Browsing by Author "Ganci, Aaron"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 31
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    Adaptive Resumes in Disrupted Futures
    (Cumulus Association, 2022) Ganci, Aaron; Herron School of Art
    As the impacts of the climate crisis continue to unfold, more and more workers will become displaced (International Labour Organization). While the bulk of disruption will be felt by the working poor in the third world, every part of the economy will eventually be impacted. Within the United States, millions of people will face dramatic changes to the environment because of rising temperatures, widespread fires, flooding, and more. In response, there will be an increased need for workers at all levels to migrate or switch employment sectors. As a design researcher, I am specifically interested in how design artifacts play a role in worker cross-sector mobility. There is one crucial artifact that plays a facilitating role within this dynamic: the resume. The resume is a seemingly innocuous player in the job-seeking process. However, when viewed as a narrative artifact, it becomes obvious that the resume has untapped potential. As workers seek to enter new and unfamiliar domains, they will need better tools to help them construct relatable narratives about their unique blend of experiences and skills. Over the last two years, my team has been examining the space of worker adaptability through the development of a solution called Real CV. This project seeks to help workers articulate their strengths and translate domain-specific abilities and experiences into narratives that can be understood by a wider audience. Put another way, I seek to update the format of the resume to help workers become more adaptable to their evolving surroundings. This paper will identify weaknesses with the CV through a critical intersectional lens (Booysen, 2018) and will detail the use of a constructive design methodology (Bardzell et al., 2015; Dorst, 2013) to examine an updated resume system. In the end, a concept for a Real CV application is presented which showcases the necessary criteria in a more inclusive and adaptable resume format.
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    Assisted Lows: Collaboratively Finding Ways to Support T1D Patients During Hypoglycemia Episodes
    (2017) Semidey Capriles, Lisa M.; Eby, Chad; Napier, Pamela; Ganci, Aaron
    This research focuses on how hypoglycemia episodes -- low blood sugar events -- spark specific communication needs in Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) patients. As a 22 year T1D veteran, I've personally faced challenges when needing, requesting and receiving an adequate response to help me overcome an episode. This research is born out of the knowledge that other people want to genuinely help, and aims to close the gap between a failure of knowing 'what to do' and effective actions.
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    Becoming a team player: the evolving role of design in agile development
    (2013 Design Principles and Practices Conference, 2013-03-08) Ganci, Aaron; Ribeiro, Bruno
    Through qualitative methods, this paper examines the evolving role of the visual communication designer within the Agile development process with a special focus on educational ramifications. As websites and software become more complex environments, designers can quickly find themselves unable to design and implement a complete solution on their own. While this realization seems like a loss of control—the designers and their designs now appear to be at the whim of the developer—it can actually result in more thoughtful solutions. Designers must simply learn to become a team player by integrating themselves firmly into the process. In doing this, the integrity of the visual design will not be compromised and will add broader benefit to the site or application. It is crucial that designers adopt a new team-based mentality towards designing digital products.
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    Becoming more than makers: the case to balance hard and soft skills in design foundations
    (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), 2015-03-26) Ganci, Aaron
    Many industries are looking to creatives to help them separate themselves from their competitors. This is especially true for designers, whose processes and visualization skills make them excellent collaborators for a wide variety of projects. Increasingly, designers find themselves working outside the traditional realm of creative activity.
 To be prepared for this new reality, creatives must add new skills to their traditional technical set. Students need to become experts in soft skills: knowing how to leverage empathy, tap into civic agency, develop research skills, learn to write well, and tell a compelling story. Design academia has been addressing these skills at the upper levels for a several years now. However, in order for creative professionals to truly excel in these new domains, they must begin to practice them earlier in their academic career.
 In this paper, I will make a case that soft skills should become equally important to technical skills within the foundation experience. I will provide insights about what skills are necessary for students to develop at a foundation level. These insights are derived from an ongoing research project where professional designers are observed and interviewed to accurately describe the roles and activity of contemporary design.
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    The Best Laid Plans… Helping Teachers Foster Intrinsic Motivation in Their Students
    (2015) Walters, Nicholas; Ganci, Aaron
    High school students suffer from a lack of intrinsic motivation to participate in class. In an attempt to combat this lack of motivation, educators often provide students with rewards for participation. However, self-determination theory—a theory of motivation— states that these external incentives contribute to students’ lack of intrinsic motivation.
