Teaching Design ℅ Lisa Baumgarten
Ideas for teaching and learning design online (in-progress)
Teaching Design (www.teaching-design.net)
Ideas for online teaching and learning design*(⇨ online bibliography)
An in-progress + collaborative project** from 13/3/2020 – 16/4/2023
*design as in: graphic, industrial, product, communication, media, visual, video, fashion, textile, web, interface, UX, animation, game, typeface …
(**inspired by the Decolonizing Design Reader initiated by Ramon Tejada & MAKING & BEING by Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard of BFAMFAPhD)
If you add a contribution, please add a credit as a comment. Merci!
While universities are pushing the start of this year's summer semester* backward due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, it remains unclear when university activities will return to normal. *Writing from the perspective of Berlin, Germany, March 13, 2020
In order to continue teaching, online lectures seem to be an obvious solution. However, many teaching formats and seminars in design education rely on collaborative processes instead of one-directional lecture formats.
As we’re starting to write up alternative course plans to teach and learn collaboratively with our students online we’re wondering:
– What tools are there to work on group assignments that are open source?
– Can we translate our exercise on perspectives to a virtual format?
– How can we translate teaching formats which are conceptualized to work in and with a space?
– How can we for example play an introduction-game to get to know each other, via video-call?
– What could be a fun way to present research to a group?
More questions (thanks to Prem!)
– How can online learning encourage embodied experiences, even if participants are distributed physically?
– How do we deal with inevitable technical / infrastructural obstacles (bandwidth, lag, etc.)? Are there combinations of synchronous / asynchronous approach that can allow this to work more fluidly? Or other non-obvious synchronizing approaches, for example all listening to the same music motogether at the same time?
– What responses do we have to the inevitably “material” aspect of teaching / learning (including but not limited to the materiality of art, design, exhibition and performance experiences, etc.)? How can these features be addressed within online learning?
– What are potential strategies to use local / immediately available resources that might be available to one but not all participants? How to invoke / evoke within online learning?
…
Let’s share our ideas below!
↓
Tools:
Important preliminary text: “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online” by Rebecca Barret-Fox. She is pointing out the perspective of the learner and their personal situation and some technical thoughts (about people supposedly being “digital natives”, and how limited some of our students' resources are really).
So please keep it simple and – here she underlines – avoid synchronicity. Make assessment quick and easy…
Please do a bad job of putting your courses online
Here another collection start for collaboratively collecting collaborative tools for teaching: remote collaboration tools _public
Here a series of tools that are free software / not data extractive:
https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/digital-solidarity-networks
Video:
Useful tool, people who just want to drop-in can send questions via text-function during the conversation/discussion
Dates can be easily scheduled, access via e-mail Link, in which you can also write messages, links etc.
Is accessible without a registration/ data-input – you just type in your name and invite others with a link.
Good audio and image quality and allows for multiple shared screens. Maximum of 15 participants in one call.
Watch videos together, play games, or simply chat with friends or strangers all from within your browser. No installation or signup needed.
From Miguel Cardono at RIT (from a presentation at Design Week Portland) — You can use Google Slide’s automatic captions to provide quick captioning on screen for use on zoom, etc.:
- Open up a blank Google Slide.
- Start presentation mode and turn on captioning.
- Leave full screen view and position the window so that the captions show at the bottom of the screen.
- So long as you don’t cover up the captions, you can leave them running in the background at the bottom of the screen.
Audio-conference:
Telegram, Clubhouse, Zoom with cameras turned off
Text, Discussion, Sharing Data:
https://slack.com/ (already used in the Digital Media programmes)
(Lots of students use Group me)
https://discordapp.com/ (comes from a gaming background, and you still see/feel it in the interface and usage (eg. focussed on streaming, not screen-sharing)
Telegram
Text-Sharing:
https://etherpad.nl, https://pad.riseup.net/
→ Secure date
→ functions like a regular pad, a kanban, presentation modus, whiteboard are available
Google Docs, Sheets
Use digital storytelling to get students to reflect, create content etc.
Use for students to introduce themselves
https://journals.co.za/content/high/28/3/EJC159140
https://elearningindustry.com/18-free-digital-storytelling-tools-for-teachers-and-students
Word and visual mind mapping as a collaborative process:
I have very good experiences working with MIRO boards, both for workshops and lectures and also in our Studio Xenorama where we work mostly remote. It is very useful for brainstorming, ideation and presentations, easy to use and has a lot of options. There is an Education access, with which you can invite up to 100 participants, that you can apply for through our HfK Email addresses.
