#risdsteam

On March 19th, 2014 20 RISD and Brown students convened in the Brown Design Workshop at Brown University for a day of rapid prototyping and making. The group was lucky to be joined by two visiting designers from IDEO for the daylong workshop, Prat Ganapathy and Bill Stewart. The event, titled 'from the bottom of my fuel cell', centered around developing ideas for wearable devices. 

The session started off with introductions and an inspiring talk from the visiting designers about their design process. Prat and Bill discussed how the design process isn't very prescriptive, but something that often circles back on itself and repeats. They gave a number of examples of the multitude of different ways one can prototype, whether it be interactions, interfaces, or products. 

After that, the participants were challenged to take 15 minutes to make a prototype that addressed a specific question related to one of four "briefs", which are fictional people that the participants were given descriptions of to design for. For example, one group chose to prototype a better way for a homeless teen in San Francisco to access information about shelters and her appointments. 

After these super-rapid prototypes, the group got together to share their progress, as a way to practice speaking about the work and to see where each others' work was going. One group showed off a very rough prototype of a baby that could be monitored remotely by it's mother. Their very early prototype allowed them to get a sense of the human factors they would have to design around for the rest of the day. 

Subsequent rounds of prototyping (there were two) lasted about an hour each and allowed participants to flesh out concepts in more depth, or in some cases completely change their direction. One group for example started out developing a communal space for the elderly and younger people, but ended up pitching an interface that would teach older people how to dance while simultaneously guiding them through the city.

Groups continued prototyping until about 3:00 p.m. when everyone gathered for a final "critique". Groups presented really interesting ideas from a shoe for building confidence to a device that would create physical artifacts from digital communication. Prat remarked that all of these ideas could turn into something really valid if the participants started putting their ideas in front of users and took them further. The two visiting designers noted that they were really impressed with what everyone came up with in such a short period of time.

Later on that day, Bill and Prat, joined by a guest of theirs who happened to be local, talked about two of their projects in the Metcalf Auditorium in the Chace Center at RISD. This talk, which was open to everyone from Brown and RISD, covered two of IDEO's classically user-centered projects. This allowed students to gain perspective on how IDEO incorporates the end user into their design process (from the very beginning) and a number of other insights into how they work. 

RISD + Brown STEAM are very thankful to have partnered with Prat and Bill on this fun project and are looking forward to the next bigger and better version of this in the future. Feel free to reach out to RISD + Brown STEAM if you are interested in hearing more information about the project at [email protected] .

Making Visual Biology, an interest group within STEAM focusing on the intersection of biology with the arts, design, and visual culture, met for its first official meeting today. Throughout spring semester, we will meet once a week to develop workshops, events, speaker series, and social mixers.

We started the meeting by watching Born Like Stars and then quickly dove into sharing ideas and spearheading projects. Topics that we want to explore this semester include adaptation, plankton, healthcare design, bird nests, biomechanics and dance, stem cells, and the art history of neuroscience. 

We had a ton of fun at Saturday's "Useless Machines" intro to Arduino Workshop. Be sure to check out upcoming events on our calendar. Thanks to everyone who participated!