Mar 01 2008
Reflections from Interaction Design workshop at IIT Kanpur
In mid February I traveled to IIT Kanpur with my colleague Adesh. We spent a good three days in the company of design students and faculty in the midst of the hustle bustle of ‘Techkriti’ - the annual IITK technical fest (read: a love fest for geeks and robo-heads) and the quaint (imagine peacocks walking outside your window) and picturesque IIT campus.
On Friday, we met some enthusiastic students and Prof. Satyaki Roy who was the brain behind this workshop idea - easily one of the most accessible, engaging, enthusiastic and savvy professors I’ve interacted with in a while. We had made up our minds that we would keep the workshop very engaging and hands on with minimal ‘Powerpoint gagging’ - however as I stood in front of those students and started my spiel on our past engagement and our plans for them and such, i had a moment of doubt on whether we’d be able to pull off an intensive Interaction Design workshop in all of two days.
Some say we did!
On Day 1, we started off the students on some basics of Interaction Design including user research and persona development. For the given design problem (Redesigning a healthcare system for the IIT Kanpur community on campus), the group conducted interviews with students, staff and faculty and went through the whole affinity diagramming process of sorting and synthesizing their interview findings. My big reminder/lesson from Day 1 was that user research is indeed a political process as much as it is a design process. We rounded off Day 1 with a requirements generation exercise.
On Day 2, we shifted gears and moved into Interaction design models, prototyping and usability evaluations. The students developed Interaction Design models to drive their requirements forward and subsequently worked with Powerpoint to visualize low fidelity prototypes. Dr. Roy was game enough to act as an archetypical ‘user’ during the usability testing session. My big reminder/lesson from Day 2 was that when you give students a free hand and let them work through figuring out a solution, they can come up with some pretty interesting ideas.
We ended Day 2 with each group giving brief ten min presentations to the workshop participants on their design rationale, process and final solution.
Alok Agashe, one of the workshop participants has posted the pictures from the workshop on Picasa
We left Kanpur on Sunday and were unfortunately too physically exhausted by the end of it all to try out Kanpur’s famous “Thaggu ke Laddoo” (The thug’s sweets). However, i found myself intellectually very charged up and inspired at the end of that weekend - I hope to be back in IIT Kanpur soon enough. There is something about good university campuses which is so different from air conditioned corporate existences. Edward Said, in one of his books fondly remembered his days at Columbia University as some of the best in his life.
I am hoping to conduct similar workshops within the Bangalore UX and Design community as well.
[…] Sufistically Speaking… wrote an interesting post today on Reflections from Interaction Design workshop at IIT KanpurHere’s a quick excerptReflections from Interaction Design workshop at IIT Kanpur Posted by: Amit Pande, in User Experience, Design, Education In mid February I traveled to IIT Kanpur with my colleague Adesh. We spent a good three days in the company of design students and faculty in the midst of the hustle bustle of ‘Techkriti’ - the annual IITK technical fest (read: a love fest for geeks and robo-heads) and the quaint (imagine peacocks walking outside your window) and picturesque IIT campus. On Friday, we met […]
I am really looking for more workshops in the Bangalore community. In particular on topics like prototyping, ethnography etc.,
[…] I’ve been coming across this ‘Healthcare experience’ discussion a lot lately. Last month as part of a workshop at IIT Kanpur we gave students the problem of redesigning the healthcare system at the IIT through technology interventions (most groups came up with hybrid solutions - website and mobile SMS, mobiles and the IIT-wide intercom facility and such). One student group found through their discussions with staff and students at the healthcare center that patients felt doctors were ‘not touching us enough, not talking to us enough, not hearing us intently enough’. I also recall reading in Dan Pink’s Whole New Mind recently that several medical schools in North America have been teaching their students ‘empathy’, ’story telling’, ‘role playing’ and other such softer skills - which sounds like a good move. I’m still skeptical though - will the medical profession ever embrace an open-source approach towards sharing medical knowledge and conducting treatments? Do they need to? […]