Revised Equation Poster!
Healthy Living Short Term
The Goal: To encourage healthy living (eating healthy, staying active, building communities, and increasing self-esteem) to indirectly decrease both childhood obesity and bullying in elementary schools.
Proposed Ideation:
A toolkit that provides elementary teachers with quick activities to be performed in class or during break that encourage “Team Building”, “Getting Acquainted”, and “Focus on the Individual”.
Early Sketches:
Where I’m at Now:
Social Anxiety Short Term
The Goal: To create a better understanding of what it’s like to live with a social phobia and help distinguish social phobias from general shyness.
To do this I created a poster-book that provides a quick glimpse into what it is like to experience social anxiety. This is done through illustration and playful type. I tried to design this so that if someone just quickly opened it and skimmed it, they would still get the very basics. But if someone did want to know more, I also included some detailed text.
Short Term Goal
Explore different ways in which the text, images, and other components within the textbook can be rearranged so that it is more interactive for students.
For this goal I compiled a book of my explorations and created a foldout poster visually breaking down an equation.
Reflection:
This short term goal really pushed me in a short amount of time. I got a lot of good feedback about things that I haven’t thought through all the way, such as who the Visual Exploration book is designed for. I made it so that it could show my explorative process, but it was pointed out that it could be a tool that designers use when thinking about designing information for students. I’m really excited about tackling the long term goal now!
Short Term Project
These screen shots show my ideas for a medication scanner.
From here,
- I plan on adding photos from the retirement center as well as a map showing the flow of nurses and residents (this will add much needed context for the scanner).
- Formally, I want to make the background color change depending on the time of day (light in the morning, dark at night).
- I am going to explore more of an icon system for the medication. (ex: with food or glass of water?)
- Rearrange the screens so that the main functions and secondary functions are made clearer.
- I’m going to explore the idea of adding a toolbar.
My short-term project addresses the difficulties of educating adult women in Afghanistan, specifically, teaching them how to read. Life under Taliban rule has largely stripped them of human rights, including the right to an education, and because of this acquiring literacy has become more difficult. While the combined efforts of Prime Minister Karzai and the U.S. Government have done some good routing the Taliban from parts of the country, not everywhere is free, and even then remnants of fundamentalist thinking remain.
However, despite these difficulties, people still have the chance to learn. It is not unheard of for literate women to teach other women how to read, sometimes in secret. The goal of my short-term project is to facilitate learning by creating a toolkit that allows women to practice even when not with a teacher.
The result of my project is my final prototype. It is designed to match the material of the burkas that many of the women have to wear. This makes it easily concealable within clothing, and that coupled with its light weight makes carrying it or hiding it easy. The kit comes in two parts that can be packaged together in a cloth.
The first part is a cloth wrap that holds dry erase crayons, pencils, a small magnifying glass, chalk, and sharpeners. The second part is a binder which contains a practice folder and a booklet. The practice folder is a cloth folder with acetate sewn into it. People can then take practice pages from the booklet and insert them into the folder, which allows them to use the dry erase crayons to practice over and over. The booklet is designed to contain a number of stories, poems, rhymes, et cetera that apply to different reading levels. The booklet provides help with pronunciation and syllables, and as a person completes each booklet, they may progress to a new level with slightly harder stories and so on. This helps keep them in the area of proximity, where they feel like they are succeeding, and that feeling helps motivate them to challenge themselves.
Sustainable Forest Management
My short term project focuses on deforestation in the Borneo rainforest. There are many aboriginal tribes living there that still depend on the resources for shelter, food, medicines, clothing, tools, and other cultural uses.
I used the Forest Stewardship Council’s current labeling system as an entry point. In doing so I was able to manipulate and refine an existing system. The existing system is as such, “Logging companies must follow the Indonesian government’s rules: no logging of endangered species or any tree under 50cm in diameter. The idea is to leave the forest healthy enough to regenerate so it will be productive and profitable well into the future.” The current labeling system is horrible. The tags are small, there is no oversight, the labels are often dismissed, and there is no connection to the local communities.
The iconographic system and toolkit I created for local communities and the Forest Stewardship council to provides a reconstruction of sustainable forestry labeling system based on use and species, addressing important resources for communities. This iconographic identification and forest protection system physically implemented on the land doubles as a subtle advocacy campaign. The toolkit will consist of stencils, tree bands, paint, instruction manuals (catering to FSC), and warning signage for those logging.
I am quite satisfied with the final outcome of my short term system. In terms of next steps and moving forward, I need to experiment with actual materials. I realized that when creating a stencil set for numbers, the alphabet needs to be modified to account for counters and negative spaces. Hierarchically I need to draw more attention to the fact that “THESE TREES CAN’T BE CUT DOWN IF LABELED”. Although I’m satisfied with my iconographic labeling system, I now realize I could have (and will) brought more attention to the fact that the trees can’t be cut down. I look forward to physically constructing my bands, labels, and signage.
