Workshop

Steven and I had decided that I would be the photogirl(photo documentation) and he would be the timeboy(we had time restraints for each activity) till lunch and after lunch we'll switch out duties.

After the welcome introductions, each participant told us their name, background and one favourite educational experience(citing from the first assignment on the cultural probe). Steven, Julia and I took noted down all the new educational patterns that emerged out of this talk.

Julia spoke about the 150 guidelines, well mannered services, the book, website, facebook page, twitter page and the current need for a smartphone application.

Then, there was a presentation to explain to the participants about the patterns we had arrived at and give emaples for each of them. We had also set big pattern stations on boards and we explained through the keywords and images on that as well.

The next step was to assign one pattern station to each participant and they had to screen the educational patterns that came out of the morning talk(from the participants themselves) and see on which pattern station it fit.

Once they were at their pattern stations, we hit the gong, and each participant had to spend 15 minutes at each station, trying to come up with new ways of teaching the eE guidelines using that particular pattern. They could interact with others at the station and take inspiration from alredy existing notes, images and objects.

Now for some Japanese lunch!

After lunch, I gave a small presentation showing them the research I had done so far, about different learning patterns, videos/products/sevices and articles about the topic, different etiquette apps that already exist(showing them a few I had downloaded on the iphone and android) and taking them through my diploma blog.

Second exercise was for the participants to pick up an object from the Material Lab and imagine it got married with the guidelines. How would this couple teach the guidelines? Each participant had a minute to show their top three ideas.

Now, the participants go idea shopping. We handed over the templates and they were to go and pick out interesting ideas from both the exercises, one which focused on teaching patterns, and the other more about the way/language of teaching.

Once they had shopped for their ideas, we gave them the final assignment of designing an app. The participant could use materials, app icons, features to make the app more interesting. They were to follow a list of questions as guidelines while designing- Who is the app for? What is the name of the app? What does the app do? What features foes it have?What issues does it address? Which partners could be involved?

There was a presentation in the end with each participant narrating out their designs and a voting stage afterwards where the winner got a prize(a kindersurprise!) and everyone got them!