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    Co-Design of a Mobile App For Care Partners Who Manage Medications For People Living With Dementia
    (Oxford University Press, 2024-12-31) Werner, Nicole; Ganci, Aaron; Patel, Himalaya; Thuemling, Teresa; Holden, Richard; Herron School of Art and Design
    For unpaid care partners of community-dwelling people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), medication management is effortful and time-consuming work that often continues over several years. Although this work may be eased by mobile application software (apps), current consumer apps underserve care partners’ needs. Through co-design workshops, our objective was to identify the user requirements for a mobile app supporting at-home medication management for people with ADRD. We conducted five 1-hour virtual co-design workshops with current and recent ADRD care partners. Care partners described their difficulties with medication management, then proposed ideal end-states by hand-drawing storyboards. We co-reflected on care partners’ descriptions and proposals, chose the app’s necessary functions, and digitally sketched corresponding user-facing features. After reviewing the sketches, care partners self-reported attitudes toward the proposed features. We ranked features by desirability, then created a digital user interface prototype. Care partners reviewed the prototype and self-reported adoption intent on a scale from 1 to 5. Seven care partners participated, ages 56-75 (Mdn=63), with 3-14 years’ care-partner experience (Mdn=5.5). Elicited requirements included tracking medication administration, recording behavioral changes, instructing other care partners, and briefing healthcare professionals. The user interface prototype included a medication checklist, observation journal, and contacts management. Care partners self-reported moderately high adoption intent (M=4.2, SD=0.9). By supporting both short- and long-term information needs, the proposed mobile app promotes shared awareness among ADRD care partners and healthcare professionals. This work is foundational to developing the app and assessing usability and utility in situ.
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    Correction: Investigating the Best Practices for Engagement in Remote Participatory Design: Mixed Methods Analysis of 4 Remote Studies With Family Caregivers
    (JMIR, 2024-12-31) Jolliff, Anna; Holden, Richard J.; Valdez, Rupa; Coller, Ryan J.; Patel, Himalaya; Zuraw, Matthew; Linden, Anna; Ganci, Aaron; Elliott, Christian; Werner, Nicole E.; Herron School of Art and Design
    [This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/60353.].
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    COVID CV: A System for Creating Holistic Academic CVs during a Global Pandemic
    (IEEE, 2021-05) Raja, Umesh; Chowdhury, Nahida Sultana; Raje, Rajeev R.; Wheeler, Rachel; Williams, Jane; Ganci, Aaron; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    The effects of the Covid pandemic have been, similar to the population at-large, unequal on academicians - some groups have been more susceptible than others. Traditional CVs are inadequate to highlight these imbalances. CovidCV is a framework for academicians that allows them to document their life in a holistic way during the pandemic. It creates a color-coded CV from the user's data entries documenting the work and home life and categorizing corresponding events as good or bad. It, thus, provides a visual representation of an academician's life during the current pandemic. The user can mark any event as major or minor indicating the impact of the event on their life. The CovidCV prototypical system is developed using a three tier architecture. The first tier, the front-end, is a user interface layer that is a web application. This prototype has a back-end layer consisting of two tiers which are responsible for handling the business logic and the data management respectively. The CovidCV system design is described in this paper. A preliminary experimentation with the prototype highlights the usefulness of CovidCV.
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    Decoded: Exploring user involvement in the early stages of software development
    (2017) Sieferd, Edward; Ganci, Aaron
    This research aims to explore how user involvement in software development can contribute to innovation in interfaces and system functionality as well as create supporting literature for human-centered design in the software development process. To achieve this, a mixed-methodology approach is used to validate users as co-creators in the early stages of development. This is done through direct engagement with users, the adaption of the GOMS framework to develop human-centered methods for engagement, and the use of evaluative surveys. By combining GOMS and human-centered design, researchers could frame engagement methods for the elicitation of system functionality and interface design requirements. Researchers then synthesized requirements from user generated data, developed a prototype, and compared it to a prototype developed without user involvement. Early results show that user-generated prototyping provides key insights into the development of software features, user flow, and information architecture.
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    Designing digital experiences in 2020
    (AIGA Design Educators Community, 2016-06-15) Ganci, Aaron
    The students entering school next Fall will likely graduate in 2020. Most of those graduates will enter the field as designers who create digital experiences—what we think of today as websites, apps, or other screen-based media. However, they will enter a media landscape that looks quite different from that of today. As the educators of these future designers, it is crucial that we understand the digital platforms of the near future and try our best to prepare them to design in these new environments. Today, many programs are still trying to figure out how to deeply integrate digital media into their curriculum. The academy rightly moves slower than industry and it has taken us several years to adjust to the new realities of digital design. In recent years, we have had some relief as designing websites and mobile applications has become much easier: our tools have improved, clear visual patterns have emerged, and interaction paradigms have matured. That said, a new wave of technologies is quickly approaching—or in some cases, already arrived—that will alter designers’ methods, processes, and outcomes in significant ways. Over the next four years, the screens we design for will multiply and diversify, virtual and augmented reality will mature, wearable and ubiquitous computing will become commonplace, and artificial intelligence will enhance or replace everyday tasks. On top of the hardware changes, security, privacy, and ethics will be ever-present forces on how designers make decisions about their work. Students cannot prepare for these environments by simply designing a few websites or apps in school. To be successful, they will require a unique set of competencies. As educators, we need to take significant steps to update and augment or curricula to prepare our students for this new world. This 20 minute talk will outline several emerging trends that will likely impact the design of digital experiences in the near future. The insights in the talk are derived from qualitative interviews with professionals, personal experiences, and an analysis of technology-centric literature. The author will unpack these trends for the audience to reveal recommendations about the core competencies that are needed to design next-generation digital experiences. From those competencies, learning objectives will be derived that educators could use to inform curricular updates.