bonbonblogpants: Short Term + Long Term
Below (italicized) are my original short and long term goals: Objective + Merits At the core of this problem is the issue of not having sufficient affordable housing options, and although the only way this can be solved is by building more government subsidized housing unite, there are things that can help move the process along. Short Term Implementation The short term goal is to educate people about affordable and alternative housing possibilities (through the first time buyers program) in their area of interest as well as define things such as who is eligible to live where, with what budget, under what circumstances, when, and for how long. In order to make this work it is important to ask citizens of the greater Tel Aviv area what they would like to see happen and then use that as well as other significant information, such as class structure, to help solve the vicious cycle that the first time buyers program puts its users in. Long Term Implementation The long term goal is to help promote, educate, and convince the public to go along with David Ben-Gurion’s dream of expanding the country past the “center,” and move people into the southern region by creating an incentive program. The incentive program will be for residents as well as businesses. With more people and business in the south, the public transportation system will have to expand to accommodate the new growth as well and prepare cities in a designed manner for steady growth. If people can image everything they want in the south through futurecasting, then moving will not be as difficult. It is important to meet peoples’ priorities about what they would like to have in a community while doing it in a sustainable, responsible, and expandable way. David Ben-Gurion’s Dream: “It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested.” Ben-Gurion believed that the sparsely populated and barren Negev desert offered a great opportunity for the Jews to settle in Palestine with minimal obstruction of the Arab He saw the struggle to make the desert bloom as an area where the Jewish people could make a major contribution to humanity as a whole. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurion#Ben-Gurion_and_the_Negev) His concern with pioneering was genuine and personal. After the foundation of the state, he tried to establish a “pioneering service” that would send young people to help new immigrants and develop the Negev. When this failed, in 1954 he retired from the Prime Minister’s office for a time, and went to live on Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev to set a personal example. He believed that the future of Israel lay in the Negev and he promoted settlement there as well as hydrogeology studies and agricultural projects that he hoped would make the Negev arable. (http://www.zionism-israel.com/bio/biography_david_bengurion.htm) ——————————————————————————- That was last modified on September 22, 2011. Today, my goals have changed, and combined into one. The overall goal is to educate people about affordable and alternative housing possibilities (through the first time buyers program) in their area of interest as well as define things such as who is eligible to live where, with what budget, under what circumstances, when, and for how long. In order to make this work it is important to ask citizens of the greater Tel Aviv area what they would like to see happen and then use that as well as other significant information, such as class structure, to help solve the vicious cycle that the first time buyers program puts its users in. Tool to make this happen: I am going to solve this problem by changing the way people search for a new home. Instead of using a website to virtually “see” a place, I want encourage users to actively go search. When looking for a new home, physically being in the space it exists in can be very different from seeing pictures of rooms online. Tons of websites already exist for this type of thing, there is a time and place for that, and there are users who want that because its conformable and known to them. My target audience includes young people, young couple, young families, young professionals, and single parents, these are typically the type of people who are okay with new ideas that break the traditional mold. This system will help people make more educated decisions about where they will be living. I plan to do this through two strategies. The short term will be to create a night time illumination system that future-casts the city skyline within the next five years. All developers will be required to add their residential buildings. ( I know this sounds very vague, look at the photo in the post right before this to get an idea of what I am talking about.) There will be a visual language that people will understand and help lead them to find more information. The supplemental information will be an app that can be accessed through a tablet, smart phone, and even some computers, and this will be the longterm.
These are photographs of the set of tools I made for helping adults who learn how to read get the opportunity to practice. Specifically, my project is aimed towards adult women in Afghanistan, who have very limited options for education. Teaching women in this situation how to read requires one-on-one instruction between parties who are already literate, who in most cases, are often women, since men are not allowed to be near women who are not in their family. My project aimed to making something that was low cost and easily manufactured. One of the most important aspects was the importance of being able to hide these work materials, which is why they are small and bound in the same fabric that is very popular in burkas. Because they are a similar color and light weight, it gives women the opportunity of concealing them within clothes or laundry.
The tool kit is in the form of a cloth in the same form of a burka. It is sewn up, very light weight and loose, and the only materials it needed for construction were simply needles, thread and fabric. Pockets inside hold a variety of tools learners can use to practice their reading and writing skills. Those tools are: Pencils, sharpeners, dry erase crayons, chalk, and a small magnifying glass for emphasizing certain words.
The binder is made out of nothing more than some cardboard, glue, and fabric. It encompasses the entire “book” and “practice book” side of this project. Essentially, it houses the content.
Inside the binder is a small fold-out booklet that can be easily removed. It consists of a back of fabric sewed around the edges to two rectangles of acetate. Papers from the “book” section can then be taken out, slid into this acetate cover, and used for practice.
The “book” in the binder is something easily changed out and used. It is held in place by simple metal clips, which makes it possible for one book to be exchanged for another as the user’s reading level progresses. Taking out sheets so that they can be put into the practice folder is easy, and putting them back in is easy, too.
All in all, this combination serves to give a low-cost collection of tools, booklets, and practice materials. It covers the major needs for a learner who isn’t supposed to be learning, including being hidden easily because of its design, and being light-weight enough to be unobtrusive. Any person could use this to easily practice when their teacher is not available, and the content provides incentive to do so.
The last three pictures are direct screenshots of the way the content inside the booklet is set up, and the ease of which the papers might be used for practice.
Moving forward from my prototypes and what I gained from them, I had a great discussion with Megan and Rachael. We thought about how difficult it would be to tackle all 8 Multiple Intelligences in a system that I would create in such a short amount of time. We also discussed that Verbal Intelligences and Logical Intelligences are the main ways that are implemented in the school system, so why not just focus in on one different way of learning. This also changes the project from Multiple Intelligences to more of a general learning style focus.
I narrowed it down to VISUAL EDUCATION - especially in the areas of helping aid students in their studies at home. This is an exploration of a 7th grade science textbook in the NC schools. I scanned one page of the textbook and tried to arrange the text and images in different ways, so that it might be easier and more interactive for students who don’t just instantly understand things by just “reading” it.
This exploration in the way that information is presented will hopefully lead to some sort of system that allows students to rearrange text and images on their own through so that they can understand it better visually.
This new turn in my project has brought about a lot of changes in my short term and long term goals. A new project brief is in the works :)
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