I’m an industrial designer who’s passionate for education. Coming from Asian culture, I benefited greatly from western education and certain values that are promoted, such as critical thinking and of course, design thinking skills. Apart from my professional practices, I want to integrate design thinking into education, using play as a vehicle for the most part, and create a platform on which kids can explore, express and fail freely and safely. I design and host workshops of various themes during summer and winter breaks, and here’s the latest one which I particularly is excited to share with you guys.
It’s hard to put this workshop into one simple phrase. I’ve integrated design, engineering, language, math and art elements into it, and used AI to “wrap it up”. I actually created this program two years ago, but it was too complicated for non design folks to understand, so I had a hard time promoting it. With AI imaging generation, it’s self explanatory.
Day 01 + Day02:
I started with a quick presentation on design, in particular the concept of “Affordance”. I started with using Cat vs Cardboard box as an analogy to explain the “instinctive” nature of Affordance, and moved onto a series of geometric shapes and asked them how would they interact with the shapes. From a simple cylinder, it turned into turn knobs, press buttons, pull levers, sliding and rocking switches etc. With small changes to the shapes, the expectations the shapes form with users change drastically. The presentation continued with food design, from naturally occurring affordance ( banana and chicken drumstick) to purposely designed food - the hotdog, burger, Chinese “burger”and Japanese rice bun, all designed to be portable. I then compared the western fork, spoon and knife to the chopsticks, a classic example of how design can be specific yet limiting, and vague yet versatile. There are other funny contents just to keep them awake, but they were quite intrigued.
Followed by a safety demo on using pen knives, hot glue guns etc.
Then I showed them eight mechanical switches that I’ve designed, which they will cut from printed foam boards, assemble and glue them. The eight switches are press button, turn knob(with clicks), steering wheel(self-returing tension), sliding switch, rocker switch, push-pull lever, push-pull accelerator and two way joystick. These were designed using materials that they can obtain easily(form core, disposible chop sticks, plastic sheets from packaging, rubber bands and plastic straws), as well as with tools that are common in their daily lives. The goal is to create their own control panels later). I want to mention that this is inspired by my sophomore human factor class taught by Mr. Thomas Roney from CCS. He had us create our own control panels with the goal of simulating physical interaction and feedback.
Day 03:
Now that the switches are all completed, it’s time to build their own adventure stories. I created “forms”to help them with story writing, describing the world of their stories, character definition and design, his or her mission and what kind of vessels needed ( land, sea, air, space, hot lava etc). They also need to describe the functions and features needed, such as mechanical arms to pick up thrash, radar for search and rescue to plasma canons to fight monsters. The above are essentially trying to create a design brief for the control panels they will be making. So there are the user scenario, user profile and finally a design brief.
Day 04:
They begin creating their control panels using discarded cardboard boxes. This will involve a big deal of math skills because they need to make sure that the control panels can fit all of the switches that they intend to install. This is real and tangible mathematics, not paper theory. It really got them to scratch their heads quite a bit.
Day 05:
They finished their control panels, and we start to condense their stories into a few scenes. They acted the scenes out with their control panels and we took photos. We then used the photos as a main reference, together with prompts, to create images using ChatGPT that can be put together as a comic style story book, so their parents know it’s well money worth.
Reflection:
I find that AI is a great excuse to teach kids how to communicate their ideas and thoughts. I’ve noticed a decline in communication skills, both verbal and written, in young adults, and more so in kids. They don’t really realize that they are not just talking to themselves, but trying to convey their thoughts in ways that others can also understand. It’s not really just a matter of grammar and technicalities in language, but logic. AI’s response is very direct, and forces users to rethink their prompts in order to produce desired results. Therefore, it becomes a good tool to train basic communication skills, in written form at least. We also ran out of time to dwell in this part of the program, but I think the story building and AI prompt sections can very well be another workshop.
Also, I think this AI prompt part is similar to “image boards”, in which both visual and literary elements are required to help communicate a vague idea, but the images and adjectives used have to be very specific and accurate.
I am planning to make a video that explains this workshop from its design to what happened during the process, but that won’t be finished till at least October, so I want to share this here first. Please feel free to let me know what you think, suggestions and more. Thanks!