Author Archives: Cole Camplese

Week 15: What a Long Strange Trip

It is hard to believe that we’ve only been at this since late January … so much has happened in that time. I owe you all both a very real “thank you” and a longer reflection on what this experience has meant to me. Consider this the thank you, but I will take some time to reflect on this very rich and rewarding experience and share it with you.

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me, Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been. —Truckin’, The Grateful Dead

Today we see how you have taken the time to bring all of this to closure — Linking community, identity, and design together to synthesize your own understanding of what the last 15 weeks has exposed us to. It only seems fitting that you all own our last 3 hours together. After 6 PM tonight there will be no more “out of class” assignments, no more strange readings from Weinberger or Wenger, and certainly no need to reflect on a piece of glass and aluminum. I sincerely hope you do take some of these things we’ve done and turn them into habits — creating on a regular basis, working to not dismiss new and emergent ideas but instead unpacking them and discovering their affordances, and certainly taking the time to reflect on yourself and the world around you.

My closing thought as we embark on our final week is that the work we created here in this space is like a time machine — you will be able to return to the course site and see what you were thinking about, working on, and making for as long as it stays here. You are co-creators of something that will extend well beyond this week 15 and into the future. If I teach this course again here (or somewhere else) you will be linked to the legacy that is the Grand Experiment of Disruptive Technologies. Welcome to the club!

Week 14: Working Session!

Well, this is it … our last class before we wrap up with the final Team Synthesis next week. It is hard to believe, but here we are. Today will be unlike any other day we’ve spent together. I will be giving the class to you — we will still be in the room together for most of it, but I want you to take the time to hang out, talk, laugh, and work in your teams on a couple of things. First and foremost, I want you to make progress on your paper prototypes. I am really excited to see how you have decided to design at least two of the interactions we brainstormed last week and I am very interested to see if you took advantage of the tools we looked at.

The second thing I want you to work on is your Final Synthesis. This one is different than the first two in that I want you to work together to draw our three themes together. You can do that in any creative way you see fit, but you must connect the dots from across the entire semester and use the lenses of Community, Identity, and Design to bring your synthesis to life. I am giving you one last reading this week and I do think you’ll enjoy it … please integrate it into your Final Synthesis. I expect you to share your app prototype, discuss the disruptive potential of the iPad, and describe how our themes and our semester long conversations about disruption impacted your final design statement. Most importantly I want your teams to bring forward a bold statement about how your collective minds may or may not have been expanded by our little grand experiment this semester.

Again, if you have readings or things for the rest of the class to do to prepare, please post them by 5 PM on Tuesday. As some inspiration, here is a Final Synthesis from ghosts of Disruptive Technology Past …

Out of Class

Small Pieces

One of the great paragraphs from Chapter 2 of Small Pieces Loosely Joined …

But on the Web we experience something we can never experience in the real world: places without space. Instead of needing a containing space to enable movement, the Web has hyperlinks. Links are at the heart of the Web and the Web’s spatiality. The fact that the linked pages come from many people turns the Web into a place larger than we are. It is a public place, a place we can enter, wander, and get lost, but cannot own.” Since place and space have been inseparable in all of our experience in the real world until now, when we experience the Web’s place-ness, we assume that it must also have the usual attributes of spatiality, including the accidental nature of geography. That makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that what holds the Web together isn’t a carpet of rock but the world’s collective passion.

Week 13: Time to Decide on Design

This week I want to give you ample time to complete your research and start actually prototyping a couple key interactions within your proposed app. We will start with you sharing the results of last week’s Team Post assignment. Let’s discuss what you have learned so far from your research and what has been effective.

Start with a peek at something I’ve been working on.

Brainstorming

We need to start with learning how to appropriately brainstorm … let’s do something together to illustrate how to best construct opportunities to arrive at ideas together.

