#cmu students

[kingbrwnn]

Are You Plaid to the Bone?

This question applies to thousands of Carnegie Mellon alumni and students, including over 700 Heinz College alumni, like Beverley Wheeler. What about you? Are you “plaid to the bone?”

[seniorlabs]

Curtains close on "design improv", but open to "OMG CMU"

After presenting our experiences at Steel City Improv to the class on Monday, we decided to continue exploring the ideas behind improv, particularly how we can help designers brainstorm more creatively using improv as a tool.

This lead to our "what" question of: "How can we make the brainstorming process more fun and effective for designers?"

We decided to specifically target designers (and other people they may work with, such as programmers and engineers), and so we could conduct test experiments in studios on campus doing improv activities such as "Scenes from a hat." 

We started to list out all the things you have to think about when it comes to designing something. Stemming from the first step of "defining a problem," to the basics of "establishing users," and "social context," and deeper steps like "naming," and "marketability." We grouped these steps into chronological, "like" categories, and started to label improv activities that could be utilized to help the design process in these steps.

We started to outline, from start to finish, how we would execute these test experiments with our volunteer subjects. The example problem/prompt we defined was "grocery store checkout process," and from there, devised how our test sessions would run, and what improv tools & activities we would have our subjects partake in to help them creatively re-design the checkout process.

^ Utilizing the warm-up exercises we did at Steel City Improv to break the ice among the stranger subjects, and get their creative "gears grinding."

^ Designing how our "scenes from a hat" activity would run, and how they would de-brief after each activity to discuss the ideas that came up during the activity.

^ Recognizing the importance of still using "traditional" brainstorm methods such as drawing and storyboards, as well as using more improv "name games" to help with the marketing aspects of design.

However, even after all of this careful planning, after talking with Kristin about our "designers improv" idea, we started to realize that our idea itself, was straying away from our original idea of making brainstorming fun. There was so much careful planning that was complicating our original idea of fun, that we started to feel more and more detached from this idea. Additionally, we all recognized the fact that role-playing is already very much an established tool for designers and brainstorming, and that our time and efforts might be best utilized going in another direction.

We listed out things that just interested us in general, from the idea of spontaneity, to the use of photography, to the idea of self-image. After a few hours of brainstorming and throwing around random ideas, we started to become more interested in the idea of connecting CMU students. I think that most CMU students would agree that our campus is a pretty divided one. Friend groups are pretty restricted to a person's major or activities, and there isn't much opportunity for interaction because of everyone's busy schedules and work ethics. One of the words we pulled at the beginning of the lab was "comedy" (hence, our improv experience), and so we started to play with this idea of comedy/humor, and how it could be utilized to connect CMU students.

This idea, along with our recent discovery of the new effects on PhotoBooth, lead us to the idea of OMG CMU. Since humor is a great way to connect people, why not connect CMU students based off strictly "CMU humor." We all go to the same places on campus, and have relatively similar mindsets in terms of our work ethics, so much that one can view these similarities in a comedic light. Also, who wouldn't love to take a little work break for a good laugh?

Our new question: How can humor be used as a way to connect strangers on Carnegie Mellon's campus?