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The goal of this recurring assignment is to develop your ability to use early design concepts (1) to exemplify and explore possible societal impacts of design and (2) to develop your own voice on class topics.
After doing this assignment you will be able to:
Designers tend to go through a lot of drafts before making a final design. The design workbooks are weekly speculative designs done in response to course readings. Because this class focuses on understanding design at a high level, we’re actually looking for your design’s interaction with the readings more than for a new product or service. Think of it as the equivalent to a “reading response” in a humanities course, where you use the response to think about and reflect on the reading. Showing us that you understand the reading enough to design with/against it is of course part of your grade in the class, but it’s much more important that you develop the skill to use later than it is to get a good grade.
Design workbooks are commonly used in the early (research, ideate, iterate, repeat) stage of a design. They are a method for exploring the parameters of the design’s context, addressing specific issues or premises that underpin the design, or playing with materials or techniques that might be included in the design. Particularly in the early stages of design, design workbooks are explicitly not intended to provide a straightforward answer to a design problem, but instead explore trade-offs and possible directions that the final design might foreclose upon or ellide. That is to say, a design workbook at this stage does not contain practical solutions that a designer would expect to be implemented, but rather “speculative” designs that help them to understand the nature of the problem they are facing. The design is often annotated with brief explanations for communicating to others, or to the designer later when they might be in a different headspace. These annotated designs may also tentatively explore the possible social worlds, new experiences, or implications opened up by the design.
In this course, when we say “design workbooks,” most of the time we’re referring to the short (one page) PDF submissions you’ll be making to Canvas every week. They can take many forms, and we encourage you to experiment a bit with format and style throughout the semester. We’ll show examples of prior students’ workbooks, but we generally love adventurous submissions. Can’t draw? That doesn’t really matter. You can trace, collage, do xkcd style kid’s drawings. Do your best to communicate, we’ll meet you half way.
So we mostly mean “your weekly assignment” when we say “design workbooks,” but because they are used throughout design-related industries and practices, we may also be referring to 1) a specific physical workbook that you keep as a way to take notes on the readings and generate your assignments, or 2) the larger method of workbooks, as used by Bill Gaver and other designers we discuss in class.
So even though submissions are PDF, most designers keep one or many notebooks that they can always scribble notes into. We strongly suggest that you do the same. It’s important to make notes, drawings, and scribbles while you are reading. It’s far more easy to be inspired while reading, or right after, than days later. If you are inspired directly while reading, or right after reading, your work will often be good enough to be submitted right away. In other cases, though, you may want to refine, edit, or redraw/rewrite a bit before submitting. We don’t require that you keep a physical workbook, but we secretely hope that you’re keeping an actual notebook, and using it to make your immediate notes and to iterate on designs. Seriously, we really suggest you try it.
For the actual submissions, we use design workbooks as a method for exploring social issues in and through design and for responding to authors’ arguments and creating our own arguments. The workbooks are a designerly form of reading response: how can I use a design to respond to topics and issues that arise in a reading?
The form of your design workbook is open. The submissions will not be judged negatively on artistic execution, but rather on the sophistication and clarity with which they explore class-related issues, their accuracy in connecting with arguments and ideas in class readings, and their creativity and variety in concept. People who can’t draw can and do ace workbook pages. You may execute your workbook by hand, electronically, or in some combination of both; you may use photographs, hand-drawn images, collages from found images, or some other form; you may vary the ratio of text and image as makes sense for your own practice and understanding. It is OK to sketch using very poor drawing skills (this is what one of the professors does herself). We do, however, encourage you to try different visual techniques for some or all of your workbooks: why not experiment? Some students find one method and do it all semester. We don’t downgrade them for it, but are trying to learn about design, or hoping to work on an unchanging assembly line?
Each page in your workbook will have a single design of a [product, service, device, infrastructure, space, etc.], which is anchored in a single, specific idea or issue which you have identified from a single course reading. One design is due for each week, using one of the readings for that that week, unless otherwise specified on the course schedule.
Example: Week X has a Tuesday and Thursday lecture, so the following Monday a workbook will be due that covers ONE of the readings from those lectures, chosen from the readings specified in the assignment on the course schedule page.
The components of a workbook:
Quote and Recap Choose a specific passage from the reading (include the page number!), an important or evocative idea passage that will inspire your design, or that the design is commenting on. This may be 1-4 sentences. Here is an example of how to cite. <– Follow this example (at least at first) to be sure you submit correctly. Then write a few sentences describing the specific idea of the author’s on which you are basing the design in your own words. We need to know that you understood the reading. The expected length of your description is 2-4 sentences; there is a limit to the entire section (including quote) of 120 words.
Draw/Explain and Annotate a Design Your design can be a few sentences, or a drawing annotated with short statements (they do not need to be full sentences). The annotations should reflect on issues that the design raises and how they relate to the idea from the reading. These annotations should not argue for the value of your design; we’re not buying. Instead, use the design as a way to explore the idea from the reading: what possibilities would exist if your design were real? These annotations should be nuanced (i.e., not present a black-and-white view of the issues, of the possibilities of your design, or of the reading) and accurately represent the author’s argument, even (especially) when you disagree with it. Your design is ideally new and original, but it has to spring from the author’s context. Not sure if it’s original? Do a search to see if it exists already.