Now it is your turn, I want you to brainstorm a set of scenarios or case studies that you can use as the basis to develop set of prototype interactions within your app. Work together to imagine:

  • A set of scenarios (3-5) where your app would be the tool people would use to solve their problem
  • How the app would be used in those scenarios by creating a work flow, a diagram, a process map, or other visual ways of articulating how the app addresses your audiences’ challenges
  • Create a set of opportunity areas to focus on within the scenarios — the team should construct a series of “How Might We …” statements to address the challenges illustrated in the frameworks from the previous step
    Spend time brainstorming each opportunity area …
  • Decide if your app truly does overcome the problems that people are trying to solve with your app
  • Choose at least two scenarios to prototype

Begin to Design your Interactions

Paper prototyping is a great way to do this … let’s explore some options. Here is a fantastic PDF template of the iPad you are designing for available for free to print (I even printed some for you). Here is an app that automates your paper prototypes — and it works perfectly with the template I just linked to.

Out of Class

  • Watch the Paper Prototyping course on Lynda.com.
  • Come to class next week with your interactions ready to paper prototype … it is a good idea to play with some of the tools we looked at.
  • Bring your iPad paper templates to class with some ideas sketched out.
  • Start working on your final synthesis — due in two weeks!
  • Remember you can now start doing your class evaluation.

Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments. They’re Just Different

I’m curious what you think … does writing here in public make you write differently than when you write privately?

With all the hype about blogging, Mr. Foster decided to give it a try in an introduction-to-sociology course he was teaching. He was surprised to find that the quality of the students’ writing was better than what he’d seen in private journals he’d graded as a teaching assistant in another intro course.

via Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments. They’re Just Different.

Week 12: Design Challenges and Research

We may have a visitor in class this week … Eric Kunz, developer of LiveBlend.

I’m impressed by your Design Challenges and how far you’ve come in a week. Let’s review:

Slides for today are here. Let’s start by writing your Design Challenges back on the board. Using your sticky notes expand a bit on the things you know and don’t know and update your team’s post from last week.

I will ask you to work through your research questions and methods to be ready to come to class next week to start thinking about creating your app experience.

  • Read pages 79-109 of the Design Kit
  • iPad Reflection: Due 5 PM on 4/2/2015
  • Team Post … see instructions below: Due 10 PM on 4/22/2015

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Week 11: Kicking off Design

We have arrived at the final third of the class. Over the next few weeks I will be asking you to do quite a bit of thinking from a design perspective. Today we will focus all of our time on arriving at our team Design Challenge. The Design Challenge will form the basis for our app creation. To this end, you will be actively engaged in this process for the majority of class. Slides for today are here.

We will start with you individually sharing your app ideas from last week’s work in front of the class and answer any questions. From there I will put you in your teams and turn you loose on Framing the Design Challenge. You will identify things you know and don’t know about the challenge and the audience and document them. You will create the types of questions you need to explore to learn more and outline your research methods. The outcome of this work will then be translated into a team post that I will provide guidance on.

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Out of Class

Sam Richards Online Tonight

Hi all … I wanted to point you to the TV series that I worked on for over a year while at PSU with Dr. Sam Richards, an interactive TV show based on his incredibly popular and challenging Race Relations sociology course. You guys got to meet Sam “in class” when he did his virtual drop in … this is the exact show I was talking about. After close to three years the vision is coming true with an online screening tonight. I urge you to watch and think along with the program. I’d love to hear follow up comments from those who tune in. Watch through the lenses of community, identity, and design. Here is a preview …

Adobe's New iPad App Slate

I built a quick demonstration using the new Adobe Slate app on my iPad this morning. Just a recap of why I go to SXSW, but in a very nicely presented way that would have taken much longer otherwise. The free price tag isn’t too bad. I sense a directed Weekly Create coming on with this app!

Adobe is looking to do something similar for reports, newsletters and other web content with Slate. The new iPad app offers preset layouts with a library of fonts, colors and animations that allow students, teachers and business folks the tools needed to easily develop a polished presentation. As you might expect, you’re able to pull in images to complete the project, overlaying titles and captions as needed. The pre-built themes are designed to look good on the desktop and mobile devices, with buttons that’ll let eager readers do things like donate or register. Published work ends up as a sharable web link, text message, email or embedded on a blog or website.

via Adobe's new iPad app helps with presentations, newsletters and more.