Recommended by Kate Rutter, I took Rob Walker's advice in The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy and mapped out the perception of my home with the sense of touch.

Before I started the investigation, I looked around my house: there is literally no natural objects! Well, except for the last three oranges in the fruit basket. My house suddenly became a depressing place to live in after this realization.

Here are some particular observations I have in my investigation.

• The first impression of tactile quality sometimes differ from its actual hardness. When I tap on the character sculpture on the TV table, it felt like a soft material. When I press it down, it turned to be harder than I thought. Surprisingly, I found the ceramic cup quite soft in my hands, even though it’s pretty hard. It’s mysterious, but I kept receiving the same feeling after touching the cup multiple times.
• When I close my eyes and focus at the tactile sense, it’s quite comfortable to touch some objects. (I kept rubbing the blanket in my living room for two minutes.) In my notes, I described it as “friendliness.” It might be a mixture of many variables, and it’s quite magical to imagine if these objects want to be touched by humans or not.
• When a texture gets too rough on my fingers, it feels as if the object is irritated and angry. I encountered it when I swiped on the dryer sheets.

Based on my feelings (……), I produced a set of overly generalized tactile map of my home.

The tactile sensation is probably one of the most ignored senses in interaction design, and I’m surprised how powerful it is at producing emotional influence. When I tried to describe the tactile feelings, many of my words are extremely subjective. The physical contact elicits stronger emotion than I anticipated. I’m happy that I picked the investigation and got to be more aware of its significance.

When Claire, Jay, An and I sat down and talked about creating a workshop about the design of education, we didn’t know that we ended up making a something dramatically different than what we had in mind.

We didn’t want to create a lecture in the first place, because we believe we can create an engaging activity where people could stay present and learn through making. Thus, designing with an intent is essential to ensure everyone can learn something meaningful from the workshop.

What helps us design better education experience? I thought: how can we design better education experience if we’re not conscious of the education that we received?

The center of our initial discussion became the reflection on our own education, largely in CCA. I felt more mindful when I connected what I experienced in the institution to what I am and hope to become as a designer. More importantly, we hope that people will be more empowered to understand the impact of education and design such experience for themselves and others.

The curriculum model designed by Kristian Simsarian, the founding chair and ex-chair of IxD BFA program, helped us clarify the concept and design the activity. His whole body learning curriculum framework depicted a dependent relationship between craft, process, and purpose.

Our activity started with thinking about the classes, projects, resources, and skills. We hope the reflection happens when the participants are asked to connect them with their values and beliefs that they hold today. From there, they can look for the missing pieces in their education experience to fulfill their hopes and needs. We think it’s an appropriate depth of critique on the program in this workshop.

Each of us designed the different portions of the workshop but stayed collaborated in testing and iteration. It’s more difficult to design a one-hour activity than a one-hour presentation! I found mapping our little steps useful in clarifying the design and reaching consensus within the team.

Through a dry run test with one of the students, we gained confidence that the activity seems to deliver what we intended to share. We shortened the ending and tweaked the small moments throughout the workshop to make the process smoother and more engaging.

When we were at the presenters’ table, there’s too much running in my brain that I can’t assess the result well. If I had to make a conclusion, I would describe the feedback of the class as a “lukewarm” response. I think we had a lot to say, and we delivered some of that through our activity. I think the activity could be more engaging with a clear explanation of our intent before it ends.

While I was writing this, I realized that this seems to be my first time designing a workshop. So, hooray!

Context

In mathematics, semilattice means a partially ordered set in which elements could have multiple parents. Christopher Alexander compares the city with a tree and a semilattice in his essay, A City is Not a Tree. He borrowed the mathematical concept to illustrate the necessity of viewing a city not as defined and separated districts, but as multiple overlapped and organically-grown communities.

The idea of semilattice doesn’t only apply to urban planning. It also offers designers an approach to map out dynamic systems and complex relationships. The word does not directly relate to the technology’s stance in our life. Instead, it honors the complexity of:

1. The nuanced understanding needed to design intervention for systemic problems.
2. The non-linear, spontaneous, and organic formation of thought.
3. The societal, cultural, and political implication of the technology’s influence on one’s mind.

Intent

How does technology augment and/or undermine humans’ ability to think?

The full context of the inspiration could be found in the essay On Thinking, as a Way to Build the Future.

Problem Space

The project considers the following items as relevant issues in the problem space.

Wicked Problems

• Deteriorating space for public discourse
• Climate crisis
• Political extremism and division

Technologies

• Algorithmic personalization
• Information and knowledge management system
• Machine learning

Skills and Abilities

• Systems literacy
• Critical thinking
• Agency / freedom of choices

Approach

To address different opportunities in the tangled and complex problem space, the project is organized as multiple short sprint sessions to create as many playful and communicative prototypes as possible. Each session focuses on a particular intersection of the problem space. (i.e. Climate crisis & critical thinking.) As the research progresses and new challenges emerge, the definition of the problem space will change accordingly.

