Topic outline

  • General

    MUO-E8041 - Collaborative and participatory techniques for design

    Fall 2023 – 4.9.2023–10.10.2023 (Mon/Tue 9-12)

    Responsible teacher: Andrea Botero // Teaching Assistant: Gabriela Farias

    Location: We are alternating between 3 different rooms (all in Väre) please always check where you should be and when!

    Description:

    The course adopts a participatory hands-on approach that builds participants’ design competences with a specific collaborative and participatory twist. The collective learning journey includes exercise in agenda setting, translation, facilitation, method choice and managing co-creative activities. Techniques, methods and skills introduced are useful in choreographing design projects for creative sustainability and will help building a personal repertoire of collaborative design practices.

    Learning Outcomes:

    After the course participant will be:

    • Capable to identify translation and facilitation challenges of collaborative design processes.

    • Able to critically discuss and apply various collaborative and participatory techniques for design, together with other members of a team.

    • Comfortable with designing interactive and collaborative sessions with care, effectiveness, purpose, and detail.

    Course practices / formats:
    Course sessions and activities take different forms. The following list explains how they work, what happens and how they will be assessed. The 3 activities marked with * mean that you are required to deliver an assignment(s) in MyCourses to get the final credits for the course.

    Lecture: Someone (a guest or me) talks for a bit, shows us some of the techniques they use or presents a case study. We ask loads of questions and reflect on what we hear/see.

    Exercise: A hands-on experience during class where we are trying something out so we can reflect on practice. During the exercises we ask each other questions (I certainly will) and reflect on what we hear/see/experience.

    Housekeeping: A space to talk about the meta of the course, clarify logistics or other important janitorial work like what is happening when and with whom. Also to mutually check how we are doing.

    Technique bite (*): A short ~5 min show&tell where each participant of the course share a collaborative technique. Bites can be of two types: telling and showing a technique you have tried/used and telling and showing about a technique you would like to learn about (depending on the size of the group we adjust how many bites each participant is in charge). During the bites, we will make sure to comment, ask questions, reflect on the assumptions we bring when selecting and using them, and try not to take them for granted

    NOTE: some bites work best when we can also try how the technique works in class, at least partially. If you plan for a try out, let Andrea and Gabriela know when scheduling. By the end of the course each bite presentation should be documented and uploaded to my course as a PDF file. The file should include: a title/name of the technique, name of the contributor and date, a short description (what it is for, how it works) and provide at least 1 link to a resource(s) or reference about the technique (e.g., an article, book or website).

    Learning diary (*): a personal reflection on the topics of the course written during a period of time. Note that a learning diary is not a description of what happened; but rather a pondered discussion of the relevance the topics have for you. In this course, the learning diary has 2 components: The first one is written reflection (can include drawings, can be written by hand and e.g., scanned but we should be able to read it). Each weekly entry (of approx. 400 words) should incorporate reflections on the course discussions, exercises, reading materials and/or group work of the 2 class sessions of each week. These entries should be done weekly and delivered via MyCourses as a file. The second component of the diary is an invitation to make, not to write. This part is inspired by textile practices of record keeping of Indigenous people in the Americas (e.g. Aymara’s Kippus and Yacama’s Ititamats). Everyone will get a thread ball and will develop tactile conventions of their own, to mark their entries making a textile/tactile documentation that records important observations about participation, the class, life, as the person encounters them while we have the course. This artifact should be brought to the classes every day as we will be activating reflections when we start each class as we progress. At the end of the course the textile artifact should be documented together with the last entry of the written diary by answering two questions and by including 2 images of it taken at different stages.

    Final group work (*): participants will plan, design, and organize how to facilitate an interactive collaborative design event (in the form of a play session) and they will pilot it with other fellow students by the end of the course. Brief for this work will be given in class. Each group will deliver a max 8 min presentation explaining the idea and results from the pilot and submit a final version of the report. The final report should include: 1) One page presenting the concept for the session, its design rationale, collaborative approach, background assumptions about who should participate or be engaged 2) One page detailed session plan with timetable, list of materials needed and roles of the group members 3) copy of the invitation materials used and 2 images 4) Approx. 4 page documentation and reflection of the pilot session. Altogether this document does not need to be more than 8 pages (11-12 size font) and should include stuff you can reuse e.g., in your portfolio.


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