Design thinking is an approach to addressing a problem. It is meant to shift focus from the problem to the problem-in-context, and emphasizes user-centered/concerned solutions. The most important part is prototyping—that of making and revising rather than trying to create a solution fully formed beforehand. Bryan Lawson, in the short article assigned this week, describes the Design Thinking mindset.
When we talk about portfolio design, we are borrowing a bit from design thinking. A good way to address this novel situation, creating a presentation portfolio, is through experimentation and prototyping, which also means covering trying out tools and approaches. You will also change your portfolio for the next few weeks constantly.
There are some tricky issues to design as well. You have watched Sue Jenkins cover in her videos aesthetic and visual design skills, and, hopefully, you understand more how to create an appealing portfolio using color, font, and design. But there are four additional concerns that will pose some interesting dilemmas for you. In this activity, I want you to use some of your new aesthetic design skills and create a Google Slide presentation as a team that introduces people new to the topic. These concerns are sometimes in conflict with one another, making some “wicked problems” (according to ac4d, this is a problem that is difficult to solve because of “incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems’”)
Task
Create a 5-minute presentation on Google Slides or Office 365 PowerPoint (so that we can share these slides with others) that will help your fellow classmates understand your topic in a larger context but also specifically how they might consider this in their portfolio design.
You will be in one “expert” group assigned to one of these tasks. You have 50 minutes to become experts. Use the sources at your disposal (internet, laptop) and transfer your research skills (consider evaluating, corroborating sources, consider popular and academic work from different disciplines).
Each of these are hyperlinked to something to get you started thinking about the topic, but don’t limit yourself to just that. Also, use your personal experience and understanding to springboard to a new understanding.
- Universal Design [Who is reading our portfolio, and should we accommodate them?]
- Designing for Permeance (or change). [how timeless should our portfolios be?]
- Novel Experiences [how unique should our portfolios be?]
- Affordances of web design [How should we best use the medium of the web?]
RELEVANT SKILLS
- This task is asking you to apply your design skills from Sue Jenkins to a slide presentation plus your experience as Internet users and own skills and background with design
- You will have to collaborate, a key component of design problems—we are better if we work together, whether that is brainstorming different ideas, researching definitions, or separating tasks of labor.
- You will develop some meta-knowledge about teaching others of a topic
- You will add nuance to design task