Plan

In the first 6 weeks (Sep. 28 – Nov. 8), each session is two weeks long. In the next 4 weeks (Nov. 9 – Nov 29), each session is one week long.

Sat&Sun / Sat

• Academic research into the problem space
• Expert interview (depending on schedule)
• Determine primary research interviewees (3 users/customers)
• Contact and schedule appointments with primary research interviewees

Mon&Tue / Sun

• Context collection
• Inspiration
• Analysis of existing solutions
• Expert interview (depending on schedule)
• Exploratory interview with users/customers

Wed&Thu / Mon

• Expert interview (depending on schedule)
• Formulation of exploration/problem statement
• Brainstorming session
• Technology/feasibility research

Fri&Sat&Sun&Mon / Mon&Tue

• Rapid prototyping of interactive prototype or multiple prototypes
• For two-week sessions: Documentation online
• For two-week sessions: Reflection writing

Tue&Wed / Wed&Thu

• Concept testing with interviewees
• Evaluation of concept testing
• For the next session: Brief academic research into the problem space
• For next session: Determine expert interviewees (>1 expert)
• For next session: Contact and schedule appointments with expert interviewees

Thu&Fri / Fri

• Documentation online
• Reflection writing
• Refinement on problem space

In addition to sprint sessions, there will be daily JavaScript learning as preparation to kickoff building the MVP next semester.

In the last 2 weeks (Nov 30 – Dec 13), the project shifts focus as the semester comes to the end.

• Wrap-up of any additional work from sprint sessions
• Determine MVP direction from proofs of concepts
• Evaluation of JavaScript learning progress
• Project Plan for second semester
• Presentation

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On Reflection

On the Third Annual Phil Patton Lecture, Natasha Jen, partner at Pentagram in New York, gave a talk about The Designer as Critic. She argued that designers should not be critics, for most of them already strive to be critical of, yet remain too close to their work. Instead, designers should be skeptics. The word opens up possibilities for designers, who are “obsessed with prescriptions,” to explore the possibilities beyond existing understanding of the field and its methodology, a.k.a. Design thinking.

A difference was pointed out between the critique on the quality of work and the reflection on the way we work. Reflection is important to designers because it gets us closer to the “possibilities removed” by the process of brainstorming, research, etc., even though we don’t know what we don’t know.

To an extent, designers’ trust and reliance on methodology resemble people’s trust and reliance on technology. Methodology promises abundance (of “ideas”) and excellence; technology (and consumerism) promises simplicity, freedom, and individual choice. Both could be deceptive. Our world is becoming increasingly complex, and people, including designers, have trouble navigating within it. Meanwhile, designers keep releasing inventions with vast implications into the world.

In the 1960s, Christopher Alexander, architect and design theorist, described designers’ unique role, which is summarized in Architectural Intelligence (2017):

Alexander argued that the designer was designing for an increasingly complex world in which it was impossible to keep in one‘s mind all of the inter-meshing systems with all of their details. “In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems have a background of need and activities which is becoming too complex to grasp intuitively.” The complex systems of which he spoke sat within a growing ecosystem of other pressures, whether social, cultural, or informational.

The reflection on how we engage in and create with technology is critical in the present world.

One could argue that it must and can only be done by designers because 1. they contributed more or less to the growing complexity of the world, and 2. they are more capable of “thinking out of the box” and recognizing the cognitive bias involved and deliberately used to construct the complexity.

On Thinking

Looking back on Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think (1945), many of the promises of technology became true today, but we are still confronted with a confusing world.

On the one hand, compared to fifty years ago, it is beyond our cognitive abilities to find answers to many systemic and global challenges that exist today. In New Dark Age (2018), the artist and writer James Bridle commented:

We don’t and cannot understand everything, but we are capable of thinking it. The ability to think without claiming, or even seeking, to fully understand is the key to survival in a new dark age, […] Technology is and can be a guide and helpmate in this thinking, providing we do not privilege its output: computers are not here to give us answers, but are tools for asking questions.

On the other hand, it is essential to examine if technology fulfills its promise as “intelligence augmentation.” To put simply, does technology help us think better or not?

In my last year at the undergraduate IxD program at CCA, I would try to answer this question. Many arguments and counterarguments could be made here, but without a focused and analytical approach, we will end up in spiraling fruitless discussions, which we’ve had too many before in this world.

We have to move forward, and it won’t happen if our ability to think is threatened.