Life with BCT

This blog is about my journey through life in AUT, doing a bachelor in Creative Technologies. Everything in here reflects on my work, what I was thinking, what I did, what inspired me and much more. It's a way for me to reflect and showcase my work.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio VI - Week 12 & 13

Following the workshop we ran with colab members, we received some feedback from Ben on Monday of week 12.

He gave some generally positive good feedback with some constructive ones to let us know on how we can further improve and justify the decisions that we’ve made. What really stuck out to us was when he made the comment that our project is “good” but not “great”.

Although we created some meaningful insights in a field that is definitely a relevant issue, especially in New Zealand, nothing about the project that we did or the way approached was exploring the fringes of what’s already available. It’s true that we’ve been doing Co Design which can be considered quite a new approach to solving issues but it’s a discipline in itself. I think what Ben was talking was that we weren’t doing anything to challenge the borders of that discipline that makes it a Creative Technologist project.

Upon reflecting on what Ben had said, it gave us a realisation that although we have been using Co Design methods, we haven’t necessarily been working within the discipline of Co Design. Let me explain. Co Design is the approach of empowering non-designers to be able to design a solution based on an underlying issue or opportunity that they’ve uncovered. It’s giving someone alternative tools for drawing besides a pencil or giving someone alternative tools for driving besides a wheel. It’s primarily focused around enabling to come up with a solution.

What we’ve done is used Co Design methods to create an experience for the participants. The focus isn’t what they make at the end of it but the learning about themselves and others that’s important. It’s the gaining of insight.

Having said that, we Lara and I thought... “It’s not creative technologist enough”.

Ben tried to help us by giving us an example of a direction that we could take. He sent us a link to Story Cubes. It’s a play device that encourages and inspires people to create stories procedurally, based on a number of dices with prodding images. How he saw us taking it was that we as Creative Technologists could create a new tool that hasn’t existed before that could act as an alternative for some of the ones in the Co Design arsenal.

With this in mind, Lara and I analyse what each tool that we used was doing. What was their purpose and what were the adding to the experience. We decided to break down the workshop and its activities into a framework, listing their purpose. Listed below is the step by step framework.

Create a safe and supportive environment.

Provide an opportunity to become aware of other participants.

Provide a platform for participants to express themselves.

Allow participants to share.

Provide a framework for participants to empathise.

Allow participants to share the experience.

These steps are what we think lead to a successful workshop. Logically, I asked, what are the possible concepts that we can build around one or two of these steps. Lara on the other hand had a different idea.

That’s what started our week long endeavour on creating a proposition for an online tool that embodies the framework that we’ve made to recreate the experience of encouraged emphatic behaviour through an online medium. The reason for online is because we envisioned it being a resource/tool that organisations that we approach could refer people to. They have a strong online presence so it makes sense that we go with what has been working for them.

Of course, it brings up a number of risks and considerations that could alter how the online tool differs from the workshop but these are all mentioned in our proposition. In the end, we’ve come up with a strong foundation for a specific outcome with strict guidelines on the purpose it has and what needs to be done to ensure it’s delivered.

Happy overall.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio VI - Week 10 & 11

Pre workshop

We ran our findings from our workshop with Ben, and suggested if we should try to make a parallel by using Colab members instead of the initial parents and teens to which he said yes.

Throughout the preparation of the new workshop, Lara and I discuss back and forth on the focus of the workshop. One idea is that the workshop focuses on the comprehension of a student on what lecturers in Colab are like and vice versa. Another is that the workshop allows for both student and lecturer to gain comprehension on either parties. While the latter opens it up for more of a co design practice where the participants dictate the learning outcome, the earlier is more of an accurate parallel of our initial parent-teen relationship. The reason for needing to clarify the focus of the workshop is to ensure that we choose activities that meet its goals.

To create the tools and activities that we used for the workshop, we did a lot of playtesting with ourselves and other students in studio. This allowed us to narrow down the finer aspects of the workshop. Things like the wording of the objective can drastically affect what people do so finding the clearest explanation was key. It also tested how long each activity may take, to give us a brief idea of what it takes to have a meaningful but efficient session.

Other aspects that were clarified from the playtests were whether our assumption of what an activity will do to people actually occurred. For example, we had an activity where images that portrayed emotions helped us reflect on how things in our world made us feel but after doing the activity, we found it to be very ineffective. Afterwards, we sought an alternative to which we found a fill in the blank exercise. It gave people enough structure so that reflecting was easier while providing the freedom to choose what to reflect on.