Recommended Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pULLAEmhSho&list=PLmiHe0R4hbzQz1VvwyRk16YeLr_Ft5zHR&index=2&t=0s
Collaborative Drawing Tool:
https://www.figma.com/education/
Web whiteboard: https://www.webwhiteboard.com/
Proprietary (but free for whiteboards lasting three weeks)
a simple online tool for writing and drawing together with other people. It is optimized for instant access and ease of use.
Collaborative Moodboard/ Ideation:
Survey/Forms/Quiz
Kahoot! https://kahoot.com
https://www.mentimeter.com/ Awesome for interactive polls, surveys and quizzes, generates word clouds and visualizes information for fun output.
E-Learning Authoring Tools
https://www.adobe.com/de/products/captivate.html
Free (random) Group/ Team making Tools
http://www.aschool.us/random/random-pair.php
https://www.randomlists.com/team-generator
+6k books “National Emergency Library”
Video-Feedback recording (no streaming!) tool for presentations/files with drawing/marking tools
Class-communication / briefing / archive of sources
List of Resources, e.g. Online Whiteboards:
https://distancedesigneducation.wordpress.com/resources/
- AWW Board: https://awwapp.com/#
- Web Whiteboard: https://www.webwhiteboard.com/
- Miro: https://miro.com/online-whiteboard/ (free, but signup required. Good tools)
- Ziteboard: https://ziteboard.com/
Setting up a digital classroom
Groups – Groups – Groups – What do we need?
Check the group: How many people are you?
Make smaller groups!
→ check specific needs of participants to make a fair access possible:
– technological conditions: stable internet? Camera? Microphone?
– personal: Who likes to be seen? Who likes to talk? Who prefers to write?
Plan break-out sessions for groups of 3, to consolidate opinions & answers
Plan more intensive, more personal time-slots
→ Teaching online does not have to mean that we have to address all people on earth at the same time
Introducing yourself (as teacher) to the group by uploading a video
Consider the tools you chose! Keep it simple, max. 2 (e.g. Slack and Hangouts)
- Using Podcasts for class lectures to start of discussions
- Record lectures and upload to Slack
- Flipped classroom exercises in Online discussions - using Zoom or another platform responding to readings and podcasts
- What could be online resources to teach graphic design, typography, design history, …
(e.g. https://type.method.ac/) - Coordinate bigger live streams that anyone can view around the world
(e.g. https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/) - Have other artists video chat into class for a lecture and discussion
- Lectures on materials you can use, that you have in your own home, e.g. magazine cutouts to practice kerning type
- Lectures on history of design
- Mapping Access: great article to talk about discriminatory design and connecting it back to how we have to find strategies now, and that those are not news: " Disabled people have been using online spaces to teach, organize, and disseminate knowledge since the internet was invented. Disabled people are leading survival praxis in apocalyptic times. Please recognize that the very types of remote access that universities now mandate for classrooms and conferences have been denied to disabled people. "
Other resources that have been shared in the past days in relation to teaching online for art & design are:
https://www.toptools4learning.com/ (not specific to design education, but a valuable resource)
A really good first initial resource is:
Resources for Online Instruction // VISUAL+STUDIO Arts Courses
Others:
https://www.mapping-access.com/blog-1
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yBE1cCqJ_4M-JZ62K4CefmYsZugqAWkGmZmdwESt0IM/preview
Paul Soulellis shared these 2 which are really beautiful:
Ideas for Teaching clay (but also non clay Ideas) https://docs.google.com/document/d/10L9zp1UlMItlUgWq5earU_UAML9-sYhMQwy0bxfMCUI/edit
Isolation Diary, Parsons School of Design, Spring 2020
https://ci.labud.nyc/projects/isolation
College Art Association guide to teaching Remotely
https://www.collegeart.org/news/2020/03/09/coronavirus-online-resources-for-teaching-remotely/
Here is a lot of ideas on how to move design teaching to digital classrooms:
https://distancedesigneducation.wordpress.com
The 🧧 #Cove Creative Toolkit 🧧 - a set of curated [free / open !] resources to support creative practitioners who need to go digital quickly, from digital gathering spaces, dance parties and tools, to digital syllabi. Curated by 30 designers, artists, makers, and facilitators around the world
>>>>>>> toolkit here / more details on twitter / living document, pls contribute <<<<<<<<
How to run an online desk crit (Jolanda Morkel) https://distancedesigneducation.com/2020/04/03/recipe-the-live-online-desk-crit/
Possible exercises, tasks, methodologies
Spread-Sheet-Introduction*
(*inspired by the “Building Alternatives” spread sheet of Evening Class London)
- Set up a Google Sheet
- In the first column write your name and style it
- Chose an emoji as your course-signature paste it in the second column
- In the third column write: What are you personally interested in or concerned about?
