Warm-ups are critical in the d.studio — students are coming from accounting classes or operations classes where their analytical, convergent thinking skills are in high gear. I want them to transition to a balanced environment. In week 2, students did a free write. And this week they were plunged into drawing — but not “artistic, picture drawing” but using lines to express how words feel: joy, peacefulness, anger and so on.
Learning to observe and really “see” is part of the d.studio learning outcomes for the undergraduate business students. This studio we reviewed the differences between observations and insights — and were collectively shocked by our seeing capacity in this video: Awareness Test
We then reviewed the Eye Phone project. The idea was to use the ubiquitous smart phone and create a visual (8 photos) and verbal narrative (one double tweet – 240 characters- for the whole show) that tells a story about an aspect of ‘commerce’ in the area bounded roughly by Cambie, Broadway, Main and False Creek. This could be about a single business and its presence on the street or it could be about a particular aspect of several businesses. Students then talked about how the project reminded them to look and see and observe — they were creative in their approach to “visual commerce”.
This was a jam-packed studio day — we moved on to critique and feedback — how to deliver useful feedback and how to receive it. I used some language from a User Interface Engineering website on “What goes into a Well-done Critique” by Jared M. Spool (Sept 23, 2008). Talked about the characteristics of a good critique and feedback under these headings: Respect; Objective/Dispassionate; Questions to Guide Discussion; Justification of Impressions & Concerns; and Specificity. Students then got into their Business Canvas teams and began to practice giving each other feedback.
We used the pods created by the doors opening for the first time. Still a few tweaks to get the studio working — but it’s getting there.
The pods look great – love it!