User Oriented and Collaborative Design

The only time at Olin after first semester that every member of a graduating class takes a course together is spring semester of sophomore year, and that course is User Oriented Collaborative Design. In UOCD, we're split into teams of five or six, and each team designs a product or experience for a specific group of people. (The classic user group example is bike messengers.)

The whole point of UOCD is that engineering design should be for someone. Design should happen with the user in mind. In the first semester, Design Nature is meant to be a class in going from ideas to a final prototype, but UOCD focuses on earlier steps in the design process. We start with a group of users, and where we end up won't be much beyond ideas. The final deliverables are "design representations" (often foam models) as opposed to functional prototypes.

The most important part of UOCD is the user group. It took us about a week to get sorted into teams based on user groups. Over the weekend after the first class period, we all went out and talked to someone in a group we thought would be a good user group. Some of the user groups that were suggested were amateur blacksmiths, elderly swing dancers, door-to-door evangelists, and suicide hotline volunteers. We wrote about our conversations, read each others' write-ups, and voted on a few user groups that sounded interesting. There were a couple of rounds of voting to narrow down the groups, and then the profs put us into teams based on our preferences. The user groups that made it through to the end are volunteer physicians, blacksmiths, mathemagicians, people who refurbish old cars, drag queens, and people who commute on public transportation.

My team's user group is mathemagicians! We've been especially focused on people who make geometric puzzles, but they're generally interested in recreational mathematics more broadly. The first phase of the project involves meeting a handful of people in the user group and getting to know them. So far, my team has talked to one mathemagician in person and one on the phone, and we have a few user visits planned for next week. It's been a lot of fun talking to mathemagicians so far. They really love math and showing other people why it's beautiful and cool, and it would be hard to not get excited when we're around them.

The classic image of UOCD is a room whose walls are covered in butcher paper and sticky notes, and that has already begun. This is my team's process diagram, where we listed everything we want to do in various parts of the first phase of the project. We have another piece of paper with our schedule on it and yet another with all the information we gained on our first user visit. We're not quite to "Undergraduate Opportunities in Coloring and Drawing" yet, but we're getting there.

The team is the other really important part of UOCD. Everyone says that having a good team is much more essential in UOCD than in most other project classes (which is a little unfortunate, given that the teams are somewhat random). This is because teams are the same through the whole semester, and we just start with a user group, so it's really up to the team where to go from there. My team is fantastic. There are five of us, four Oliners and a Babson student, and we're all really excited. With a good team and an interesting user group, I think it'll be fun semester.