CMDilemma – ethics in design workshop

CMDilemma – ethics in design workshop

UX-/ UI-designer
2020
1 week
School project

Growing ethical awareness among UX-/ UI-designers

CMDilemma was born out of an introduction challenge for a new semester of CMD. For this challenge I had to develop and give a workshop to fellow CMD students. I was free to choose to subject, topics and form of the workshop. The project was a pressure cooker, so I only has 1 week to develop this workshop.

The goal of the workshop is to enlighten the students about the ethical choices they are making when designing a product/ experience. At the end of the workshop they need to be aware of the ethical and moral consequences and decisions they make as designer. The workshop has the form of an interactive game with discussions and 3 minute lectures.

Process

01. Ideation

The first step for this project was thinking for which subject I wanted to design a workshop. I made a list of these and discussed my subjects with the others team members.

02. Research

After the subject was chosen I did research on which topics and ethical dilemma’s would be interesting for the target audience. Ethics discussions with team members were also part of this step.

03. Creation

With the results of the research and ethics discussions I created the accompanying app for the workshop.

04. Testing

With the prototype for the app ready, I tested the workshop among the team members and made some changes. After this the big test was the workshop with CMD students.

To start off I made a long(ish)-list with subjects was interested in developing a workshop about. I shortened this to a short-list of 2 subjects, other students also did this. Based on this teams were formed. Within the team I pitched my ideas and one of my ideas, ethics , was chosen. I chose this subject because the students were also getting 2 courses about it during the semester, so I found it relevant for the target audience. I did a short brainstorm on concepts for the workshop. Dilemmas was the winner of this brainstorm, because the workshop had to be interactive I wanted to make it in the form of a serious game, but not in the form of a Kahoot.

We wanted the workshop to be more interactive then a Kahoot, so we brainstormed on how we could do that. We decided on a structure where we first presented a dilemma, made the students choose an answer, discussed their reasoning, after which we geve a 3 minute lecture about the theory behind the dilemma. We pitched this idea to the other students and got positive feedback on our concept. We did got back that we should not focus on good or bad in the discussion and lecture, but more on the reasoning behind the decisions. We also received an idea with the feedback to group students together based on ethical principles. I thought this was a good idea, because it could be useful knowledge for the other courses the students would follow.

After the concept for the workshop was decided on, I went ahead and did research on ethics and moral theories. The insights of this were captured in a master document, which I and another team member used to wrote the small 3 minute lectures. The insights also were used to develop dilemma’s and the categories were the students would eventually fall in at the end of the workshop. With the dilemma’s ready I and the whole team made a schematic view of the workshop and dilemma’s and discussed the outcomes of the dilemma’s. At the end of the discussions the flow (pathway) to the group result for the students was known. I used this flow to design and develop the app in Framer. After the prototype was done I tested it on my team members and made changes were the prototype didn’t function as needed.

I uploaded the prototype to Github, so it could be used as a web app on the phone of the participating students and lecturers. A QR-code was placed into the presentation so the participant could easily reach the web app. At the time of the workshop we had placed dots on the ground where students would move to after they selected their answer in the app. This enabled us and the participants to view which statement the participant choose and helped with the discussions.

CMDilemma web app prototype

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Bladmuziek – multi-sensory intervention

UX-, UI- Designer & Front-End Developer
2017
2 years
School & private project

A happy note

The speech in this video is Dutch – English subtitles are available.

Bladmuziek (Musical Leaf in English) is a multi-sensory interactive installation, that I designed for the course Emerging Media. Bladmuziek is green, surprising and musical. It makes for a happy note at places where one is in need of positive distraction or want to elevate their day. It is designed to surprise the user right away and helps them feel more positive and happy.

Bladmuziek started out as a project for the course Emerging Media with a case from the Center of Expertise of Social Innovation (EMI). After winning the title best project the research group Creating010 from Rotterdam University for Applied Science wanted to develop the project further with help of a €10.000 grand from Innofest. This grand enabled the project to get developed further and get tested at two festivals in the Netherlands.