To get the most out of the workshop, we aimed at getting a small but diverse group of participants. We had two people from year 1, year 2 and lecturers, with one from year 3. If we had our way, we would have a one to one ratio of student to lecturer but given short notice, we had to work with who we can get. It was vital for a meaningful outcome that we get a number of lecturers to take part in our workshop so it was much appreciated that two lecturers made time for it. We also got one student from our previous workshop to participate again on this one. This is extremely valuable as we’ll get some comparative input on how this workshop went in comparison to our previous one.

Reflections on Workshop

Overall, the workshop went well. It went well in the sense that we got through it without any major issues. It went well in the sense that some people got some value out of it that aligns with our goal of providing people with comprehension about another group. One participant reflected that the workshop helped them learn more about Colab students and lecturers.

The methods used had not only brought out what we had expected them to do but sometimes more with some participants finding it a very self-reflective exercise. The nature of the structure also flowed from one activity to another, helping people build on top of their ideas and understanding of the topic to something more developed.

For the meantime, I’m keeping the description of what happened in the workshop minimal. Concerns of whether it’s relevant to bring it up or not is the primary reason.

Post Workshop

From here, Lara and I will be discussing about what we can do as a presentable outcome for assessment and exhibition. I’m hoping that Ben has more thoughts and reflections on how the workshop went and that he can give us more feedback and suggestions on what we can do. A possible aesthetic approach is that we have a dummy workshop laid out on a table so people can get a sense of what a workshop looks like. We can also try to create a standardised version of the workshop that we ran and the materials needed so that other people can use it for their own purposes.

For now, it’s very rewarding to have come this far and run what seems to be a successful workshop.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Pre and Post Workshop

Pre Workshop

After Lara had compiled a number of key concepts from the “Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for Front End Design”, we went through possible useful tools we can use for our test workshop with some colab students.

One of the most interesting tools was something called sensitiser. The purpose of a sensitiser is to create awareness for workshop participants of certain behaviours or situation that would be later developed in the Co Design workshop. An example of a sensitiser is providing two post it tabs to someone fixed to a bracelet each. One is red and one is blue. For every time that person has a negative reaction to anything, take a red post-it. If it was a positive reaction, take a blue post-it tab. The purpose of the sensitiser isn’t to be aware of how many tabs you took but to be aware of when something has a negative or positive effect on you. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to implement a sensitiser but it’ll be something we’ll look into implementing in the future.

We structured the workshop with two critical phases within it. The first, being the immersive phase, where it allows them to get an understanding and a shared view on the topic. The second is the generative phase where they form new ideas, explore them and build new concepts. Ideally, with the immersive phase, we will be able to extract what living in this world as an adolescent means to them. From there, they will create an empathic tool/experience that we can provide to the parents that we will be working with in our next iteration of the workshop.

Post Workshop

After doing the workshop, the main takeaway was the amount of assumptions we had going into it. We had the assumption that the topic talked about in the immersion phase was enough of a link to jump into the generative phase. One of the main criticisms on the workshop was that it was too disjointed. In the future, we’ll be trying to make a more visual link between the two activities. If we start off with a collage, the next activity should make use of that collage, rather than just the topics talked about in the collage.

The workshop also highlighted that there’s a major difference between teens that are in university and those that are still in high school. The dynamics between the two are most likely very different as the two situations are very different. The results we got from the workshop was not what we thought we would get. While it’s still school holidays, we will be looking to see if we can approach schools to do workshops but this exposes to a lot more challenges with ethics approval.

Another major assumption we had was that not understanding created a lot of tension in the family. While there were a number of topics brought up that parents didn’t understand, most of them were not crucial to the relationship. A lot of the participants said that although it was nice to have understand, it doesn’t play a big role in the tension of the family.

Where To

One consideration we had was to reframe the problem again. Given that our workshop hadn’t worked out the way we thought it would, that puts us back in our schedule.

If I had to think about ultimately, what has our goal been this whole semester, it would have to be the improvement of youth’s quality of life. For the majority of the semester, we have taken the approach of tackling adolescent depression because it’s a prevalent problem in society and it was heavily informed by Lara’s previous project. One way we can create an achievable goal is targeting a specific group with a specific issue. Adolescents have been too big of a community to effectively target and design for. One idea I had was to target the students of Colab and how one of the main struggles we have is explaining what we do in our course. While it doesn’t create much tension at home, it’s a big part of our life currently and not being able to clearly show what we do, presumably, leaves a lot of people feeling underappreciated and undervalued.

If we were to go and work on this topic, we have to try to cull out as many assumptions there are in that statement.

These assumptions are:

Colab students feel strongly enough about the misconception of what we do.

Understanding what students do is of value to students.

