This past weekend, we had another design charette for Wonjoon Chung, a graduating PhD student at the Institute of Design who is leaving Chicago to teach in Canada.
It was similar to the first charette (We were again designing an object for the classroom, a desk). There are a multitude of problems with the desks that we currently have– mostly they are unstable and tend to fall. Not exactly designed for laptops, either.
This charette was different because people who participated in it had varying years of experience. We had MDes students, Foundation, and MDMs in it. This posed some challenges that were not apparent before when we had a charette with only Foundies, but the challenges were good and I walked away with specific knowledge about how to “level” the playing field when you have a lot of variation in the groups. The two ways to overcome the problem, in my mind, is to appoint specialists on each group… Or have a sketching/foamcore modeling session prior for 30 minutes to teach everyone how to use the materials given to them. Or… just somehow prime people into pulling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. There exists a high cognitive barrier that prevents someone from bridging the gap between thinking about the problem and creating something to manifest that thinking— Charettes need to be billed as an enabler to reduce this barrier for them to work.
I’d be interested in hearing thoughts from anyone else who was in the charette or see the fruits of the research Wonjoon is doing. Oh that brings up another one. I wonder how many people act differently based on the fact that a video camera is pointed at them and a microphone is recording their conversations. (I can say that I don’t think my group really changed our behaviors or thought patterns, but I can’t speak for everyone).
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