Reading Reflection | Due 9/27 Hugh Beyer & Karen Holtzblatt. "Contextual Design." interactions 6, no. 1 (1999): 32-42. Reflection Question Prompt: How would you adapt the Contextual Design process and language in this article, which draws on workplace examples, for student-centered learning activities (e.g portfolio practices) in a classroom context? Focus your translation on the design directives in the Contextual Inquiry section and Work Model examples (flow, cultural and physical) for a learning context. Feel free to challenge or problematize assumptions built into the authors' Contextual Design approach that may unravel in a learning context. NB: For User Study 1 - each team will need to create a “work model” for student portfolio practices based on your user study data, so pay attention to the different ways work models are represented in this reading. Another good summary of Contextual Design online https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/contextual-design
Nick Lewis
9/24/2016 02:52:14 pm
The contextual design process translates fairly easily from workplace to classroom contexts. Students are essentially customers who take in information, use tools, and produce outputs. The classroom context and tools shape what students think about and how they behave with their work. The contextual design process affords methods that may help us understand student behavior and needs such that we can develop better tools.
Miki Nobumori
9/25/2016 06:45:00 pm
Contextual Design is an approach to design a system based on data gathered from customers’ needs. Karen Holtzblatt introduces this method as a way to design products in a workplace, but her approach can also be adapted in a classroom context for student-centered learning activities. However, the differences between workplace and classroom must be taken into account before translating the design directives for a classroom. One of the main differences between workplace and school is the level of expertise in individuals. A working professional’s needs and desires are more developed than those of a student’s--a professional has a better idea of what they want to accomplish whereas students may not have a clear idea of what/how to approach a project.
Bria Best
9/26/2016 12:30:57 am
Contextual Design is an extremely beneficial process to help a design team synthesize a wicked problem. By breaking up workflow into affinity diagrams and work models - cultural, flow, and artefact, a designer builds a familiar knowledge of a customer’s workday and methods.This process builds empathy and understanding, and ideally helps the designer create a beneficial solution through the iterative process.
Yilin Ying
9/26/2016 12:32:06 am
A Reflection on Contextual Design
Amanda Johnson
9/26/2016 12:19:43 pm
Contextual design provides many methods to gather data and user inputs from multiple perspectives, but I think one problem that contextual design does not address from a learning context point of view is getting learners on board with portfolio practices initially. I saw that many of the work flows come in after this stage.
Sarah Klein
9/26/2016 12:41:31 pm
Problem statement: Adapting the Contextual Design process and language for classroom context and student-centered learning activities, esp for Contextual Inquiry and Work Model examples
Jordan Marks
9/26/2016 12:47:26 pm
The process of contextual inquiry as outlined by Beyer and Holtzblatt translates well to student-centered learning activities as long as the researcher understands who users are. In the article, they outline the design requirement of understanding customer needs, desires, approaches, difficulties, motivations, and strategies. The general aim of this practice is absolutely necessary to understand student-centered learning activities; the designers have to have shared goals and interpretations with the “customers” to design a solution to fit their needs. However, the learning context complicates who the customers are. Students will be using portfolio tools, but may not understand the scope of the portfolio depending on the integration of portfolio practices into their learning. Because students may not own the process of portfolio building (particularly at first), they may not be a sufficient source of data. Contextual inquiry has to take into account different levels of users, including students, teachers, higher education, and the facts that their goals and challenges may differ.
Stephanie Liao
9/26/2016 08:19:45 pm
Contextual design brings together the users’ needs and possibilities that technology brings to the table. The focus around users’ needs is really important. Without the users’ needs, we can create all these fresh products with the available technology but no one will use it because there is not a need for it in our market today. This applies to everything including our education space. My team and I want to develop an application that students will actually use.