Process

01. Research

To narrow the scope of the project and get meaningful insights for the concept creation and design phase I performed multiple research activities: field research, literature research and multiple creative research techniques from the 75 tools for creative thinking card deck by Booreiland.

02. Insights

The research resulted in a lot of information to proces. To make the data easier to interpret and build insights I made infographics. I also summarised multiple research steps into Capture Cards, which helped gather insights.

03. Concept & Design

With the capture cards and insights in mind I organised and lead a OmDenken session (reverse thinking) and took part in a brainstorm session. Ideas from these sessions resulted in concepts with their respective designs.

04. Prototype & Testing

After the client (EMI) chose the concept they wanted to see developed further I started building prototypes which were tested with the multiple target audiences.

05. And do it all again

From the presentation / test of the prototype new insights were gathered and used to improve the product. This led to a reiterative proces.

Assignment and desk research
Bladmuziek started out as a case from the Centre of Expertise of Social Innovation (EMI). They asked to design an intervention that gives a positive pulse to the health of the citizens of De Landbouwbuurt, Rotterdam. For this they wanted to use positive design, nature and emerging media.
I started the project out by doing research in an online databank with information about the neighbourhood. I found out it is a young but poor neighbourhood with mostly native citizens, a lot of the housing comes from social housing schemes and the people that live there want harmony, participation and safety. To display this information, I designed infographic, which you can see below (Dutch).

Field research
After the desk research I did field research. I went around the neighbourhood with a big sign asking the habitants what they missed in the area and how happy they are. This gave us a good response and input on what the concept could be.
Right after this I made a purse-diary for the habitant asking about their day to day experience and went door to door to ask people about their happy places in the area, on their use of technology and their confidence with it. Results and proces of these are displayed in the photo slider below (Dutch).

Concepting
With the findings of the research we went into the concepting phase. During this I facilitated a concepting session. For this I used the technique OmDenken (reverse thinking). Goal of this was to think about the problem from a different perspective and come to possible solutions. After this I participated in a brainstorm session where I contributed ideas for the final 3 concepts out of which EMI could choose.

Prototype
After the final concept was chosen I started on the prototype. For this I used a Makey Makey and wrote a code (HTML5, CSS and JS) that converted the touches to sound. I set up this prototype at a big planter at the local hospital. Where I tested the prototype with the target audience, which did not believe it would work and acted surprised and happy when they heard the sound at the same moment they touched the plants.

Presentation & pitch
After testing the prototype with the target audience in their neighbourhood, I presented the product and results to the client (EMI) who was happy with the results and also got the opportunity to test the prototype during the presentation. Out of ~6 teams our intervention was chosen as winner. This meant I got the opportunity to present it at a booth the Rotterdam Resilient congress, which was visited by influential persons from government agencies and private businesses.
The research group behind EMI, Creating010 was interested in further developing the intervention, for use in hospitals, they asked the team and me to pitch the intervention to Innofest. After the pitch we got awarded with a €10.000 R&D grand and the opportunity to test new prototypes on 2 dutch festivals.

Product development
To develop the intervention further the collected insights and feedback were taken into account. One of the focus points was to do further research into which plants can trigger relaxation via multiple senses (seeing, touching and smelling). For this I visited a botanical garden in Delft where I’ve gotten a tour of the garden by the head gardener and plant expert. they helped with recommendations for plants that stimulate the senses and are also able to be touched without dying.

Also the form of the intervention, specifically the planter, needed thinking because the small Ikea boxed we used for the earlier prototypes wouldn’t work for a full scale intervention. For this I set multiple design guidelines, which these I made sketches of possible forms and configurations. These were also tested (low-fi) with chairs. The best form was a half round planter, which I further designed in SketchUp. Deskresearch into vandalism deterring design was also a part of this iteration.

