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DECO1006/DECO2016 2024 Assessment Guide – Assignment 3 Visual Report – Detailed Steps
Version 2 May 2024
A3: Visual Report 40% (Individual)
The aim of this assignment is to develop your ideation and conceptual design skills. Working individually students will follow a human-centred design process to iteratively develop, prototype and evaluate a design concept that meets the design brief of radically re-imagining a ritual. The design concept can be for a product, interface, service, process, or environment that supports a new ritual. The design proposal is to be documented using visual communication and storytelling techniques, with an accompanying design rationale and reflection.
In a typical human-centred design process, the proposal would need to be firmly grounded in user and background research, with a strong alignment to the needs of users. Therefore, you will use the results from Assignment 2 user research where you identified user needs and design opportunities in response to the design brief theme of radically re-imagining a ritual.
For background research, students achieving Pass/Credit grades are expected to look up precedent design solutions from the literature (grey or academic) – see step 5 below. Students aiming for Distinction/High Distinction grades are expected, in addition, to conduct background research on your chosen topic (that is, your interpretation of the design brief theme) to inform and justify your design decisions and iterations.
Key Learning Outcomes:
. LO3. show imagination and competence in design ideation
. LO4. communicate information, ideas and concepts visually
. LO5. evaluate design ideas and proposals from the stakeholder perspective
Tasks
The activities that you will undertake, broken down into steps:
1. Introduction to the topic, the plan and design process:
• Define your interpretation of the design brief and describe the topic (do not simply copy from the design brief).
• Decide on a set of issues you will attempt to address through your design process. Summarise these into a concise problem statement (starting point is the problem statement you generated in Assignment 2). Identify who are the people you are designing for, or may be impacted by your solution (end-users, stakeholders).
• Summarise your design process: How will you address the chosen topic? What will you try to achieve? What methods will you use?
• Summarise and visualise the key elements of your process: How many iterations completed overall? Include tests and number of users for each test. This should be YOUR iterative process, avoid generic models, be specific. You can customise the process diagram provided. This section helps the reader understand your process before reading the full proposal.
2. First design iteration
Within the frame of your problem statement, and using How Might We questions, generate 3 concepts (or more) using
• ideation and/or lateral thinking methods – choose at least one method.
• Document the concepts with simple sketches.
• Seek informal user feedback from peers or potential users and select 1 concept to further develop. Highlight how you may have re-framed the problem or design direction as a result of user feedback.
3. Second design iteration
Use a variety of design methods to explore and evolve your chosen concept, e.g.:
• Scenarios and storyboards.
• Paper prototypes.
• (optional) Experience prototypes.
• The prototype(s) from this second design iteration is what you take to user testing (see Step 4).
4. User testing and evaluation This will take place in your scheduled tutorial class in Week 12.
Perform user testing/evaluation on your prototype(s) to get feedback from potential users.
• Plan how you will conduct the user testing. Describe the process, test (aims, place, method, protocol) and users (who, how many). You will apply the think-aloud method, or post-experience interview method.
• Ask potential users (3+) to interact with your prototype (virtually or physically). Start with your fellow students in your tutorial class, then extend to other people if necessary – at least 3 users.
• Give users a set of predefined goal-oriented tasks. Observe their interactions and behaviour.
• Ask them to ‘think aloud’: find out what they are thinking and experiencing during their engagement with the prototype; OR interview them about their experience after engagement with the prototype.
• Record their answers, either by audio/video recording, and/or filling in a data collection template as you listen.
• You can also take photographs or video to support your analysis and design documentation.
• Use the test results to identify potential improvements to your concept, and further refine your concept.
5. Third design iteration
• Refine your concept based on the feedback from the user testing and any additional exploration or information. Document the process and how you made the choice.
• Create/revise your concept sketch, scenarios, storyboards, and paper/cardboard prototypes to provide a final set of design documentation.
• Your final idea should be a unique concept: be bold, be brave, think outside the box. Describe the final design concept, its qualities, how it may be used, benefits to the users, justify its novelty.
6. Design precedents
• Compare your concept with existing solutions; this should be at least two cases, include images (cite the sources).
• Discuss the shortcomings and strengths of the existing solutions.
• Discuss how your solution is better than the existing ones; that is, argue for the value of your solution.
7. Reflection
• Critically review your design with reference to how well it responded to the problem statement.
• Reflect on the learnings, the changes to the concepts, and strengths of the final concept and why it is unique.
• Reflect on what you still do not know. How would you continue to research or test your ideas and design direction? What is next? How could this solution be improved? What further testing and research is required that you weren’t able to complete at this time, given your limited resources.
Format:
Design Proposal
Your design proposal should be presented as a visual report (see guidelines on Canvas Introduction to Assessment Module). The intent is to concisely convey, through a well-balanced selection of text and visuals, the approach, methods, results and conclusions of your design work. There is a strict limit of 10- 15 pages (cover page, table of contents, reference list and appendix are not included in this page limit). The visual report can be created in any software (e.g. PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, InDesign, etc.), as long as your submission is a PDF file.
The table above suggests a structure that covers all the main ingredients of your report, but simply checking these off will not produce a good piece of work. Your report needs a logical narrative with clear reasoning, to help the reader understand the decisions you have made and the relevance of your findings. Each step should clearly influence the one after it.
Appendix
You are also expected to submit an appendix. In the appendix, you can provide additional evidence of your design process. This could include
. iterations of concept sketches
. photographs of prototypes
. evidence of evaluations and critiques, informal and formal – the protocol, data
. photographs of the user evaluation process, etc.
. information on design precedents
Any acknowledgements of the use of generative AI, or editing assistance must be included.
The appendix will not be graded on visual presentation, but it should be tidy and legible.