People not understanding what students do

Post Blog Thought

My initial reflections on how the workshop went was that it only brought up holes in our project. We had a lot of assumptions going into the workshop and it didn’t work out the way we wanted. In the end, the assumption that parents’ lack of comprehension creates a lot of tension isn’t applicable to a lot of people.That doesn’t mean that the workshop wasn’t successful.

A lot of the participants enjoyed the experience and some of them found meaningful outcomes. While some found a means of letting out something they have been repressing, others found a new appreciation for the people around them.

In the end, the workshop proved to improve their well-being in their own way. What we can do from here is refine the workshop experience which allows participants to find problems in their lives and let them express it or help them realise how good they have it right now. We could provide the structure and the type of resources they need as an outcome.

To pull this off, we would want to iterate the workshop structure and resources and have colab students participate in it. Given that atleast one participant find new appreciation for something or get the chance to express something, it can be seen as a success.

Studio Exhibition

Given that we take this route, we could portray on a table what a post workshop situation could look like. People can try to unravel the experience on the evening. This is more a mental note. Exhibition approach will be developed later on.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Week 3 Summary

https://marlosanmiguel.tumblr.com/post/165258490534/studio-6-research-on-co-design

https://marlosanmiguel.tumblr.com/post/165258511019/studio-6-delegating-network

https://marlosanmiguel.tumblr.com/post/165288415099/studio-6-project-timeline

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Framing the Problem

While I had a breakthrough with understanding more on the topic of depression, I was still unsure of the extent of our project. We always talked about adolescent depression and the method of co design. In my mind, from that, we would be approach adolescents with depression and co design with them on what they need. But based on what Lara’s been talking about, we wouldn’t limit ourselves to those with depression but to all adolescents. Not only that, we would be bringing in their parents, based on her last semester’s research of their being a gap for support for those parents.

That’s when it came to me that it our project wasn’t just on “adolescent depression”. It’s been more defined than that this whole time, but we just haven’t put it down to paper.

What Lara is talking about isn’t about the adolescents that have depression, but the environment that adolescents of today have to live, with depression being more prevalent. And it’s not just about the parents or the adolescents exclusively but their relationship in the context of adolescent depression.

Thanks to a worksheet that Lara brought in, we managed to frame our project fairly well.

The Topic:

Parent & Teen Relationship in the context of Adolescent Depression.

The Question:

What is the potential impact of parents’ comprehension of current adolescent life in a depression-prevalent environment?

With this in mind, we’re better able to frame what our actions will be to be able to answer that question. The worksheet shown above is a guideline that will help us prepare for our workshops once we’ve finished.

As far as it goes, we’re currently looking at running a prototype workshop on the 29th of September with a number of willing adolescents (12-19) to first gauge what life is like in today’s environment. We’re looking into getting a number of people from Colab as they are more accessible than other adolescents. Based on what we find out and from more research on possible workshop tools, we’ll prepare a workshop for parents to get involved in. Ideally, we get parents of the previous participants involved, but we’ve taken into account the unlikelihood of that. As a result, we’ve contacted a community of student parents attending AUT through Facebook. This workshop will be held in one of the days between Monday, 2nd October (week 10) - Sun 15th October (Week 11).

Hopefully, we’ll have enough insights from these workshop to be able to produce some form of resource that would support parents and teens in this situation.

If this doesn’t work out, or we don’t manage to get any participants from the groups we’ve approached, I’m also contacting some parents that I know as a contingency. Although it’s a small group of people, it will hopefully give us enough insight to work on an outcome.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - A Better Understanding

With the end of the semester closing in, we really had to ramp up our progress for our project. We had the discussion of what it’s like for a child to have a difficult subject that they have to discuss with their parents and the implications of doing so. What are their fears, what environment did they feel most comfortable to open up and why it was a difficult subject for them.

To get a better grasp of what that situation may be like and what are the areas that we can work with, I had the idea of talking to two families that I knew the child and the parents. I was going to ask what a difficult topic was for the child to talk to their parents about and how they may want to get the message across. 

From there, I was going to create a workshop where the parents would experience what I had designed with the child and see their reaction from it. It inform us of how they handle what seems to be a difficult topic and allows the child to voice what they want to get across without being put in an unwanted position.

At first, it seemed like a good idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I got hung up on whether the people I should be talking to should be relevant to adolescent depression. I understood that it would have provided me with a level of understanding on the relationship between a child and their parents. Whether or not that learning is translatable to all difficult topics was what made me hesitate to do it.

Instead, I looked through Facebook for support groups for depression and found in their descriptions detailing the needs of those suffering depression. It gave me a better understanding of what I’m trying to work towards and really clarified the project for me. I’ve been struggling for a very long time but thanks to going straight to the people and communities of those experiencing depression, it made me understand the situation more.