- Find common themes and comment on your colleagues interest in the fourth column in your font-style
USING MIRO FOR INTRODUCTION
Create a profile according to the following in our Miro-Board
- Photo/Self-representation - The first thing people notice about me - What I’m doing with my life - I’m really good at - One day, I would like to | - I am most passionate about - My favourite resources for design knowledge - I value - I spend a lot of time thinking about - You should contact me via |
Creative Misuse of Tools
Develop workflows that enable exchange/conversation in various ways, e.g.:
→ 3D-Software (C4D, SketchUp, etc.) + Cloud Drive + Set of Rules:
– Open empty 3D Scene > add/modify an object > save the scene in the cloud for someone else
→ Use the chat function in online multiplayer games to talk about work
→
Give input in form of a video/
Dori Tunstall: Respectful Design → https://vimeo.com/204728326
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of the Single Story → Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED
Let all participants/ students collect their questions, comments, criticism in a google sheet
Meet with smaller groups to discuss
Allow drop ins for other students to listen
Facebook-Group: Online Art & Design Studio Instruction in the Age of "Social Distancing"
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2872732516116624/
Final project presentation idea / if your final project is a publication/ an at home printed prototype which was meant to be shown and feedbacked in class, this is a tutorial by Rob Duarte for his students on how to make a stop-motion animation-like video of them interacting with the book:
Any other ideas on how to present visual results/ in progress-work to the class/ group?
Use google slides or Google docs for design journaling by students
Phone calls or Mails based on the game Stille Post*, with the task to continue something like pics, topics, texts…
(*telephone-game)
- Collecting research, text and visual on an Are.na board/ channel
A post on how to facilitate remote small group interactions:
https://innoeduvation.wordss.com/2020/03/13/remote-small-group-interaction/
A general suggestion for all of the above:
Include the above challenges in your briefs, let students contribute to solving such problems as most of them (problems) can inherently fit into a design project. Educators work for such precarious academic institutions that asking them to come up with urgent, mind-blowing, optimal and UNPAID solutions is not only unfair but highly counter-productive. We should not reproduce precarity.
Please do not tackle this as a design project. Your task here is to train students to find their own solutions. It is not a test for your own design skills. Keep the ego aside and be kind to yourselves.
Examples:
- Students can design their own courses. They can come up with interactive solutions to display information. It is a design task.
- Students can design their collaborative environments. They can research, test and work on improving pre-existing models.
- Students can come up with digital ways to experiment. Materiality can also exist digitally.
- ‘The digital’ is also a research field. There’s no excuse for why they cannot do field research. Visual and digital anthropology has been doing it for decades.
- Students can rework your syllabi and course content. It is a design task involving: layout, typography, UX/UI, participation and can be quite performative for those involved in artistic practices.
- Students can create online focus groups, share, rank and filter through digital archives - You don’t have to provide them with sources anymore. etc.
+
Please avoid creating new design disciplines based on design + crisis management or virtual teaching/learning.
REALIZATION: this might be an opportunity for design to leave the art academy and for design research to gain actual validity.
—
Wowzers what a good resource list 🦠 thanks all, keep on rocking - x rooosje
→ encourage students to use their own tools
→ start the course by finding out what tools they feel comfortable using
→ studio-work doesn’t have to be replaced one to one
“Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup ~
This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included the ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.”
→ http://everest-pipkin.com/teaching/tools.html
🟣 Sasha Costanza-Chock: DESIGN JUSTICE. At: Eyeo Festival, June 3-6, 2019, Minneapolis, USA.🟡 → https://vimeo.com/354276956
Watch the lecture by Sasha Costanza-Chock and learn about "how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of benefits and burdens between various groups of people" and the #DesignJusticePrinciples .
Use the following questions to start a conversation about: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
🔸Equity: Who gets to do design?
🔹Beneficiaries: Who do we design for, or with?
🔻Values: What values do we encode and reproduce in the objects and systems that we design?
▫️Scope: How do we scope and frame design problems?
🔹Sites: Where do we do design, what design sites are privileged and what sites are ignored or marginalized, and how do we make design sites accessible to those who will be most impacted?
🔺Ownership, accountability, and political economy: Who owns and profits from design outcomes, what social relationships are reproduced by design, and how do we move towards community control of design processes?
🔸Discourse: What stories do we tell about how things are designed? ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Questions extracted from Sasha-Costanza-Chock: Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Available online, HERE
In here, collective and mutual assistance on how to teach (art and design) in times of COVID 19. This document does not contain official school policy of the Willem de Kooning Academy. This document is open to editing and collaboration from anyone.
This document may be shared/remixed freely.
→ https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SPStudyRoom
Working on Google, Pad, any Online Tools is messy and “undesigny” but is also an opportunity to let a multiplicity of voices and styles meet on eye-level
→ don’t “clean up” the documents!
