Final Project: Design Manifesto

Overview

For your final project, you will create a website that acts as your final portfolio and post that acts to synthesize and reflects on all of the work you have accomplished throughout the semester. This type of portfolio demonstrates your skills in the design process – a valuable tool for you to show future employers (my friend Noëlle who is working at Google reiterated this to me, she thinks this project is highly applicable). This website will contain two primary elements:

STOP and complete this form about whether or not you want written feedback on your final project.

Design Manifesto

You should do this individually, and it will be the primary artifact for your final project. Since all of the write-ups for your design process for the design sprints were co-written with your group, the manifesto is a particularly critical part of the grading for the final portfolio as a way for me to gauge your individual contributions and takeaways from these projects.

Before you begin writing, think carefully about the following questions:

Design is rarely divorced from our personal lens - our experiences, our expertise, our beliefs. These aspects all mold the applications of technology that you find exciting.

Together, these questions should guide you to at least 5 main points that define your design process. To do this, imagine you must translate the processes/skills you gathered in this course to an entirely new scenario (let’s say Brain-Computer Interfaces). What are the important points that you would want to communicate to someone who hasn’t taken an HCI class before?

Your takeaways should be evidence-driven. That means that when you discuss these topics, you should frequently reference (and show examples of!) the projects that you completed. I highly encourage you to start from the bottom-up: review each design sprint and note a few things about the design process. Then look at your notes to see if any notes start to form themes. You can modify these themes into your 5 main points.

Quality checks for the Design Manifesto

This Design Manifesto should be part of your website (like the “About” page on my website); you are not linking to a Medium post.

Website Portfolio

You will create a homepage of some kind that demonstrates each of your projects. The design of the page itself is up to you, but it should be polished and match the tone/mood you would like to set for a public-facing entity.

At a minimum, the page must:

Note: Because you are linking to Medium, you may want to consider how the design of your webpage compliments or clashes with the design of Medium as a platform. You may want to copy your article data into your website so that the user can stay in one place to view your work. It is encouraged but not required that you embed the content of your 4 Medium posts directly into your website for a more cohesive portfolio. I expect the 4 links at a bare minimum.

On Web Design

You are welcome to create your design page with any technology that you’d like. If you are not familiar with web design, I’d encourage you to look into using your Davidson Domain. From there, you can build a website using the Wordpress app inside of your Davidson Domain. There are a number of other free templates you can find online, or you’re welcome to build out your own fully custom design. You will need your website to be hosted on a server (meaning anyone could access your website from anywhere), so if you host your website on somewhere besides Davidson Domains (free) or GitHub pages (free), check to make sure there aren’t any costs ($) associated with it. You should only need the free tier of any hosting platform.

For those with more web design experience, I recommend hosting on Github Pages, which will handle hosting on the server and version control.

There are a number of design questions you need to answer:

You are encouraged to create a beautiful, unique website that showcases your design personality. You may use existing templates, but particularly for the context of a course like this, I think it is important that you don’t simply take the theme at face value, but modify it to fit your own goals.

AI Policy

To reiterate my AI Policy in the context of this assignment: you may use LLMs like ChatGPT to generate code to assist you in building the structure of your website, including to generate boilerplate code, to ask for help debugging, and to create CSS code for a desired style. You may not use LLMs to generate textual content for your Design Manifesto.

For example, you may NOT ask the LLM to summarize all of your Medium posts. You may NOT ask the LLM to extract points of the design process from your articles. However, you can engage with the LLM to help refine your thinking.

Acceptable prompting: “I am writing a design manifesto based on this specification (paste the contents of the website). Here is my outline with my 5 main points from the design process and my quoted supporting evidence from these articles (completed without the help of AI). Ask me clarifying questions to help me connect how my experiences in the design process have led to these 5 main points.”

Deliverables