about online education.

Some response from Anthony, a start-up CEO based on NYC:

Anthony is a “traditional” man. His attitude to online education is not very positive. He said he would not hiring students from online college. The reason is it is hard to evaluate students from online learning. He pointed out that even we can see the students’ achievements via portfolio, it is not clear that what kind of education experience they had. After talking to him on this topic a while, he said he would like to accept students from the online school which have some successful alumnus. This remind me reputation of the school also play a important role when students going into the society. Comparing with the traditional schools, online learning is a new thing. It takes time to improve, and let society and industries know about them.

Some response from Nancy, a professor of a university at NJ also woking for an online college:

Nancy is teaching on a online course every week so she is very open to this. She thinks online learning experience provides a good way to improve students’ self-learning skills. Because Every thing go through on class will be show on the online classroom platform so that students can easily get access to all resources and figure out questions by themselves. But this also becomes the problem of online learning, lack of communication. Not too much interaction between students and teachers let Nancy sometimes doest know students very well. Also there is not much conversation among students.

So at this point I think my project would build the bridge between students and teachers to enhance the communication for online situation.

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?

My first impression of the Sim Center, when we first walked into the floor, is that it was much nicer than I thought it would be. Not that I thought that it would be run down, or anything like that, but that someone had spent far more money on this facility than I had expected. This thought continued as we went through the different wings and saw all of the different rooms, tools, and (essentially) props that were available. For whatever reason, I had assumed that this kind of role playing would be seen as being too much like play for the medical community and would not have received this level of investment. I’m sure that assumption says more about me than it does about them, but there you go.

I think that it is interesting how much of the facility, for all of its professional seriousness, felt like play to me. Maybe it is because it reminded me of a ‘job museum’ I went to as a kid, where 10 year olds could pretend to work for the postal service or produce a news report. But, I think that the Sim Center doe have a similar sense of people trying something on to see how it fits that is in common with children at play.

I think that it is easy for us to forget how much of play is serious for children and the opportunities it gives them to practise roles they will take later in life. Much of professional development is really faking it until you make it. What if there were somewhere where people felt more comfortable saying to themselves “I am a product designer and I am going to lead this team” without feeling like a failure was going to cost them. Maybe this is something that does exist already, but not that I know of.

“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.