Tag Archives: design

Creativity with time constraints

I’ve learned over the years that whenever I try to do something creative it always takes much longer than I thought it would. The moment there is a design element to something I’m working on, I will spend too long tweaking it, and making it better. I actually need to give myself time constraints.

If I wrote in the evening with nothing on my agenda, I’d take over an hour to write this, but in the morning, I don’t want to miss my meditation or workout so I have to get writing. I have to write before I meditate, or I’ll spend my meditation time thinking about my writing.

When I edited my Halloween video I gave myself a 3 hour time limit and got it done in less than 2.5 hours. But when I watched it the next day, I thought of several clever edits I could have added. I had to convince myself that it was good enough or I would have spent well over another hour editing. It’s my nature to tinker, tweak, and just throw more time into something creative.

So for me, time constraints are a key strategy to get creative work done, because I could dive deep into something and time just flies by. I get lost in the flow of being creative, but my time isn’t well utilized. If you want me to really get my creative juices flowing then give me a realistic, but really tight timeline.

Shadow play

We recently did a first floor renovation. We created an open concept, taking down the walls between our kitchen, dining room, living room, and front entrance. We love it. A few months later I have to say that there isn’t much I’d change. But there is one surprise we didn’t expect.

It turns out that where we our our kitchen island lines up with our big from windows at a perfect angle to create a shadow line exactly on the line between the drawer shelf and the bottom cupboards at our kitchen sink. So, it looks like we painted these two sections different shades of white.

At night, when no light comes through the front window, you can see that the cupboards are the same colour, but any bright time of day the colour difference is significant. We couldn’t know this in advance. It would have looked like a shadow if the line didn’t sit right at the break between the two sections. And we are just going to have to live with it.

Not a big deal, but totally not expected. When designing our space the idea of thinking about how shadows would change the look of our furniture was not on our radar, and in all honesty, even if it was I don’t think we would have caught this.

So if you ever come over to our place in the daytime, no, we didn’t paint these cupboards two different shades of white. And we didn’t plan this… it’s just the way the shadows and light play.

Public spaces

It’s interesting how we think of social media as our main public spaces. When did that happen? I’m not going to wax poetic about the way things used to be, instead I’m going to ask what could be possible?

How could we create richer public spaces? What would draw people to these places? When is the last time you went to an evening presentation in a library? Or a concert in a park? (As opposed to a bar, nightclub, or theatre.)

Where can we close traffic to cars and create larger spaces for meeting and socializing?

Do we have to run special events or can we create spaces that people want to go to because they are public, open, and free?

Maybe what we have is enough, but I can’t help but wonder if we couldn’t design better public spaces, or even better neighbourhoods, that invite people to be more connected face to face. And if we did design these spaces better, would they be used? I think it’s worth thinking about, and trying. As more and more people flock to bigger and bigger communities and cities, high rises are taking over the landscape. With greater density comes greater opportunity to find like-minded people to be social with… and our public spaces should be designed to consider this.

Sometime technology s(UX)

I used to have one remote for my TV, now I have 3. One of them is for my sound bar. When I turn the sound bar on, (on its own, it turns on automatically for the tv), in order to connect to my phone. Before I can click the input options, I need to wait 6 or 7 seconds while the sound bar scrolls ‘WELCOME’ across its small screen 3 or 4 times.

Just now I decided I want to have a song on repeat on my phone and it took me over a minute to figure out how to do this. Sure, I was given the choice to do many things with the song…

But the simple option to hit repeat was elusive on the main screen.

Yesterday I wanted to drag a song into GarageBand and it kept being added at 4 times the speed. I found out GarageBand needs the song to be a specific speed. I checked, same speed. Then I learned it had to be a specific format, so I had to duplicate the song in the new format. Now I’ve got two versions of the song in iTunes and need to delete one, but which one, they look identical in iTunes? 3 years ago this was a seamless activity that I never struggled with no matter what format I worked with.

Is it just me or is technology getting more confusing and less user-friendly. And no, my sound bar scrolling ‘WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME’ while being fully inoperative is NOT user friendly!

I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.

So for any tech designers out there, here is a little tip, we don’t need to be greeted by inanimate objects, and if we are, allow us to actually use the object while it’s welcoming us.