A lot of the needs that were stated were around support and the ability to share their negative experiences without the fear of being confronted or diminish the intensity of their hardship. With this, I’ve got a better understanding of adolescent depression and what we might come across as sought out solutions from the workshops.

[laragalea]

Wk 5, Re-Assessing ourselves

Before crits next week, Marlo and I wanted to re-assess our project direction and evaluate where we’re at.  As we discovered getting advice for our project, we agreed that our key goal is about the co-design aspect of the project, and how quality it’s implementation is.  We identified three approaches to the workshops involving parents 1 - understanding the situation of parent/teen relationships 2 - providing tools for parents to support teens 3 - helping parents understand teens lives empathetically  We realised we can’t actually decide on that approach without knowing more about the parents or involving them in the decision. Diana mentioned to us earlier about the Co-design process and how crucial involving participants in every stage, which applies in a way to the direction we aim the workshops in. 

[marlosanmiguel]

This dependence in the input of parents highlights the core aspect of Co Design. It’s the “co” part of the word that makes this approach different from ones that I’ve been used to. To ensure that we make substantial progress, we have to soon identify a group of parents that we can design with to identify what is the most crucial issue and what we can do to address it.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Struggling Direction

I've lately been struggling with feeling confident with the progress we've made. Primarily because we still haven't been able to where we're headed towards or what our ideal outcome is. After discussing this with Lara, I've come to realise that it comes with taking an Co Design approach. From my analysis of what I've been told and what I've read, Co Design is all about researching, defining and designing all at the same time. Because of it's highly iterative and participation-heavy approach, a lot of the progression comes from the workshop. Now, it's about being able to reach out to the right organisations so we can get participants to start the workshop iteration phase.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Project Timeline

To prepare us for the upcoming weeks, I came up with a estimated timeline, based on the Discover, Define, Design Deliver stages known in doing a Design Thinking methodology. We've set out the first 6 weeks primarily as research with defining what we'll be doing as we continue. With the nature of running workshops and using a Co Design approach, we've set out three iterations of planning, designing and running workshops. This is so that we can progressively learn and adapt from them. We realised that we'll be constantly researching about how to run workshops as we go, so we've set that time out. We suspect that this timeline will change as we go and are open to using the two week break to provide more value to the project. Also, depending on what we come up with from the workshops, we can shorten or lengthen the time needed for the 'Deliver' stage as we come close to it.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Delegating Network

Lara and I have determined that the best course of action to make the most out of our project, is to contact any relevant organisation/person and see if we can learn some key insights from them. Because of the connections Lara made from doing her previous project, she's in charge of contacting any outside organisation that is involved in mental health or specifically, depression. I will be contacting anyone within the university that could shed some insight on what it takes to practice Co Design and to run workshops.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Research on Co Design

We've managed to get in contact with Ricardo Sosa, Antonio Esparza and Diana Albarran, all of which have experience with Co Design. Lara and I were able to help Antonio prepare for one of his workshops and along the way, he went through a number of insights when it comes to approaching workshops. One of the main things he mentioned was the importance of clarity in communication. My impression on workshops after speaking with him is that workshops are a lot like theatre. Everything that is put forward and everything that is seen should have a purpose and adds to the overall outcome. This puts into perspective how crucial each question is and each activity that the participants will be going through. Speaking to Ricardo highlighted that there's no better way of learning about workshops than doing them. He said that we don't have to design it specifically for depression but something that is also difficult to talk about. This way, we have a means of gauging how people approach such a hard topic. He also provided some resources to read through that I'll hopefully read through again and provide a more in-depth blog on. Diana has a more theoretical background when it comes to Co Design, so I tried to focus on whether she has any literature that we could go over. She has sent us a few that I'll read through at a later date. She also mentioned a few other methodologies that are similar to Co Design that shows the necessity for appropriation. Things like culture, upbringing and values are something that we have to be aware of, so that when designing the solution for our chosen demographic, we ensure that our background doesn't over influence that of the people we're trying to help. Although we can provide an alternative point of view, the solution ultimately has to adhere to the values and life approach of our demographic.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Brought upto Speed

To bring me up to speed, Lara went through some facts and learnings she got from her project from last semester. We went through a range of  information from facts of the population affected by depression, through to public perception on the topic, all the way to any relating thoughts that could be somewhat related. One of the things that we came out with was the insights that for adolescents, behaviour is heavily influenced by peers. Whether or not this is something we can tap into will need a bit more discussion to determine. There was also a unanimous agreement that most people like to have the feeling of control. We had a discussion with Clinton about his son who is experiencing depression. It lead to discussing the different effects of having depression. One thing that relates to control or lack thereof is that sometimes, by having depression, the mere act of getting out of bed becomes a very difficult task. It's almost losing control of how you perceive the world. Is there any way that the parents can provide any help with this? At the end of it, we tried to end it with a question that would hopefully guide us toward a direction. "How to treat mental illness like it was cancer? How does the conversation start? What was the tone?"

