CMU 51-774 : Project 1

Project 1: Ideas, Goals, and Preconceptions

What if you were asked to design some aspect of location-aware technology to improve the place identity of an organization? You are asked to use this very open question to begin to discover your expectations and imagination for this course.

Would you design a device, a website, a set of kiosks, other sites of embedded computation, or some particular relationship among all of these? Would you design for a "clicks-and-mortar" business, a neighborhood-oriented nonprofit, some other civic agency, an institution, a private association, or some new kind of organization? Would you design an event, something to be released, something to be sustained for some period, or something built to last indefinitely? Would you focus on technology or content? Would you focus on things, sites, identities, or experiences? How would you justify your work to non-designers? How does design add value? What is obvious about that (at least to you), and what is at issue? How is place-centric design changing? If architects and graphic artists have always used design presented organizations to their constituencies, how does such work shape up now? In particular, what is the role of existing cultural place? How do persistence, navigation, social framing, and especially appeals to cognitive background add up to a more viable design?

Rather than taking a definitive stance on so many questions at this early stage of the semester, you are simply asked to jump in. Pick some issues about which you have some thoughts, work backwards from them to see what sort of design problem would bring them to light, and then proceed as quickly as possible with such a design. Working in teams of three, you are asked to come up with a simple, place-centric design idea which raises the kind of issues that interest you here in the outset of this course. Work in collages, sketches, and storyboards Although you will quickly encounter the problem that brands become places and places become brands, do not take this as an exercise in marketing. Use this project to scope the semester's inquiry into design.

Thus you are asked to pay attention to your thought process in this design exercise and to identify a set of governing concepts in the following categories. A compilation of these is the actual goal of the project; the sketch design is just the means to get them flowing.

Keywords: what are the essential concepts you find yourself working with. What seems important to define?
Issues: what is debatable in this work. What really has to be decided
Assumptions: what conditions must we accept. Or what conditions does everyone already accept that they need to question?
Relationships: how are all of the above interdependent? Can you identify any important resonances, conflicts, or tradeoffs?

On Thursday, February 3, please bring a single board for your design and as many 5x7 index cards as you feel are appropriate for documenting these categories of concepts. For ease of group compilation, lease color-code the latter: keywords-blue, issues-red, assumptions-green, relationships-yellow.