Browsing by Subject "design process"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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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    Designing for the dynamic web
    (Kent State University School of Visual Communication Design In-Vision Workshop Series, 2014-10-18) Ganci, Aaron
    Today, more Americans access the Internet through a mobile device instead of a PC. As the number and diversity of connected devices increases, websites are stretched to their limit. The visual design and layout conventions that web designers have relied on for traditional desktop-sized screens are quickly becoming outdated. There are new approaches that allow web designers to present content and improve the experience of using a site, regardless of the screen size. This workshop will provide a survey of these approaches—responsive and adaptive web design—with hands-on examples. We will discuss the differences between responsive design and adaptive design and the impact those methodologies have on web layouts. Emphasis will be placed on the dynamic web’s impact on the visual design of sites but will also include process, planning, technical implementations, and interaction and usability considerations.
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    The forest and its trees: understanding interaction design through service design activities
    (IxDA Education Summit, 2016-02-28) Ganci, Aaron
    Interaction design and service design have a lot in common. They both focus on improving the experience of people in real-world contexts. Service designers strategically plan the big picture of the experience while interaction designers focus on the tangible details within the user’s interaction experience. These two fields have a lot to offer one another and depend on each other to make a complete design. After all, a service experience is often a sequence of interactions that a person has with artifacts or people. For interaction designers, understanding how their work fits into the bigger picture can be of huge benefit. If the objective of an interaction designer is to assist a person in the achievement of their goals and improve their experience overall, they should widen their perspective and embrace the totality of the experience. Arguably, what happens before and after a person uses a website impacts the overall quality of their experience just as much, if not more, than the interface design elements or physical quality of animations on screen. Understanding the totality of people’s experiences needs to begin in school. Design professionals are too busy to constantly keep the macro and micro elements of the experience in mind. After all, that is why we have the distinct professions. An academic setting is an ideal space to enable interaction designers to consider a person’s broader experience and leverage that consideration into their work. In short, utilizing service design process, methods, and outcomes can improve interaction design students’ understanding of their user and, in turn, enable them to create more appropriate or innovative designs. This presentation will provide an in-depth case study on the curricular use of service design processes and methods to help interaction design students understand their own work. The course which will be discussed, titled “Designing People-Centered Experiences”, is an advanced undergraduate (senior-level) course taught at Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, IUPUI. This course is a preliminary, 8-week course that initiates students into their senior capstone experience. It engages the students in a discussion about the current state of the design industry, how experience design is defined and what are its parts. In total, the course teaches students how to assess user need and, with that information, design experiences from the the broad strategy to the tangible interfaces. Topics covered will include a framework for how to describe experience design activities, assignment structure for the course, examples of student deliverables, assessment techniques, and insights on how to improve the course experience moving forward.
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    The Work/Life Portal: An Innovative Navigation Tool for Faculty Benefits & Policies
    (AAMC Group on Faculty Affairs Professional Development Conference, 2014-07-19) Ganci, Aaron; Krista, Hoffmann-Longtin
    Project Benefits and policies of large academic medical centers can be challenging for faculty to navigate. A recent survey of faculty at our institution reported large gaps in their knowledge about and use of benefits and policies related to career flexibility. For example, nearly half of our faculty didn’t know about clock stoppage policies and expressed concern about how polices were communicated. Thus, the goal of this project was to develop a web-based solution to clearly convey work life benefits and policies. Methods In partnership with our school of art and design, a two-phase project was developed to design a new web portal for benefits/policies. In phase one, we conducted qualitative, usability testing of current web and print resources with the goal of further explaining the survey results. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with new and veteran faculty, as well as campus HR staff. They reviewed the current resources; provided feedback on what was unclear or hard to find; and finished by drawing their “dream website.” Results In phase two, the team used the design-thinking methodology to develop a prototype of the website. After systematically testing ideas, the team settled on a modified natural language user interface, where a faculty member types in a question or idea (e.g. “I’m having a baby”) and a series of policies is returned, associated with keywords within the question. The simple design of the interface allows faculty affairs office staff to assign word tags to policies/benefits that may appear in the user’s questions. A free online tool (http://wordpress.org) was used to create the portal. Conclusion The new portal allows our institution to create a clear online presence for work life benefits and policies, demonstrating our institutional commitment to supporting faculty. At the same time, the program uses resources efficiently. The only expenses incurred have been faculty and staff time to conduct the study and develop the portal. Implications While the portal is still in development, it demonstrates a promising shift in how faculty affairs offices can collaborate with faculty and internal partners. By designing and testing ideas with faculty and HR professionals, we created buy-in for the project early on. These individuals have the potential to become early adopters of the new portal, sharing their positive experiences with others.