This blog provides a forum for students, instructors and others to share information and ideas about the Spring Thesis Program at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City.
David, Nice sketches, but I would like a little more specificity at this stage about the product before you can really carry out meaningful user tests. It seems to me that there are several components to the system you envision, each of which will require more specificity on your part for you to make a convincing case in your thesis. I think these are:
1. The machine that you feed the corrugated cardboard or other raw material to generate the building modules. This seems like a potentially large, electrically powered machine. Stamping those shapes will take a great deal of pressure, more than a kid has, unless you use some kind of fancy mechanism. I assume that you are not planning on building a functional version of this machine in the next couple of months, but you could make a full size mock up. Or, I would be satisfied if you did a really beautiful series of renderings of the machine and perhaps an animation of it running.
2. The modules themselves and how they will be assembled by kids into some structural configuration is the real focus here, I would expect. You need to make and test the actual building modules with kids to see how they do it. You need to know what kinds of shapes are easy to assemble, and which ones lend themselves to making structures that illustrate engineering concepts, or at least that will build an intuitive understanding of how things stand up and why they fall down.
3. The final thing that your project requires is some form of curriculum, teacher's guide or instructions to explain to each audiences (children, teachers and possibly parents) what to do to get the most benefit from the product. I would imagine that you will want to provide some images that illustrate how the modules fit together, and what kind of things you can build. This is also the area where you can find many aspects of the design that require testing with live human subjects. Since your project is simply a toy that any child of the appropriate age could enjoy using, you will have no difficulty finding participants who will be happy to give your toy a whirl. You just need to be an impartial observer, and pay attention to what happens, and then use the information you acquire to make necessary improvements to your product.
Finally, I would recommend not requiring the use of only scrap material. You may find that you just cant punch structurally rigid and aesthetically nice shapes our of soggy and beat up corrugated cardboard. There would also have to be another machine just rip it down into the right width and you would have to engineer the machine to deal with different thicknesses. The key to the product is not that it uses recycled material (although this would be a nice collateral benefit): the thing that is great about your product is that it requires the child to manufacture the raw materials that he is going to buiild with, and that makes the experience of producing a structure out of the modules much more personally memorable for the child, thereby stimulating incidental learning.
1 comment:
David,
Nice sketches, but I would like a little more specificity at this stage about the product before you can really carry out meaningful user tests. It seems to me that there are several components to the system you envision, each of which will require more specificity on your part for you to make a convincing case in your thesis. I think these are:
1. The machine that you feed the corrugated cardboard or other raw material to generate the building modules. This seems like a potentially large, electrically powered machine. Stamping those shapes will take a great deal of pressure, more than a kid has, unless you use some kind of fancy mechanism. I assume that you are not planning on building a functional version of this machine in the next couple of months, but you could make a full size mock up. Or, I would be satisfied if you did a really beautiful series of renderings of the machine and perhaps an animation of it running.
2. The modules themselves and how they will be assembled by kids into some structural configuration is the real focus here, I would expect. You need to make and test the actual building modules with kids to see how they do it. You need to know what kinds of shapes are easy to assemble, and which ones lend themselves to making structures that illustrate engineering concepts, or at least that will build an intuitive understanding of how things stand up and why they fall down.
3. The final thing that your project requires is some form of curriculum, teacher's guide or instructions to explain to each audiences (children, teachers and possibly parents) what to do to get the most benefit from the product. I would imagine that you will want to provide some images that illustrate how the modules fit together, and what kind of things you can build. This is also the area where you can find many aspects of the design that require testing with live human subjects. Since your project is simply a toy that any child of the appropriate age could enjoy using, you will have no difficulty finding participants who will be happy to give your toy a whirl. You just need to be an impartial observer, and pay attention to what happens, and then use the information you acquire to make necessary improvements to your product.
Finally, I would recommend not requiring the use of only scrap material. You may find that you just cant punch structurally rigid and aesthetically nice shapes our of soggy and beat up corrugated cardboard. There would also have to be another machine just rip it down into the right width and you would have to engineer the machine to deal with different thicknesses. The key to the product is not that it uses recycled material (although this would be a nice collateral benefit): the thing that is great about your product is that it requires the child to manufacture the raw materials that he is going to buiild with, and that makes the experience of producing a structure out of the modules much more personally memorable for the child, thereby stimulating incidental learning.
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