Supply issues
Unfortunately it was not possible to get the planter produced to the specs the team and I decided on. It would be to costly and take to long. Due to this a plan B was developed. We would be building a planter ourselves of reclaimed wood. Luckily an open wood workshop was open to hosting us. With the wood available at the workshop we build a full planter which was still in line with the design guidelines I set. it also had a surprising benefit, is was a more sustainable design. The festival organisers were especially pleased with this design choice.

FestiValderAa
FestaValderAA was the first festival that welcomed us to test the intervention during their festival. The prototype was pretty much finished and worked perfectly during the tests at school. During the festival however my team and I had to deal with a lot of problems. Unfortunately there were problems with the energy source with caused the upgraded sensors to not work the way they should. Luckily there was good coffee available. The power delivery was also not stable enough. I worked together with a team member and a teacher of school to debug and problem solve the problems. Unfortunately we had to decide to go back to a previous revision, which did work. I also went out and bought rechargeable powerbanks to use as a power source. This proven to be more stable and when the power at the festival cut out, we were still able to go ahead with the tests and experiments. Luckily the tests were a succes!

Welcome To The Village (WTTV)
Unfortunately there was not enough time between FestiValderAA and WTTV to find other solutions to get the prototype fully functional in the way the team and I envisioned. But because the implemented solutions worked good enough to still be able to test we had a lot more time to interact with the visitors of WTTV and get feedback from their usage of the intervention. The tests resulted in a lot of usable data and of course happy and amazed visitors. Not an intended use, but fun and social was that some visitors tried to form as big a line as possible and still be able to play the plants.

Others about Bladmuziek

Other projects

LOLE – vintage clothing subscription

UX-, UI- & Visual Designer
2016
2 months
School project

Open Project

‘How can we change the attitude of young (heterosexual) men in a positive way, so they will be nugged to buy vintage clothes?’ Was the design question I had to solve for the Open Project (group). After doing extensive research, concepting and design sessions LOLE was born. LOLE is a concept for a vintage clothing subscription for men. Aiming to convince them that wearing vintage clothes is not something to be ashamed of and has multiple benefits on personal and global level.

In the second year I, together with 2 colleague students, participated in Open Project. For this I had to write my own assignment on which I would be working during the project, which was designed to encourage personal growth on courage, boldness, curiosity and contemplation. At the end of the project I had to deliver a prototype and an experience.

Process

01. Research

To narrow the scope of the project and get meaningful insights for the concepting and design phase I performed multiple research activities, like location visits, (ladder) interviews and literature research.

02. Insights

The research resulted in a lot of information to proces. To get more insights out of the interviews, I did a braindump. Following the braindump I participated in brainstorm sessions to find concepts for prototypes.

03. Design and protoypes

With the concepts in hand I designed and developed prototypes and tested them on prototype parties. Feedback gathered during the parties were used to refine the prototypes.

04. Final prototype

The refined prototypes formed the base for the final prototype which was an expo to present and test the final prototype: an experience, website and example of a subscription box.

To start off the project I did research on the perception of vintage clothing. For this I photographed vintage clothing shops and interviewed (ladder interview in dutch) potential users. During which I found out vintage clothing is perceived as dirty, hard to find and outdated shops. After which I made a vintage lookbook to test out if a more modern look would appeal to the user. During an exposition I asked potential users if they would wear what they saw and if it appealed to their senses. Which resulted in a loud yes. To design the lookbook I made wireframes, edited photo’s, did an editorial session to choose the photo’s which would end up in the lookbook and made the patterns for the cover pages.

Because the main goal was to shift the behaviour of our target group, I did a research on behaviour management (dutch). For this research I looked up two techniques: nudging and the behaviour management model of Balm. I closely watched our concept with this information in mind and made recommendations for bigger possibilities of behavioral change.
I contributed by finalising the concept as well. I did this by making the style guide and wireframes of the website. As well as visualising a big part of the pages of the website, you can view the Marvel prototype here (in dutch and containing only the pages I visualised).