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Start of Semester

For this Studio VI, I've been talking to Lara about her project and where she wants to take it. Lara's project involves creating tools to empower and help parents that are struggling to support their children that are experiencing depression. The most compelling thing about her taking her Depression project forward was the prospect of running workshops to find insight about what needs to be made for struggling parents. From doing a number of Design Thinking papers, I'm starting to have a strong belief that to create an effective solution for a demographic, they must be heavily involved in the designing process. Co Design is a methodology that has that philosophy at its core and we'll be making efforts to apply it in our process. In the next few weeks, we'll be hoping to delve more into what it takes to use this methodology and what to look out for.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 6 - Changing Platforms

I was previously using Google Community for my blogs but it was proving difficult to use for accessibility purposes. I will be moving all my existing posts onto tumblr and will be posting here from now on.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 4 - Project Schedule

From the start of this project, our group has managed to work well with each other remarkably considering we haven’t worked as a group before. As we near the finer details of the project, involving more decision making and designing, we’ve slowed down and haven’t managed to keep it in track. This is based on what I think our capability as a group.

This is why I tried to make a point for our Monday meeting to ensure that we write down expectations on what we want to get out of the meeting but also from the next coming weeks. For the recent 2 weeks, we have had meetings where it was a lot of talk and very little decision making. It felt a little slow. Whether or not that was meant to be the pace, I’m not sure but it didn’t feel right. A part of it was a lack of direction, not knowing what I should be doing.

We managed to write down expectations for the next 4 weeks, breaking the expectations into two main columns, Overall project and BCT Showcase. The difference between the two is that the overall project covers things like concept development and preparing for the pitch with AIAL while the BCT Showcase involves coming up with a book and poster for the BCT Showcase event.

The timeline goes as follows:

Week 11:

Overall Project - Determine one concept through a collaborative floor plan, implementing different technologies

BCT Showcase - Equipment list and location chosen

Week 12:

Overall Project - Prototypes of different technologies working together incl. playtesting. Narrative creation.

BCT Showcase: Planning book & poster design and content

Week 13:

Overall Project - Further develop prototype and produce portable version to show in AIAL pitch

BCT Showcase - Final draft of book and poster (finalised overall aesthetics and layout)

Week 14:

Overall Project - Writing pitch

[marlosanmiguel]

Last week, Lara and I came up with an assumptive journey mapping for the different stages with flying from pre planning to post sharing. We tried to map out the emotion of adults throughout the process and based the children’s journey based on that. Based on our assumptions, we think that the children’s experience will be very extreme, whether they’re going to be indifferent about the experience or very excited about it. This journey map gives us the opportunity to design the experience outside of the emperor lounge to compliment the experience inside whilst improving the overall journey of flying.

While I’m not sure if we will be designing an experience outside of the emperor lounge, it gives us a visualisation of opportunities that we have if we ever need or want it.

Besides the journey mapping, I also tried Resolume Arena for projection mapping to test out how to do the basics. Because of its free version, I found that it comes up with  water mark every so often but seeing that this is only a prototype, it’s not an issue. It’s fairly easy to use but it lacks integration with the kinect so if we were to implement projection mapping with the kinect, we will have to find a workaround. Otherwise, Dillon and Jenny said that Millumin has that functionality. Sadly, it only works with Mac, so we will need to use a P-Lab if we’re to test any kinect + projection mapping prototypes.

[marlosanmiguel]

Studio 4 - AR Testing and Next Steps

On Tuesday, we tested out the use of animation with AR. Patricia helped get it going on and the video above shows the result. I wish to use this as a foundation on figuring out how models moving in space looks like with the use of AR but for now, I’ve decided to move onto projection mapping and journey mapping.

During our meeting on Thursday, Aaron pushed as to be more specific as to what we want to achieve by next week. Having done a lot of Design Thinking Processes, I thought it would be good to cover more on that before next Thursday. The Auckland Airport has given us some information on the passengers’ journey map and how they want to change that. I’ll be looking into that in detail to create an assumed journey map for the kids and assess where we can improve the experience and how, hoping that it would relate back to what everyone else has developed throughout the week.