Topic

Risking the Physical and Digital Experience

Open-Ended Question: How can the digital experience of playing Risk feel more physical? Within the assigned context, how can the UX/UI be improved when playing Risk digitally?

Hand Lettering

Open-Ended Question: How can the design of a phrase communicate its meaning through hand lettering, typography, color, and subtle motion? 

It was my pleasure to lead the students below through this hand lettering project at KSU back in Spring 2021. Special thanks to guest speakers Justen Renyer and Pouya Jahanshahi (OSU faculty). Students credit: Abby Swafford, Cameron Wasinger, Emily Graham, Maddie Brown, Mayra Sigala, Meg Brekke, Molly Galitzer, and Sarah Onken.

Sustainable Packaging

Open-Ended Question (for students): What would it look like to take an overpackaged product and reimagine it into something that still protects and communicates while making it more environmentally sustainable by reducing materials and giving said product a second life? 

Beneficiary: Future humans.

Open-Ended Question (for the professor): How do I equip soon to graduate seniors with a portfolio project that displays their awesome packaging ideas (packaging being something most impactful when held) when the world is meeting remotely and can’t physically hold their work? My answer was to give them several iterations that led to a final explainer video. 

See the seven best student solutions below.

Lego Hidden Side (Spring21)

Open-Ended Question: How can our next Lego AR theme be more physically interactive (hands on bricks) than LHS? How can our next Lego AR theme improve the UX/UI problems observed in LHS? How can we tell the story of our next Lego AR theme to Lego stakeholders?

See the seven best student solutions below.

Crowdsourcing DataViz App (Spring21)

Open-Ended Question: How can a crowdsourcing app resolve a user’s complaint by empowering them to input a small amount of data and see the impact of their contribution (DataViz) on a larger community?

Students worked in a group and individually through: Benchmarking, Personas, Pain Points, User Journey Maps, Scenarios, Task Flow Analysis, Wireframes, User Testing, Naming, Branding, Lo-Fi Prototypes, Hi-Fi Prototypes, and an Explainer Video.

See the ten best student solutions below.

Kirjalo

Kirja: Is a Finnish word for book.

Kirjalo: Is a sustainable, homey bookstore that makes reading cool.

Design and the Play Instinct

In “The Play Instinct in Design Education,” authors Hester and Hannaford identify several misconceptions students have about the creative process: namely, that graphic design is not an intellectual pursuit, software will fix all their problems, and creative outcomes can be “correct.”

A timeless undergraduate project asks students to create using “Design and the Play Instinct” by Paul Rand. The internet is replete with examples of students mindlessly laying out page after page with almost no consideration or understanding of how Rand talks about play and restraint nor the processes discussed in this classic text.

To combat these misconceptions, I ask students in my class to physically make some of the processes discussed in the text. For example, my students first played with Photogram and Cubist Collage processes before laying it out in book form. As Hester and Hannaford say, “the psychology of play is conducive to learning and problem-solving.”

Rullo

Rullo is a math-based game where the user removes numbers from the grid so that the remaining numbers in each row or column add up to the numbers at the beginning and end of the given row or column.

Students explored UX/UI principles in this project.

Book Series

Scenario for Students: Your publishing company has bought the rights to distribute the Thames and Hudson series of manuals on the arts. Your job is to explore many conceptual options and present them internally. We’ll have four internal drafts before meeting with the stakeholders at the end of October, where we’ll deliver our best two concepts. Instead of designing all 11 manuals, we’ll give the stakeholders a taste of our skills and only show them three manuals, but with two visually distinct concepts. Since they’ll be comparing and choosing one concept, we should present them the same three books, but with two visually distinct concepts. 

Type Legibility as seen by Historic Design Style

Students communicated the principles discussed in the “The Legibility of Type” through a historical design style.