In which I really don't know what to think of UOCD. (It is a design class, after all.)
Cookies and mathematical conversations with a family we called the Shelleys. Squealing excitedly over pictures of people building huge mathematical sculptures together in a garden at Gathering 4 Gardner. Playing Equate, insulting the rules, and joking about a game called Compile. Fiddling with puzzles while going through raw ideas. Stepping back, looking at what we'd done, and thinking it was beautiful. "Hi, we're the Mathemachickens, and we've been working with recreational mathematicians."
There was a lot of joy in UOCD. It was also deeply frustrating. It's taken me a long time to write this post because, even three weeks after being "UOCDone," I'm still not sure what to say about this course.
A Description of UOCD
The setup: 90 students were sorted into teams of 5 or 6, and each team had a user group. There are six or so teams in a studio, there are three studios, and each studio has two professors. There are three phases of the course, and each phase ends with a design review in front of one professor from your team's studio and one professor from another studio. The idea is to start from a user group and arrive at a model (not a prototype) and product poster of some design for that user group.
Phase I: My five person team worked with recreational mathematicians, focusing on people who work with math in a visual or physical form. We visited and interviewed a lot of recreational mathematicians. From what we learned, we made four personas, which are supposed to represent typical users. With our users and personas, we made frameworks to try to find areas of opportunity, and then we identified areas of opportunity.
Phase II: We generated a lot of ideas for products/services to help recreational mathematicians. We did gallery sketches of nine or ten, and then we visited users again and co-designed with them. We chose two ideas to develop more fully.
Phase III: We chose one of those two ideas to go forward. The idea we chose was Abacus, a space in which recreational mathematicians and other curious people
could discover and design mathematical art and objects together. We made a requirements table, some interaction maps, a foam-core model of Abacus, and a product poster.
What I Wish Had Been Different About the Course
The readings were old, didn't always feel relevant, and were all at the beginning of phases. They should have complemented the lectures, and it felt like we ended up favoring either lecture or reading over the other based on comments from studio professors because there were too many contradictions or things that were just unclear. I think the readings haven't changed for a long time, and the course has, a bit. The readings need evaluation to see how well they match up and if there are other readings that would be better. The contradictions in UOCD were the most frustration part of the class by far. The profs also spaced out the lectures, whereas the reading was all at the beginning. It would be nice if the reading were paced with the lectures. I know it's more convenient to give one reading assignment, but it's less effective.
One of my friends pointed out that we were in studios, but we didn't have any structured interaction with the other teams in our studios. As annoying as giving regular updates on our progress could be in FBE, the teams did learn from each other, both through feedback and through each others' successes and failures. If we'd done public check-ins in UOCD, I'm sure there would have been times when I would have just wanted to work and not do this talking thing, but I think it would have been useful (probably more useful than it was in FBE). On the days near the end when I spent far too many hours in studio, I really talked to some of the other teams, and it would have been so useful to do that earlier. It was just too late at that point. With no structure for talking to each other, it was too easy to respond to "How is UOCD going?" with something vague and quick. I wish I had really been talking to other teams earlier, not just in general about how things were going, but about what was working and what wasn't. Even more, though, I wish those conversations were part of the course. Without them, the whole point of being in a studio together is lost.
I'm not sure what the change I want here is, but my team also felt like we had issues with professors making assumptions, not listening to us, and contradicting themselves. Some of these issues were at least partially caused with some issues my team had with communication (which I'll get to), but not all of them were. During a process review, a prof told our team that a poster we had made
was excellent, particularly in how specific it was to our users. Later,
after our Phase I design review had gone poorly, the same prof told us that the poster seemed like it could apply to almost any group of users and wasn't very generative. As a class, the profs always reminded us that we were the ones who knew our users, but then in design review questions they contradicted things we had said about our users. We later on made a very important design decision based on what this professor would think about it, because like it or not, the professors are stakeholders in UOCD projects, so we had to keep them in mind as we designed.
What I Enjoyed in UOCD
I loved getting to know our users. We were excited after every user visit because of something we'd learned, because of something our users had shown us, or just because the recreational mathematicians we met were so friendly and happy to talk to us. One of the coolest parts of UOCD was finding out that after they talked to us, two of our users visited each other! They had heard about each other for years but had never met, and we helped connect them.
My first semester, before I did my field work and interview for my Anthropology religion paper, I remember telling my professor that I was really nervous about interviewing someone I didn't know. At this point, I would still be nervous, I think, but I'm much more comfortable with user visits, interviews, and co-designs than I was before Anthro and UOCD.
