Re-design and Extend

Overview

In this design sprint, we will revisit one of the previous design sprints. Which project we revisit will be determined by students voting in a survey. This page will be updated once the votes are in. We will be revisiting Design Sprint #2: Design for Understanding. This project will involve a few components and will involve several important in-class hack sessions. You will need to use physical prototyping for this assignment.

Although it may seem odd to make a physical prototype of something digital, I encourage you to push the boundaries of your creativity! Here are some examples from Emory’s Hall of Fame that show how you can transform the digital into something physical:

Evaluate

You should begin by evaluating your previous visualization designs. You are working with new people so the group needs to decide which datasets you all are going to work with. After you pick a dataset and an existing set of visualizations, you and your team will need to decide what your evaluation criteria are:

Revisit our lecture resources for evaluation methodologies (cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation, usability study, etc) and decide if one of these is fitting for your evaluation goals. A good framework for thinking about this can be found in Research Contributions in Human-Computer Interaction by Jacob Wobbrock and Julie Kientz.

Your evaluation likely involves human subjects. Feel free to reach out to friends and classmates or other potential users of your target audience. That means you should make yourself available to your classmates to participate in their evaluations. You will likely need them to participate in yours as well. Some of this can be achieved during our hack day. Some of it will likely need to take place outside of class.

By this point in the semester, your group should be able to make informed and carefully rationalized decisions about the task, target user group, number of participants, conditions, and other details of the experimental design. You will need to justify these choices in your blog posts.

When in doubt, run your evaluation ideas by me.

Iterate

Next, reflect deeply on your evaluation results. How can you use what you learned to inform the next iteration of your design? You will want to describe this reflection in your blog post and go on to implement these changes in your design. That means you will have a new prototype that reflects these design changes.

Extend

In the final part of this project, you will be expanding on your previous design using a new prototying modality: physical prototyping. You can find some examples here.

How you choose to extend your previous project can take many forms, entirely up to your group. Be sure to clearly state your goals. Depending on which project you are extending, some examples you might consider are re-designing a wearable biosensor to collect additional health data, an accessible data physicalization experience (Fall 2024), a integrating tangible objects in a virtual reality art viewer, etc. You should show evidence of iteration in your physical prototying as well. Check out this article on low-fidelity prototyping for guidance.

For Design Sprint #4

You should create at least 2 data physicalizations: one for the analysis and one for persuasion. I do not want you to literally recreate your existing visualizations. Instead, think about what aspects of your visualization would translate well to a physical medium and which ones might need to be changed. For example, any interactivity on a screen will need to be reimagined in physical space.

Specifically, I am looking for:

I am NOT looking for:

Tools

For this project, you will have access to tools and materials through the DACE Studio (in the north basement of Chambers, by the flagpole). They have materials ranging from sewing machines, knitting machine, yarn and string, embroidery tools, paints, coloring utensils, paper, canvas, etc. You may also choose to use materials you find around your dorm/house (cardboard, plastic bottles, old tshirts, etc).

Sketching and Planning

Before we go to the DACE Studio and work with physical materials, you must sketch out your proposed new design. As always when sketching, I encourage you to explore multiple options in your sketches. However, you only need to submit 1 annotated sketch per visualization (so 2 total – persuasive and analytical). You should annotate your sketch with the materials needed. For example, if you make a bar chart, you may choose to use pipe cleaners for the bars so in your sketch, I should see the bars drawn as pipe cleaners and a label explaining the bars are pipe cleaners. Finally, write a list of the materials with explicit quantities.

You should submit your sketches and supply list to this Google Form by 12 PM on Friday, November 8.

Re-evaluate

Now, given your new physical prototype, your group should design and execute a preliminary evaluation of this extension. Refer back to slides on Experience Prototyping, Heuristic Evaluation, Usability Studies, etc. This evaluation will gather preliminary feedback, but it should include well-informed and justified experimental design decisions.

Deliverables

Checkpoint: Nov 13

Final Deliverables

Grading: Grading will be based on the design rubric.