d.science

d.science: DESIGN FOR SCIENCE

FINAL PROJECTS | d.science 2012

MUSEUMTAG

USER: Museum aficionados
NEED: A way to keep track of exhibits they have interacted with at different museums
INSIGHT: Over time, museum experiences become a blur.

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CHANGING CLASS CULTURE

POV: Teachers need to be able to identify what was confusing what was confusing in their lectures since students are not giving the lecturer the feedback in-class.

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SCIENCE FOR ATTENTION

POV:  Teenage science students with AD(H)D need real-time reinforcement & feedback to channel their impulses towards subject matter rather than distractions.

KEY INSIGHTS:

- Challenging your teacher can be even more engaging than being challenged by them, but students rarely get the opportunity.

- The most important thing for students with AD(H)D is to take time to learn

FINAL | Changing Class Culture

d.science Slowing Down Teacher 23Feb

FINAL | MuseumTag

Our problem:

That over time people forget their experiences at museums and that these experiences become “a blur”.

Specific user group:
Museum aficionados - people who are frequent visitors to museums.

The Cantor Museum was a logical place to conduct our empathy research especially since it is on campus and we have connections/liaisons who have been extremely helpful in letting us observe there. We believed that the insights gained there would translate well in the domain of museums, though we would lose the specificity of the nuances of a science museum.

We observed and interviewed a variety of visitors to the museum, both inside and outside the Cantor and both entering and leaving the museum. We interviewed a total of 5 separate couples/individuals.

Point of Views generated

“Museum aficionados need a way to keep track of exhibits they have interacted with at different museums because over time these experiences “become a blur”.

Museums need to provide more hands-on experiences to their visitors because museum visitors nowadays are more like participants; the era of hushed tones and don’t-touch standards is in the past.

Museums need to amplify their exposure to new audiences by creating a depth of reasons to be there because some participants just want to skim the exhibits & reflect on what they have seen while others are hungry for more depth feel the need to satiate their curiosity.

Hands-on participants - people who need a tactile experience, need a surrogate ownership experience - an artifact that serves as a totem of their experience or provides them with a scaffold to craft their unique museum experience - because many museums don’t provide the hands-on interaction they crave.

Prototypes

#1, MuseumTag

USER: Museum aficionados
NEED: A way to keep track of exhibits they have interacted with at different museums
INSIGHT: Over time, museum experiences become a blur.

What is the variable you are testing? Whether museum aficionados would enjoy carrying around a physical card to tag exhibits with.

Where and with whom did you test your protoype? At Cantor Arts Center, with visitors that were either entering the museum or leaving it.

What was your biggest learning? Those visitors that cared about preserving the memory of their visit by something external had varying means of doing so, some more successful than others. For example, one woman mentioned that she often buys postcards “that serve as a reminder of the visit.” Additionally, she often visits the museum websites when she goes home. And when she travels, she keeps a journal. She was very interested in the curated memory experience the Museum Tag solution offered. Another visitor mentioned that he often took pictures, but that he usually didn’t have the time to organize them later and they get forgotten. And another museum visitor mentioned that she often wrote in the margins of brochures or maps to remember her experience. Clearly, people do all sorts of things to remember museum visits. Museum Tag would be a streamlined solution.

Prototype #2

iPhone application

USER: Museum aficionados
NEED: A way to keep track of exhibits they have interacted with at different museums
INSIGHT: Over time, museum experiences become a blur.

What is the variable you are testing? Whether museum visitors would welcome the quick, low-energy interaction of checking in to a museum and having that action store information on the exhibits at the museum at the time of their visit.

Where and with whom did you test your protoype? At the Cantor Arts Center, with visitors that were either entering the museum or leaving it.

What was your biggest learning? We in the Bay Area often assume that smart phones are ubiquitous, but that might not be the case. Several of the visitors we interviewed (mostly the older crowd) said they wouldn’t use it because they didn’t have a smart phone. Additionally, the people that do take notes or pictures to remember their experience do so because they want personal reminders of their visits and what they liked. Thus, the fact that the app would store info on ALL of the exhibits detracted from developing a personal memory of their visit.

FINAL | Science for Attention

Team AD(H)D | Cruz deWilde & Eli Marschner

Problem/POV: Teenage science students with AD(H)D need real-time reinforcement & feedback to channel their impulses towards subject matter rather than distractions.

User Group: Teens with AD(H)D who have difficulty with science subjects because it’s hard for them to focus & stay engaged with the material.

What’s out there:

• Medication
• General strategies & mantras, such as: “Pause, reflect, be correct”…
• Khan Academy (optimal for NLD learners)
• Tablet computers
• 

Intermediate POVs:

“Challenging your teacher can be even more engaging than being challenged by them, but students rarely get the opportunity.”

“Teachers and students would like to create new learning materials, but lack the resources to do so.”

“Teachers are already very familiar with the subject matter, which means they have less excitement and surprise to convey to students. They don’t like wrote teaching any more than students like wrote learning.”

Initial Prototypes:

Video annotations…

• User: student & teachers
• Need: way to easily create material suited to how students learn
• Insight: teachers lack tools to create quality materials
• Variable: quality of self-created educational materials
• Tested with: e-textbook conference attendees
• Learnings: not felt to be any significant benefits over using existing materials

Physics simulation game & Homework racing game…

• User: students who learn best by doing
• Need: keep students engaged & interested while doing homework
• Insight: games give a much-needed boost in adrenaline
• Variable: effectiveness of gamification & competition to keep students engaged
• Tested with: college freshmen & sophomores, and business school students
• Learnings: games are fun, but only encourage short attention spans

Observations:

Location: outside science lectures
Who: students finishing up problem sets, on their way to do homework, discussing the subject w/ peers, chatting with friends both online & IRL
What: enjoy playing games, but only playing games. get frustrated when don’t know the answer, and can’t continue in game until they do.


