Play With It – A Design Theory Presentation

We were tasked with building a presentation explaining design thinking. This presentation was tailored toward a team of web designers and developers. Our presentation was titled “Play with it” and was an attempt to not only introduce the process of design, but also show teams how play can produce better, more creative, concepts.

Presentation

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Summary

We delivered a presentation to our “clients” (our peers in the course), introducing our theory, noting the expansive and contracting actions that comprise the design process and the goals each accomplishes. We then introduced ideas on how to create new design activities which help produce more creative concepts.

Process

Our team began by meeting together and jotting out thoughts about how we articulate the process of design. We threw out metaphors for different pieces of the process, we sketched our ideas with visualizations, and we stayed relaxed by sharing a pizza and sitting in comfortable chairs.We met 3 times and between meetings reflected back on the ideas we brainstormed while working on other design projects. We refined our model further and decided we wanted to talk about the 2 sides to design thinking, those aspects of design that many people from outside fields are good at (analytical, reductive thinking), and at the same time introduce the concept of play as a way to stimulate the creative, expansive side of design thinking.

Too often design is viewed as an ambiguous process embodied in a designer and separate from everyone else. We wanted to break free from this thinking and present a break down of the design process into something everyone can understand. We introduce the design process as a container filled with many design activities each meant to help us learn more about the design project.

As we refined our model we also began to build our slide deck. This refining of our ideas forced us to really approach each diagram we had, and analyze that it was truly making the point we were trying to get across.

We continually refined our presentation and practiced how we would transition among presenters and then delivered our presentation to our class envisioning the other teams as our intended web design/developer audience.

Reflection

I was very excited to work on this project, first my team was a really fun group of guys who were all able to contribute freely. We were able to meet regularly and everyone was excited to work on this project and really refine our understanding of the process of design.The really exciting part for me was the ability to contribute my ideas of design being made up of many smaller design activities, and that these activities were focused on either expanding possibilities or contracting the focus to narrow outcomes. I also really pushed the team to focus on the refinement of the visualizations we used to make sure that our point was clearly being expressed. This was especially important when we were filling in the items inside the concept and prototype bubbles. We spent a significant portion of one of our last group meetings to really hammer out precisely what we meant and if it really came across in our presentation.