Project 1: On the Town

Goal

The goal of this assignment: communicating ideas and observations visually.

Design requires communication. The better your communication cuts to the core of the idea, the more effective you are as a designer. It's your responsibility to ensure that others see the same thing in your ideas that you do. If they see something else, you need to accept a mea culpa: there's something you're not communicating clearly. Visual communication is a kind of interface design: if the recipient doesn't rapidly get it, then the interface (communication) needs to be tweaked.

Through this assignment you will deepen your visual communication skills. (And, if you're like me, you will prove to yourself that visual communication can be effective even without years of artistic training.) You will not be graded on your artistic abilities. You will be graded on whether you communicate your ideas in a clear and engaging manner. Utilize the tools and techniques that we covered in the first lecture and associated reading.

Brief

Your mission is to capture social experiences on the town. Pop the Stanford bubble and go off campus to any busy area and time where people often come into social contact — San Francisco's Dolores Park, Mountain View's Castro Street, public transportation hubs such as the Palo Alto Caltrain stop, checkin areas at local airports, movie theater lobbies, downtown Palo Alto, or even a hospital ER waiting room. Marguerite, Caltrain and BART open up a wide variety of interesting environments. Pick any venue you are interested in observing. Choose a time when the location is likely to be busy (e.g., dinner for downtown, rush hour for transportation areas). You will visually capture the environment, social successes in that environment, and social breakdowns in that environment.

Project Example

An example of a good project 1 from this year can be found HERE.

Note: while this project has great insights, it does rely too much on text instead of primarily using visuals to tell stories.

Assignment

Your assignment is to observe and then sketch an environment of your choosing. You'll use your observations to inspire a redesign. Break down your steps as below.

Equip yourself

A good sketchbook is a critical part of the designer's toolkit. Make sure you've purchased a sketchbook and pen you can take with you. Act quickly, because we are not the only class on campus that's asking you to buy a sketchbook and they do sell out. Important features: no lines, no flimsy pages, no tiny sketchbooks (we recommend at least 5"x8"), no thin-lined pens (go for something with a reasonably thick ink stream), and no pencils. The Stanford Bookstore sells sketchbooks, as does University Art and Accent Arts. Moleskine makes some great ones (example), and Amazon Prime Student can get them to you very quickly.

Then, make sure you've finished this week's reading linked on the syllabus. In your sketchbook, practice your star people, blob people, boxes, and other techniques from this week's class.

Observe at your location

Once you're at your location, walk around and observe. Take down some sketches to yourself of what you see. Aim to capture at volume, don't worry about filtering to just great observations. Just capture what you see and ideas as they come to you. Feel free to take pictures or audio recordings on your phone to complement for your own memory. For this section, you are not graded on your communication skills, mainly on your use of visual expression techniques from class and on observation.

Dev Patnaik's rule of thumb is to observe until it gets boring, then observe until it gets interesting again. Give yourself 30 minutes. The only requirement is that you watch, but you should feel free to introduce yourself and interview people in the environment as well.

Your goal will be to capture the milieu and activities of this location so that others who have never been there can understand its dynamics. Pay attention to the people, the environment, and how the design of the environment is influencing how, when and where the people interact. What are the focal points of the space, where people meet up and hang out? Why? What areas do they avoid, and why? Is there an ebb and flow to the space, or is it static?

Think about the how the environment was intended to be used, and how it's being appropriated by current users. How do people interact with the architecture, with their technology (e.g., phones/music), and with the designed objects in the space? Are there any discrepancies or interesting insights that arise? If there are environments being mixed together (e.g. digital environment of a phone, the physical environment of the space), how do they interact?

The deliverable here is a selection of no more than six pages of your observations captured in a primarily visual form. While you likely have more sketches, pick the most interesting six pages to turn in. Feel free to include other material as supplements at the end of the assignment submission — we will glance through them too.

Social performances

Now that you've spent some time observing and capturing ideas and events, it's time to start communicating this environment to others. We'll focus on the people. Focus on successful social interactions: what are social engagements people are participating in? Look for situations where everything really seems to be clicking. Is the environment supporting that success, or is it simply a backdrop? Capture specific instances, as well as broader patterns.

Now, in your sketchbook, work to communicate the nature of these social successes to others. Don't be afraid to go big and spend an entire page or more capturing a pattern in a visually compelling manner. Again, don't be descriptive or schematic --- aim to communicate an implicit story using your static images. Your goal is for a viewer to understand what the social success is, and why it might be particularly well-suited to that environment.

With this and the rest of the components of the assignment, use any visual tools at your disposal. You can produce single sketches or short storyboards. Use shapes, words and short phrases, titles, people, abstractions, whatever would help someone understand. It's expected that you'll want to use some text, but don't write essays. Treat text as a visual tool.

Turn in scans of no more than three pages for this deliverable. Feel free to include other material and self-study sketches as you want as supplements as well.

Social breakdowns

The fourth deliverable is the same as the third, but this time, focus on social breakdowns. Watch for slips, mistakes, missed connections, or social interactions that don't go as well as they should. Sketch to yourself what's going on.

Now, as before, communicate visually a few of the most salient breakdowns, and ways in which the environment might be contributing to them. Are people tripping over each other on the sidewalk? Friends not able to hear each other? No safety from the weather?

This deliverable is identical to the successes: three pages, plus any supplemental material you want.

Redesign the environment

For the final deliverable, focus on one of most interesting observations you made, and sketch a proposed redesign of the environment. Don't fix a small social "usability problem": think holistically about what the social goals of the environment are, and how a redesign could empower those goals and downplay the social breakdowns you saw. Focus your redesign on one core element of the environment: don't try to fix everything through a lot of tiny changes. It's fine to be ambitious in your redesign, and to assume technology that's within five years of practical deployment.

Sketch the redesign. No more than two pages. Add any supplemental sketches you want.

Explain: unseal the envelope

We will look at your sketches without knowing where you visited or what you were trying to communicate. Now, add a very short writeup to tell us what you were trying to communicate. In particular, we'd like to see:

• One paragraph (3-4 sentences) to describe the location and why you chose it,
• One paragraph to describe what you hope the viewer will see in your observational sketches of the environment,
• One paragraph to decribe the social performances you captured,
• One paragraph to decribe the social breakdowns you captured, and
• One paragraph to describe your proposed redesign.

Submit

Scan or take photos of your sketchbook. Submit one combined PDF with each deliverable section clearly labeled as below. Now, start bringing your sketchbook to class and studio!

In one PDF file:

• Observe at your location: no more than six pages.
• Social performances: no more than three pages.
• Social breakdowns: no more than three pages.
• Redesign the environment: no more than two pages.
• Your brief explanation writeup.
• Supplemental sketches: anything you'd like to include, no length limit.

If accessibility constraints would make it difficult for you to execute this assignment, please post (anonymously if you wish) to the class forum. In particular, please envision an alternate means of observing and communicating your observations to others, and share it in your post. If it sounds good to us, we'll OK it!

Please post any questions about this project or others to the class forum.

Grading rubric