Design, Place and social Innovation Studio

CMU School of Design

It is important that you remember as you complete the following – that this is one aspect of your overall assessment requirements for the course. Crudely we can say that it is 1/3 of your requirements – but what that means will vary depending on what people do. Each aspect of this – in progress and outcome is to be negotiated with your professor.

• What will your individual exploration of the issues in this class focus on?
• What is it that you want to know?
• What is it that you want to do?
• What will your reference material be for this? (readings, designers, writers etc.)
• What will the material outcome be?
• What is the scope of this investigation? How big will it be? How many components, words, minutes?
• What is your timeline for progress through this?
• How will you know that you are making progress on this?
• How will you measure your success in realizing your ambition?

HOME RUN REVIEW April 8, 2013

As you work through your individual projects, you should by now be clear about what it is that you are doing, and how your particular investigation is fitting into the overall themes and issues from the class. Take some time to think about the following:

What design act or design strategy or design method are you exploring?

What from your work would be transferable to other designers? How could they adopt the ideas behind your project and apply it to another complex social problem?

How does your work relate to the work of other designers or design researchers?

What about your project is different?

Go back and read what you set out to do in the beginning, in your initial project brief – how does what you are doing now, relate to that? Is it different? Has it evolved? And if so, why? what caused/created the changes?

In terms of presenting your work – how will you synthesize your discoveries to go into your pages in the book? And, where will the greater project work be located? How will all the project work be presented for assessment?

FINAL ASSESSMENT

CLASS REFLECTION AND INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT

The aim of this assessment is for you to reflect on your learning in this studio this semester. There are two parts to the assessment 1. Is on your individual project & 2. Is in relation to your learning ambition as you stated in the first class. Please answer the questions in the points below and return to Laurene by Thursday the 9^th of May.

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

Return to your individual assignment brief – the one where you stated what your project was gong to focus on, what you would learn and how it would be evaluated. Refresh your memory of what you hoped or planned to do. Now in response to that, I would like you to critique or evaluate your individual project against the points that you addressed in your project plan.

What will your individual exploration of the issues in this class focus on? Did this change in the course of your project inquiry?

What is it that you want to know?/What is it that you want to do? Did you come to know what it was that you wanted to know more about? Did you do what you had hoped you would do?

What will your reference material be for this? (readings, designers, writers etc.) What reference material – text, images, artefacts – did you use in your project?

What will the material outcome be? What did you produce in your project?

What is the scope of this investigation? How big will it be? How many components, words, minutes? Including what you have done for the book – how are you presenting/compiling all of your individual inquiry?

What is your timeline for progress through this? How did you go with your time management for the project? Is it complete? Is there more you would still do if there was more time?

How will you know that you are making progress on this? How would you evaluate your progress in this study? Did it go as planned? What did you have to change or modify?

How will you measure your success in realizing your ambition? How do you measure your success in this project and what you have done? If you had to give yourself a grade – what would it be?

INDIVIDUAL COURSE LEARNING STATEMENT

In week one of classes I asked each of you to complete an individual learning statement – in this you listed what it is that you were hoping to learn/know or be able to do as a result of undertaking this studio. It was framed around the following statements.

At the end of this semester I hope to…. (KNOW, WORK IN, DO, TAKE ON ETC….)

My aim is to be:

In this course I hope to … (LEARN, EXPERIMENT, DISCOVER, PRACTICE…)

I hope that this course will help me to:

To make this happen I will need to:

I would now like you to return to your original statements and based on these reflect on what you would say now in terms of:

Have your aims been realised?

Have you evolved as a designer in a manner that you had hoped that you would?Have you taken responsibility for your own learning in this class? Requesting changes, adding to content, questioning things you didn’t understand or think appropriate?

Additionally I would like to know what has been the transferable knowledge for you from having undertaken this studio course?

PREPARING FOR FINAL PRESENTATIONS

For the final assessment day  each student is required to present their individual project to the class. This presentation should be between 10 minutes max in length.

Every body in the presentations is aware of the complexities of the problem we have been exploring and of the narratives of your individual projects through the various presentations and discussions throughout the semester. In this presentation I want you to elevate a level and to discuss your project as a design action or strategy, and what kind of transferable knowledge and insights your method can produce for both the challenge of guns but any other such wicked sociocultural and political problem.

An example of a presentation outline is:

• briefly state what your project focused on/your intention (2min)
• what you did (2min)
• state what kind of design strategy/method this is, or how what you have done draws on your design knowledge (2 min)
• the strengths and limitations of your method (2min)
• with more time, resources or capabilities what would you change or extend and why (2min)

The style of the presentation should be to walk us through your project & provide us with enough context to be able to critique and consider it for further application.