Note that your design doesn’t have to be practical; you don’t have to explain exactly how it works; it doesn’t need to be buildable in 2022 (but should be somewhat plausible); it doesn’t need a market; you don’t even have to want to own it or use it. That said, it shouldn’t be magic. A good design will seem like something that could exist now or soon. No magic, though. A pill that makes you a genius; a pump that turns garbage into delicious healthy smoothies; an electronic collar that prevents traffic accidents: these are magic, not technology. So you are trying to design an interesting current or near-future technology, but never forget that its ultimate function is really to engage with the readings.
Consider Two Other Designs You Could Have Done, Once Sentence Each. Good designers aren’t too precious with their early ideas. Indeed, each design should spawn other ideas that you might or might not want to explore, but you nonetheless should document. After your in-depth design, imagine two more designs that are different approaches, but still generated in dialog with the reading. Try to mix it up: if your first design was phone-sized, make another house-sized and the next a software platform. If the first design agreed with the author’s point, try one that didn’t agree. We suggest that you adopt a sentence like: “An X that does Y [and maybe Z],[tie to the reading].” One sentence each isn’t much, so take care to write it pithily. Here’s an example of two designs responding to Scott’s text of the High Modernist city:
“1) A city that randomly rearranges one way streets and makes stochastic changes in zoning, forcing people and businesses to constantly swap, undercutting modernist ideals of rational, top-down spatial control. 2) A subterranean ‘borrowers’ neighborhood called Subzilia, created and occupied by the workers who built Brasilia, after it was clear they weren’t welcome in the finished above-ground city.”
Neither of these designs is groundbreaking, but they were fun to come up with, and they certainly demonstrate that I read the Scott and understood it.
What Did You Learn About the Author’s Points By Making the Designs? This final stage is one that may take a few weeks to do well, because once you’ve tried it a few times, you’ll realize that you need to do stages 1-3 in such a way that you have the right raw material to work with in stage 4. If you chose a straightforward or didactic point from the reading, and you created a design that simply illustrates that point, and squeezed out two similarly illustrative designs, you probably haven’t learned anything from doing the design. Really, you want to have chosen a complex point from the reading, found a thoughtful way to engage with it, then done two very different designs. At that point, more likely than not, you’ll have learned something new about the author’s point. As always, this final part of the assignment needs to be in dialog with the reading, but uses your designs and process to synthesize your own new point.
What we are looking for in this design is 1) an accurate reflection of a specific idea from the author of a reading, 2) a creative design idea clearly inspired by or reflecting on that idea, 3) a couple of other designs that show you’re generating more ideas, and 4) thoughtful and personal response that uses your design to reflect on the reading in interesting ways.
What we are not looking for in this assignment is a “good design” with a justification for why the design is good. It is not unusual for the design itself to have serious problems, which your annotations can and should explore. The design might reflect limitations of, alternatives to, or questions about the issues raised in the reading, but again they must be clearly tied to the reading. Again: we want you to be able to show that you understand an author’s ideas, and to design in dialog with those ideas.
Why? Why do reading responses through design? In lecture we show examples of how often designers can be trapped in their own values, and copy those values into their designs without knowing they are doing so. Doing a semester of design exercises based on other people’s arguements helps you to reflect on values that aren’t your own, and to work them into design intentionally. This detachment builds your ability to be conscious of how values are built into designs, and to better make your own fully conscious design arguments later.
Again, your submissions will not be judged negatively on poor artistic execution or sentence fragments, but on the sophistication and clarity with which they explore course-related issues, their accuracy in connecting with an author’s arguments and ideas in class readings, and their creativity. That said, graders will absolutely note effort, care, and excellent execution, and they love clear and compelling submissions. No one has been downgraded for a very well-thought-out, readable, and unique submission, and indeed it can be the difference between an 18 and a 20.
For each of your first four submissions, you’ll add one part of the four parts listed above successivly. So in the first week, as only one lecture has readings due, your ONE design workbook will ONLY consist of part 1: Quote and Recap. The second week, your two workbooks will include both parts 1 and 2: Quote and Recap AND Draw/Explain and Annotate a Design. The fourth submission, your workbooks will have ALL FOUR PARTS of a complete workbook, outlined above. All workbooks will be graded EXTREMELY GENEROUSLY until the fifth submission, but with comments. It is your job to read those comments and try to improve. The comments may even say what your score would be after week four, if you don’t take them into account and improve.
Each page in your workbook will be graded out of 20 points, using the following measures:
An assignment that meets all these criteria will receive an A (18/20). Additional credit is possible at the discretion of the TAs for designs that are truly imaginative, as well as for reflections that are truly thought-provoking and original. Extra points are unusual.
2-3 times per semester we run critiques in discussion section. We’ll explain critiques in lecture, but they are essentially a way to discuss, compare, contrast, and seek help on your workbooks. You’ll be expected to put paper copies of your workbooks on the classroom wall, so please hold on to your originals. You’ll receive feedback on your work, and give feedback to your peers.