Presentation day

Yesterday was a day at school when many students were doing year-end presentations for their inquiries. In the morning I visited the Grade 9’s and watched the tail end of one presentation and then the full following presentation. In the afternoon I got to see several Grade 11 & 12 presentations. Overall, I was very impressed!

My biggest takeaways were first how confident the students were. We have created a great culture where presentations happen all the time and students demonstrate that they are comfortable in the front of the room. Also, student feedback is awesome. Students in the audience share genuine praise and feedback.

But the thing that really impressed me was the design of the presentations. The slideshows each had clear themes, and almost all of them were not typical to PowerPoint. They didn’t feel like students took a theme and plugged their slides into them. Rather, they had the look and feel of something designed by the students, and in many cases they did fully design every slide themselves… making sure to have continuity from slide to slide.

From grades 9 through 12 the slide design was better than almost any presentation we would have had at the school 5 or 6 years ago. The students also had a story line through their presentations. Good delivery, good design, good storylines, these students can really put together solid presentations. I could definitely learn a few things from them about creating and delivering a good presentation!

Put it in the closet

There are a couple things that have surprised me about our home renovation. The first one I was told about but it still seems over the top, and that’s how many changes there would be and how much more it would cost than expected. Surprise ducts and vents in walls that need moving, deciding to add more flooring up our steps, buying new furniture. All these things add up to blow up our budget expectations.

The other surprise is the small decisions to make, like where do you put light switches? Where to put the thermostat, that was on the wall that we removed? Where to put the door bell? For this last question, the builder was surprised when I said, “Put it in the front hall closet.”

“IN the closet?”

“Yes, put it high up, out of the way and out of sight in the closet.”

Our doorbell is loud, it’s old and ugly, and we don’t need to see it. We’ll still hear it in the closet, and we won’t have to look at a big ugly box designed in the 60’s, or waste money replacing it.

I don’t think that’s a request our project manager heard before, but he didn’t need a lot of convincing. It was an easy ask and a decision that doesn’t cost us anything… it has to be put somewhere. Why not put it out of sight, and out of mind, and when it rings it might sound a little muffled, but we’ll still know what we are hearing and what it means. We don’t need to see it.

Ask a student

I’ve created a survey for my Grade 11’s and 12’s. They are the only students in our school that know what our community and culture was like pre-lockdowns and pre-restrictions into cohorts to deal with the pandemic. The 11’s only saw this from September to February of their grade 9 year, the 12’s experienced it for a year and a half. I am asking them these questions for a few reasons:

1. I want them to remember what makes our school special.

2. I want them to share their perspective so that we know what students find valuable about the culture we had before restrictions altered our environment.

3. I want to learn what students didn’t like or enjoy, so that we don’t bring those things back.

I created the questionnaire and shared it with teachers for feedback. I also shared it with one of our grade 12’s. The teachers said, ‘good questions’ and gave a suggestion or two. My student said the same, then went on to give me a whole slew of suggestions that will make the survey easier to understand and respond to, and provide better (clearer) feedback to us. This student’s suggestions allowed me to see the survey through a student’s eyes, and gave me perspective that I could not have had otherwise.

Sometimes we do things for students without having empathy for their experience. We design activities and assignments without thinking of the user experience… without including them in the design process. Often we can make these activities and assignments for students so much better… if we just remember to ask a student.

Students design the school

Seven years ago a student and her father wrote a grant proposal and got money to beautify the school. Most of the money went to get concrete picnic benches in our courtyard, but there was also money earmarked for an outdoor mural.

The student who submitted the grant and 3 of her friends started polling students about what to put on the mural. At the time, we had a school slogan of, “Connect, Create, Learn”, and these students came up with the most popular adaptation to this: “Dream, Create, Learn.”

I hated it. We were a very small school with no catchment, meaning every kid must choose to come to us rather than a school near their home, and I thought the word ‘Dream’ was not a good word to recruit students or their parents. “Parents don’t want to send their kids to a school that’s about dreaming,” I would say. “We love it. and that’s what we want the mural to say,” they responded I acquiesced. The mural was created as the students wished.

