Engaging Students in the Design Process

Last Friday we were privileged to have students and faculty from the Little Black Pearl, Options Laboratory High School join us for a hands on workshop and prototyping session. The ID team introduced the students to the concept of human-centered design through an immersive design experience. The first activity of the day was self-guided "research" tour through the DuSable Museum of African American History. During the tour, the LBP students collected data about their experiences of the museum and its exhibits. The students took note of the content presented at the museum as well as the way in which the content was displayed. After completing the tour, we broke the students into teams of two for the second activity "Designing a Visit to DuSable." In pairs, the students acted as both design researchers and design participants as they shared the information they collected on their tour. The LBP students then worked individually to design an improved DuSable visit for their partner by brainstorming, sketching and finally building prototypes of the ideas.

The experience ended with a presentation of the ideas the LBP students designed. It was a great day! We learned a lot from the LBP student's insightful research and concepts and we hope that the students had a great time learning (and participating in) the human-centered design process. Also, in attendance at Friday's workshop was Lisa Montgomery, Director of IIT's Student Center for Diversity and Inclusion and Amanda Williams, Adjunct Faculty at IIT's School of Architecture. Lisa and Amanda were active participants in the workshop, coming up with some great interactive ideas to improve DuSable's student experience. We look forward to collaborating more with them both in the future.

Initial Analysis

Today the team met to continue organizing our observations and coming up with insights. Our focus today was mapping out the user journey that teachers and students go through during museum visits.

Next week is Spring Break at ID! We'll be pulling together our learnings to share with the museum staff when we get back.

Compiling Observations

This past Friday's class time was spent analyzing and clustering our most recent museum visits. We started with a few large stacks of post-it notes, each containing a "we saw" or "we heard" statement, and began to determine the overarching themes at play.

As we all crowded around the board and discussed our observations, the post-its began to fall into several main buckets. Our categories were loosely defined to start, but after looking through the headings and asking ourselves "so what?" for each one, we came up with more concrete titles. A few examples were Good balance of levels of engagement for different groups, Welcome to museum determines the success of your visit, Identity of museum drives programming.

We discussed with Jeremy, our professor, to make sure we were on the right track and that our titles were clear and unambiguous. We are now working on compiling a spreadsheet database to organize all of our observations, insights, and ideas for change. This will help us in synthesizing possible solution tracts in the next few weeks.