Everyone says that the UOCD experience is really team dependent, and I had a fantastic team. Among the five of us, we usually had good levels of energy and excitement. We weren't afraid to disagree with each other, and we were good at talking about those disagreements and coming to decisions. We were sometimes too negative (see below), but other than that, we made sure our team health was always good. Sometimes that meant taking a break for food or distributing puzzles to everyone at the table or just working on something else. I'll miss this team a lot.
I talked about user visits, but I loved the synthesis part of Phase I as well. We spent a lot of time coming up with frameworks, which capture some key information about users and also help with idea generation. My favorite kind of framework is a 2x2, which is just a plane with two axes along which you plot your users or personas. Coming up with good 2x2s involved thinking of axes that revealed something specific to our group of users and also showed some kind of differentiation that would be useful for design, and I thought that was a fun challenge.
I was proud of our final deliverables, and our final presentation went well. Given how frustrated we were at the end of Phase III and how much I questioned some of the decisions we had made earlier, that was pretty remarkable. A lot of work went into that final success, but of all the long days, the UOCDay before the final presentation was the most satisfying one.
What I Wish My Team and I Had Done Differently
The biggest problem my team had was external communication, and that has a couple of parts. First of all, as a team, we were terrible at getting our point across succinctly. This just confused things when we talked to professors when they came and checked on us in class and meant that we had to rehearse presentations a handful of times and run them by a NINJA to make sure they weren't repetitive. There were two of us that were better at brevity than the others, so we always did the intro and conclusion in presentations, and that framing helped. That didn't mean we didn't still have presentation issues; we definitely did. In Phase I we structured our presentation poorly, and in the Phase III design review we hadn't figured out a good noun to describe Abacus, so our review professor who wasn't in our studio was confused about the fact that at the end of Phase II it had been a cafe, and now it wasn't, and no one was really sure what to call it.
The other side of our external communication issues was that a lot of our internal communication was talking to each other. That sounds obvious/natural, but what I mean was that our reaction was always to talk about what was going on, and a lot of the written material we produced was done for reviews after the conversations were done. We realized after the first phase that we were talking too much and not putting enough of our thoughts on paper, but this ended up translating as "too many words, so let's make everything visual" as opposed to "let's just put everything on paper." Our daily communication with our in studio professors would have been a lot easier if more of the things that we had talked out had gone on paper. It was too easy to lose the intermediate thoughts when we just had a conversation. This was something I didn't really figure out until talking to another team in my studio the night before the Phase III design review. That team told me that every time they decided to just write stuff down and see what happened, a prof would come by and get really excited about the team's thoughts. We usually got concern/interrogation, not excitement, and I wonder how much of that would have been unnecessary had more things been on paper.
There were times when we needed to vent, and we did, but then we needed to stop talking about what was going wrong and just do work. We got work done, but we often kept ranting as well. At some point, it was no longer a productive discussion; it was just complaining.
I needed to be less scared. This one is personal as opposed to team-based. I was nervous about Phase II because idea generation didn't go well in Design Nature, so I wasn't confident about idea generation in UOCD. In Phase III, one of the professors told my team to stop talking and "Think with your hands," and my immediate reaction was that I don't think that way. That was a silly reaction, first because I really do enjoy making foam-core models, even if I like knowing what I'm doing first, and more importantly, because there's no point in staying completely comfortable in a class like UOCD. At that point in the course and the design process, the focus was on representations, and similarly, the whole point of the beginning of Phase II was idea generation. To learn as much as possible from UOCD, I needed to buy into the process, at least for a little while.
Overall
I liked UOCD, and I think the frustrating moments were all the more frustrating because I liked the class and really wished it were better. Unlike in Design Nature, I really felt like I learned the design process (or at least a design process) by doing; the process isn't just something I know because I was told. UOCD really is a do-learn course, which is why buying into the process is so important. While I wish I had sometimes bought into the process more, in the end I did so enough to learn.
There were still a lot of problems with UOCD and a lot of things that I hope will be fixed, but in the end, it's not about exactly how we did things in this class. The tour guides for external groups often bring people in to see UOCD, and somehow my team ended up talking to a lot of visitors. One of the tour guides we saw most often was Brett Rowley, who just graduated, and as we were talking to some visitors, he answered a question by saying, "We want to create value, not stuff." That's the importance of UOCD, and I think I learned how to create value.
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