Now, the dedicated self-directed time we give students to work is called DCL… their time to Dream, Create, and Learn. This idea I originally hated has become woven into the vernacular and culture of the school.

This year, we had the Grade 10’s design murals for the school as one of their SCRUM projects. Here are the designs they came up with.

One of these murals is a play off of DCL, Dream, Create, Launch. While this won’t replace DCL, it’s an idea inspired by one of our teacher, John Sarte, who is our STEAM teacher, (except the ‘M’ isn’t for Math, it’s for Marketing). John loves the notion of seeing Inquiry Hub as being an idea incubator, with students designing real world solutions and projects. I love the student design, and that this mural is at the entrance to the part of the building that is our school.

Allowing students the opportunity to create these murals, and giving them a lot of choice about what to design and where to put them is something that I think makes them so appealing. ‘Your journey starts here’ is in our office. ‘Nature calls’ is in our bathrooms. Our pentapus mascot (a 5 legged octopus named ‘Ollie’, also chosen by students) and ‘Live your dream’ are in our learning commons. And, the sunflower mural livens up a beautiful atrium that most people didn’t even notice we had. Oh, and our school logo, also designed by a student.

Students ideas and artwork bring our school alive.

When students own the learning

Last night was Inquiry Hub’s open house. I shared a post about our open house last year: A Place to Dream, Create, and Learn. A year ago we packed around 200 people into our gym and had a great night of presentations:

But with Covid-19 this year the event had to go digital. We held a YouTube Live event. Show starts 26 minutes in or you can watch topic-based sections here: InquiryHub.org/open2020

It is such a privilege producing something like this with these students. They worked so hard preparing the event. They created scripts, videos, music, and designed posters, (like the 16 individual posters that fit together to create a single poster below, used as one of our backdrops). And students learned how to use all the equipment along the way. We had 3 cameras and a slideshow presentation, and while transitions could have been a bit tighter, I’m so impressed with how this student-organized event went.

One neat thing that we did was that we had a question submission form that we advertised before and during the show, where viewers could ask questions. Then we answered them live, throughout the show. Our student producer fed the questions to our student MC, and she directed them to our student and teacher panel depending on who she thought should answer. This is a challenging thing to do well in a live show… especially having never done it before. Of all the questions asked, I think I offered one of the weakest answers (because I rambled a bit on what should have been a 10 second answer). Beyond that flub, we didn’t need to have an answer clarified by someone else.

We had over 180 live viewers at the start of the show and still had over 170 viewers 40 minutes in. To keep that many people watching for that long is a testament to how smoothly things went.

Through the night, one thing was clear: when students take pride in their school, when they feel they own the learning, they will step up and deliver a great product when called upon to do so. Students thrive when they own the learning.

—-

(Just dug up another similar post I wrote about one of our previous open houses, prompted by a Facebook memory,)

 

Logo Composite Design by Maddison D, Grade 10

Decades behind where we should be

I have been on Alexa with my in-laws for over an hour trying to help them set up a wireless printer. We just got disconnected after they tried to take Alexa over to the router. This is way harder than it should be. It’s worse than trying to load disks and follow the instructions, so that I could access the internet through AOL… back in the late 80’s!

I just reconnected with my in-laws and they’ve had enough for the night. I’m not sure if they are truly done or if they just feel that they are taking too much of my time… they aren’t but I’m guessing that’s playing on their minds anyway.

Here’s the thing, none of this is easy and I’d probably struggle a bit even if I was there. It wasn’t just me trying to help them navigate a simple menu, it was a confusing set-up. The tiny keyboard gave limited buttons that my in-laws struggled with, having to hit the 1/2 button twice for 2 and the 3/4 button twice for the number 4. It’s a complicated 10-digit password on the wifi that is the default set-up. It’s the printer asking for a PIN rather than Wifi Password as the default, with PIN instructions buried somewhere in the tiny font instructions.

It’s not just this printer. I recently spent an hour and half helping my daughter switch to a new iPhone. I couldn’t load a purchased app on my TV to let it screen share easily from our Apple products. I spent about 30 minutes trying to sync two bluetooth speakers that have a ‘friendly’ app to help me.

How is it that in this day and age of connectivity, nothing likes talking to each other and every connection takes so much effort?