Further Insight:

Simply emulating the qualities of games in an educational context doesn’t produce the kind of behavior change we want to enable. The symptom of being engaged while being entertained isn’t the point — it’s the root cause of impulse control & channelling hyperactive shifts in attention that really matters.

Final Prototypes:

Word scramble & draw.science…

• User: students studying & doing homework
• Need: be actively engaged but still reflective while learning new material
• Insight: the most important thing for students with AD(H)D is to take time to learn
• Variable: time spent willingly engaged with material
• Tested with: undergraduate science students
• Learnings: games are still fun, and make it easier to be engaged w/ subject matter — but are potentially frustrating due to excessive repetition. Combining the two approaches would be a good idea.

d.science FINAL PRESENTATIONS

 
d.science [Design for Science], a new class at the d.school this year, is holding final project presentations on Thursday, March 15, at 12pm in Studio 2 on the second floor of the d.school (building 550).  [Map] 

d.science students were asked to explore the questions:  How might researchers use design to create innovative means of data collection, to develop new lines of research, and to more effectively communicate their work?  How might designers and artists generate work that opens up scientific discovery to new audiences?

Working in interdisciplinary teams, and with only six class sessions across Winter quarter, students worked intensively on quarter-long projects with coaching from our teaching team. 

Come show your support and give feedback as our nine dedicated students share their quarter-long team projects via 7-minute presentations and an informal prototype expo session. 

Interact with physics, be proud to raise your hand, and always remember what you saw at that exhibit that day….

We look forward to seeing you there!

~the d.scientists



DIRECTIONS to the d.school
From Highway 101 North & South or El Camino Real

Take the Embarcadero Road exit west toward Stanford. At El Camino Real, Embarcadero becomes Galvez Street as it enters the university. Stay in the left lane on Galvez and at the stop sign turn left onto Campus Drive. Continue on Campus Drive (East) until you reach Mayfield Ave. Turn right onto Mayfield Ave. After a forced left turn there is a large parking lot off of Mayfield on the right side. (Parking is $1.50 per hour from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and credit cards, bills and coins are accepted.) Park as far from Mayfield Ave. you as you can.

Once parked, walk north towards Tresidder Union which can be recognized by its outdoor tables. Walk with the Tresidder Union on your left side and you will see the Old Union directly in front of you. Take a left to walk between Tresidder Union and Old Union, and then a right onto Duena Street, keeping Old Union on your right. At the next intersection, Panama Mall, make a left onto Panama. The d.school is two buildings down. On several doors, you’ll see “Thomas F. Peterson Engineering Laboratory.” You’ve arrived!

From Highway 280 North & South

Exit Alpine Road east toward Stanford. Turn right at the light onto Junipero Serra Blvd. Turn left at the second light onto Campus Drive East. Continue on Campus Drive East until you reach Mayfield Ave. Turn left onto Mayfield Ave. After a forced left turn there is a large parking lot off of Mayfield on the right side. (Parking is $1.50 per hour from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and credit cards, bills and coins are accepted.) Park as far from Mayfield Ave. you as you can.

Once parked, walk north towards Tresidder Union which can be recognized by its outdoor tables. Walk with the Tresidder Union on your left side and you will see the Old Union directly in front of you. Take a left to walk between Tresidder Union and Old Union, and then a right onto Duena Street, keeping Old Union on your right. At the next intersection, Panama Mall, make a left onto Panama. The d.school is two buildings down. On several doors, you’ll see “Thomas F. Peterson Engineering Laboratory.” You’ve arrived!

INSPIRATION | Bertrand | Topobo

link: Topobo

INSPIRATION | David | FoldIt

I was inspired by the protein folding game, FoldIt, which came out of David Baker’s lab at University of Washington; he came to give a seminar in the chemistry department this week. I thought it was cool how they came up with intuitive tools to manipulate structures in 3D space, which is notorious for being hard to think in.

INSPIRATION | SFMOMA Artscope

This was actually brought to my attention by Maryanna, and I thought it was hard to find something more interesting to share this week. The ArtScope is a massive tile of 6000 art pieces within the SFMOMA collection, and it actually ties in very neatly with some of my other research in “browsing large media collections, specifically on the TV”. There are some things that could be implemented on top of this tool, such as clustering of art pieces, zooming to explore more pieces similar (instead of tiling them right next to each other) and seeing how the odd empty spaces between art pieces can be used more efficiently.

http://www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/

INSPIRATION | Daniel | dispelling myths around violence and self-defense

My inspiration for this week is something of an outlier in this blog, but I think that it fits with the overall themes. It’s a book called “Meditations on Violence” by Rory Miller.

Miller writes and teaches about the causes and prevention of violence in a range of settings. In his words,

“After nearly thirty years in martial arts, 18 working with violent criminals in Corrections and a year as a contractor in Iraq, I now teach and write on the subject of violence. I’ve been a military medic; a tactical team member and leader; a corrections officer and sergeant.”

I’m reading a book by him right now called “Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence”. Miller spends a lot of time dispelling myths around the realism and value of a range of martial arts, discusses the dynamics of real violent encounters, and offers advice that goes way outside the typical fighting methods and macho empowerment of many books in this genre. For example, he discusses the legal implications of violent encounters, dealing with the aftermath, and the importance of avoiding encounters over “winning” them. Over and over, he points out the mistakes that well-intentioned people make around their own safety based on bad information.

I think that this book fits with the spirit of this class for a few reasons. It was clearly addressing a need for knowledge that had not been met before, and the author’s first-hand experience gave him observational data to drive his insights instead of theoretical assumptions about how violence should look. I find it inspiring that Miller so carefully addresses the real and dangerous misconceptions that people have.