AC4D Professor Jon Freach was recently published in The Atlantic. In a short piece titled  Sciences, Humanities, and … Design? The Case for a Third Pillar of Education, Jon describes some of his experiences teaching at AC4D:

But the problematic part was that they were students at a design school. We actively recruit and accept those without deep design backgrounds because of the other skills and experience they bring to our program like business, science, engineering, education, social work, or simply their intellectual curiosity and adeptness. We do this with full confidence that we can leverage our own design training to help them along. The expectation at our school is that students won’t be creating just beautiful objects; they’ll create beautifully smart and socially impactful ones.

Click here to read the whole article.

Hi,

I’m interested in sharing some of my thoughts about design in a more accessible format than my admittedly dense writing, and so I’m going to be publishing quick videos – Design Snacks – once a week on various designerly topics.

Here’s the first one; I hope you like it.

Technology is a tool that humans have used for centuries. It’s part of what defines us as human. It’s an extension of ourselves.

Technology is a tools that grants us the ability to wield unimaginable power. We can use it as an advantage over others, helping us to remember perfectly, or to catalog our lives with great precision.

But should we?

Often times technology creates an un-level playing field, where the rich gain the edge, and the poor stay dis-empowered.

Designers have the ability to change this dynamic.

By engaging in the unmeasurable aspects of what make us human; emotion, context, phenomenology, irrational and strange behavior, we will be forced to extend our understandings into unknown areas of human existence.

Stretching ourselves to design for the dis-empowered will lead us towards making more careful and empathetic technology for everyone.

Thanks,
Cheyenne

Artifacts presenting the role of technology in the world and its importance.

1. New technology advances slowly and new technology is available to a select few.
2. People are influenced, constrained, and motivated by technology in every stage of the design process.
3. The design process results in the creation of things in the form of products, services, and systems.
4. Things shape people and some of those people are are influenced, constrained, and motivated by new technology.

1. New technology advances rapidly and is available to a large population.
2. Ubiquitous new technology allows more people to act as designers.
3. People are influenced, constrained, and motivated by technology in every stage of the design process.
4. The design process results in the creation of things in the form of products, services, or systems.
5. Things shape people and most of those people now design things.

This is important because I value people and want to live in a world of things that do more good than harm.

Congratulations to AC4D Alumni Ruby Ku for her article Austin Center for Design Looks at Homelessness, Published in Touchpoint: The Journal of Service Design’s January, 2012 issue. You can read her article here (.pdf), and learn more about the journal here.

Please join us at our third annual Design for Impact Bootcamp, to be held on Saturday, Mar 31, 2012. This day-long event will introduce you to the research and design approach we use at Austin Center for Design; after taking part in the event, participants will have:

• Acquired a high level process for approaching large-scale social problems, and understand the challenges associated with these types of problems
• Experienced the research, synthesis and ideation processes as related to design for impact
• Gained empathy with a target, at-risk population
• Acquired the introductory vocabulary to speak about strategic design work, in the context of designing for impact

There are a limited number of seats available for this event; if you are interested, please sign up here.

We are excited to welcome two new faculty members, who will be teaching class in the upcoming quarter:

Matt Franks is a Senior Interaction Designer at frog design and the co-owner of Monster Feet design consultancy. Prior to working at frog, Matt was a hybrid interaction / product designer for Target Corporation. His work ranges from mobile systems for both handsets and tablets, to entertainment experiences for TV, web, and video. In the past 4 years, he has released over 400 products and services into the market. Matt will be teaching the Design Studio class.

Jan Moorman is a design researcher for projekt202, where she is responsible for both generative and evaluative user research. Jan holds degrees in Fine Art and Computer Science. She has worked in analytical chemistry, software architecture, scientific visualization, performance support and interface design. She believes that the skill of research cannot be completely learned from textbooks and is excited about having the opportunity to mentor and coach the ac4d students. Jan will be teaching the Evaluation of Interaction Design Solutions class.

Welcome, Matt and Jan!

This quarter I created a prototype for a web app called Healthify. This application allows people to find and easily modify recipes in real-time to make them healthier. The goal of the app is to encourage individuals to try healthier recipes through a user interface that encourages experimentation and gives immediate feedback of the benefits of healthier ingredients.

I learned a lot during the creation of this web app. First, I learned the value of working through the higher level concepts of an idea before diving into the details. As a developer I have a bad habit of rushing to coding as soon as possible. However, this tends to result in creating products that are poorly thought out and have little value to the end user. Working through the higher level ideas of the app and considering the goals and needs of the user allowed me to create a prototype that fit better with what the user desires.

I also learned the value of iteration. Forcing myself through the cycle of making, evaluating, and refine allowed me to see the issues with my app earlier and work through them. If I didn’t move through this process the value of Healthify as a product would have been questionable at best.

Finally, I learned that explicitly wire framing every screen of my application saves on valuable development time. I have a bad habit of coding too quickly and then making poor interaction decisions which I need to redo later. Making every frame allows me to quickly see the issues with the app and then change them before I spent time coding.

However, there are a couple things I would do differently next time. First, I would not create my prototype in HTML. I wasted way too much time fiddling around with random bugs. Also, I realized that potential clients would not appreciate all my extra effort anyway since the end result is visually indistinct from other types of digital prototypes. Next time I will strongly consider making a clickable PDF instead since it creates the same effect for end users with significantly less development time.

Secondly, I would show my idea to more people during the development process. After my final presentation of Healthify I received a couple ideas for my app that I wish I discovered sooner in the ideation process. Next time I will try to get as much feedback as possible to improve my app’s experience.

Overall I am very excited how Healthily turned out. Through rapidly iteration I was able to create a working prototype of a product that I feel has real value to people who want to eat healthier. In the coming months I hope to build Healthify into a real product that encourages people to try baking with healthier food choices.

View the Healthify work flow pdf >

View the live Healthify web app prototype >