Reflection on workshops

Hansen Wei

I do not really remember what the first workshop is, maybe mini EI? What I do remember is that we formulated a design a goal of helping bank robber to escape easier after robbing a bank. The design goal was a little bit absurd but as an example to provide a quick exercise, it was perfect. The most effective thing that afternoon brought me was I learned a lot from practicing how to set up research questions, how to diverge sub-questions from research questions and then how to come up with different research methods in order to tackle different sub-questions. It was this practice that gave me a clear structure of the whole research phase, helping a lot in making a research plan. Due to time constrains, though I didnt strictly follow the initial research plan, I know exactly what to expect during each research since the structure of the research was quite clear. In the Interaction Vision workshop, I think I fully digested how to seek for relevant experience from daily life based on interaction qualities, and I applied it quite well to my own project, which really helped me gain a lot of inspirations, I think I will keeping exploring my interaction qualities in the next phase. Also the Interactive Prototyping workshop went very well as a pilot for my design intervention experiment. My group mates, Kah Kih and Joep gave me many good suggestions on both the way how to better prototyping my idea to be tested and the quality on the idea itself. I appreciated it a lot. Only one concern about his workshops, to me these workshops, especially the last 2, the Interaction Vision workshop and the Interactive Prototyping workshop, are quite useful to keep a student right on track of the project: It could sort of force student to prepare the interaction vision, and design intervention ideas to be tested on time. But on the other hand, it may overset the students original research plan, sometime I see some students have to stop their research , which is not even enough for them to come up with an interaction vision, but to prepare a random idea just to be tested in the interactive prototyping workshop without knowing what to expect. Maybe its good to discuss about it.