Eunsol Byun
9/26/2016 09:27:08 pm
In the reading, Beyer and Holtzblatt talk about Contextual Design, “a method that helps a cross-functional team come to agreement on what their customers need and how to design a system for them”. Contextual design is composed of different steps of process: Contextual inquiry, work modeling, consolidation, work redesign, user environment design, and mockup and test with customers. Contextual Inquiry is interviewing the users in their work environments to observe and understand them better in context. Contextual inquiry is distinct from an interview in that the interviewer gets to sit with the user and experience the user’s work flow. Work modeling is to draw out the user’s work process learned from contextual inquiry using work models. This step is to represent the user’s work in a compact way and visually see the work flow and what the problem is in the flow. There are five work models including flow model, cultural model, sequence model, physical model, and artifact model. Consolidation comes next. Affinity diagram and consolidated work models are part of the process. This phase is to consolidate all the findings from the user studies and extract meaningful insights. When doing work redesign, designers get to create a vision based on the insights gathered from consolidation process. Often this vision is delineated into storyboards. Next is user environment design. Through this phase, the designers broaden their views and see the system holistically. Then mockup and testing comes next. Many rounds of iterations are important to lessen the cost to fix the system. Mockup can come in various fidelities. Rough prototyping such as paper prototypes are useful because it is easy to build and easy to test with people.
Natalya Buchwald
9/26/2016 11:03:20 pm
Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt's "Contextual Design" covers the concept of contextual design within the workplace. We can extend this setting to the classroom and beyond. Contextual design is defined as the process of creating a cross-functional design solution for a workplace with the knowledge of their specific environment. The authors outline methods such as contextual inquiry, consolidation, and mockups/tests. Contextual inquiry are user studies specifically within the environment of the user you are designing for. This inquiry therefore incorporates nuances and details of the area. Specifically, this inquiry picks up upon the culture of the problem area.The authors continue onto consolidation; the synthesized and analyzed data from interviews and modeling. Consolidation is key when multiple perspectives and sources are taken into account. Mockups/Tests within the environment, including both lo and hifi deliverables, also are extremely beneficial to the design process, especially in the classroom.
Pei Lin
9/26/2016 11:15:33 pm
The article defines contextual design as “a state of the art approach to designing products directly from a designer’s understanding of how the customer works”. It involves different parts including contextual inquiry, work modeling, consolidation, work redesign, user environment design, and mockup and test with customers. In the contextual inquiry stage, raw customer data is collected using ethnographic techniques of observation and interview. Work models provide a language to describe the work being done and a visual representation of the data collected. Then, designers consolidate different types of work model to create a single work model. The user environment design is a “blue print” for the overall organization of the application. Lastly, the prototype is created to invite the user in the design process. It is not necessary to go over all the steps of contextual design. Designers should choose some of them that can best correspond to design needs. For example, if you’re focused on understanding a single task, you should start by drawing sequence and artifact models. On the other hand, if you are developing a completely new product, it’d be best to develop all of the models.
Lily Soyeon Kim
9/27/2016 12:18:48 am
Beyer and Holtzblatt made their case for contextual design which laid out strict steps to a design process. If the product of great contextual design comes from understanding the customer, the “customer” we would we designing for in a learner centered design model, would be the student. The first part of contextual design would come from trying to understand the customers and the way they work through contextual inquiry. In designing for ePortfolios and learning environments, the varying levels of expertise as well as diverse needs between the multiple users would make the conversation more difficult in following the contextual design model laid out.
Cory Bird
9/27/2016 01:38:46 am
Contextual design is “A state-of-the-art approach to designing products directly from a designers’ understanding of how the customer works.” It seems that this idea will translate in a rather straightforward manner to designing online portfolios. The contextual design approach will allow learners’ to be at the center of the design project and result in a platform built to support their specific needs.
Annie Kim
9/27/2016 08:39:03 am
Beyer and Holtzblatt define Contextual Design as a process of contextual inquiry and modeling. Contextual inquiry consists of observing and interviewing users in their work environments; this allows the interviewer to get a better understanding of the user in context. Modeling is the next step before consolidation, in which the designer would put all their data and models together in order to look for patterns and insights in their observations. Redesigning involves having a design team discuss how to improve the identified situation with technology so that they can mockup solutions and test with users. These mockups can be low-fidelity prototypes to ease iteration as well as save money and effort.
Aliya Blackwood
9/27/2016 09:13:35 am
The most important aspect of the contextual design process is observing and interviewing the user in their environment. In this case, we should consider students in the classroom. Classroom observations and interviews of how students work on projects and how that is supported by teachers is essential to understanding how portfolio practices are being implemented or could be implemented. A flow model can help us understand how the students understand how to communicate their progress in their projects and academically in the classroom. If a classroom setting has no support for recording the student progress, it may be important to provide a physical model that presents how the physical environment could potentially support a student’s portfolio making process. Comments are closed.
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