→ they’re visible documents of collective thinking
→ Affidamento: Alex Martinis Roe: To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice. Berlin: Archive Books, 2018, p.56
Affidamento is, as the co-operative describe it, a “social-symbolic-practice.” It has been exercised and theorized by the co-operative since the early eighties and what it is, is a reciprocal relationship of entrustment between two women. It is a relationship that exceeds the kinds of relationships found in the existing institutions of family, friendship, and work, and involves a commitment to the other women as political partners. In that partnership, the two engage in an intimate process of becoming each other’s point of reference in their different endeavours. Thus together they establish a different female-determined structure of validation. The way of doing this is to refer to and support one another in their spheres of political practice, giving each other authority in those spaces, through full acknowledgement and support of the other’s competencies, achievements, and desires.
Each affidamento is different, because every woman is different, and so each pair must invent the nature of the practice together in relation to one another. […] The practice works on those differences [added by the editor: different social classes, ages, sexualities, ethnic backgrounds] as they are embodied and lived by each member of the group, rather than through blanket policies. In some relationships of affidamento there is one woman who knows something that the other wants to learn […]
Super helpful Online Teaching READ ME for educators by Hannah March Sanders 🙌🏽 : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MIShf3AK1Pob0HkvMeSLj7L89RTd9U_AUVbKrbYLEug/edit?usp=sharing
Freedom and Balance is an art school for everyone. Anyone can enrol, and coaching sessions are held online. The curriculum has been specifically designed for this way of teaching:
https://www.freedomandbalance.com/the-curriculum
Synchronous and Asynchronous
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ccsudB2vwZ_GJYoKlFzGbtnmftGcXwCIwxzf-jkkoCU/mobilebasic
There are two options for instructors to facilitate class sessions remotely:
Synchronous: instructors and students gather at the same time and interact in “real time” with a very short or “near-real time” exchange between instructors and students.
Reserve synchronous sessions for interaction rather than lengthy presentations that can best be pre-recorded. Use webinar tools to:
- Check in with students or colleagues
- To clarify/ Q&A
- For desk crits: students present their work for feedback
Asynchronous: instructors prepare course materials for students in advance of students’ access. Students may access the course materials at a time of their choosing and will interact with each over a longer period of time.
Instructors may choose to engage their students synchronously or asynchronously depending on the course content or material that needs to be taught. There are many advantages and disadvantages to asynchronous and synchronous teaching options.
Write an email to somebody who inspires you
A student I barely know took a few minutes to send me a beautiful email today. Let’s all do this while in lockdown, if we can. Let’s write one email a day to someone whose work has inspired you, someone you care about, someone who has made your life more meaningful. All in for fierce and kind pedagogies
Source: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SPStudyRoom
🙌🏽 Thanks to Andrea Tinnes for the following suggestions:
“The AIGA Design Teaching Resource is a peer-populated platform for educators to share assignments, teaching materials, outcomes, and project reflections. “
https://teachingresource.aiga.org/
Open Collab Projection by Patrick Thomas:
Registration necessary for accessing the Open Collab package, Download the PDF open it from your desktop, fill in the blanks and hit submit. An pop-up will open to ask you permission to send it via e-Mail to the project coordinator.
Haven’t received any feedback so far but will keep you updated :)
http://www.patrick thomas studio. com/open_collab/
https://www.instagram.com/open_collab/
Some practical ideas
- Creating a special mailbox for elderly homes / public space to start a letter exchange. But also to deliver letters for people who don't want to take the risk of going outside.
- Making window posters, for example with a text from someone who inspires you / offering help / a nice story or poem / any kind of visual (I am imagining a whole street where everyone starts putting up posters to communicate)
- If possible, using balconies for messages (I'm thinking of Barcelona, where people use their balconies for activism).
- inviting people in the digital classroom who are normally not able to physically be present in a classroom, e.g. a friend of mine who works as at the higher court will be available for a video call so my students can ask her any question about the law for an hour
“Connection is a fundamental human need. This is why many folks are having a hard time with social distancing. As educators and experts on remote collaborative teamwork, we’re here to tell you that it really doesn’t matter what kind of tools you use in this chaotic global scramble to suddenly remake every course online. Your students don’t care how you configure your shared cloud-based folders or employ your campus’ learning management system. They just want connection—especially in this time of uncertainty.”
Source: https://educators.aiga.org/in-teaching-under-quarantine-connection-tangible-work-are-key/
My findings while I basically use Slack, Miro and BBB video chat for my lectures at HBK Braunschweig:
Typology of Free Web-based Learning Technologies
Typology of Free Web-based Learning Technologies | EDUCAUSE
Virtual Collaboration Tools
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kusxXPI=/
Grüße
Prof. Eku Wand