Design Thinking - and Designing for Thinking?

I've been listening to an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 "In Business" about Design Thinking. 

There are many similarities to web design, such as using personas to make typical customers "real" to the design team and to others that they deal with. 

"There's a certain magic when a product you've bought just simply works, when a company's customer service satisfies instead of frustrates, or when a website gives you exactly the right information you need, exactly when you need it. But these seemingly serendipitous moments might actually be the result of exact planning and customer research. The technical term is 'design thinking' and with the help of designers eager to break out of the lab and into the real world, it's a movement that's catching on in all sorts of unlikely places"

"This week Peter Day talks to the people behind an award-winning government website, agencies that are creating whole companies from scratch, and finds out about other ways that innovative designers are intruding into the real world like never before"

The programme website is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038hkl7

It should be on iPlayer for a week, and there's a repeat on Radio 4 on Sunday.

Lightbulb moment:

I'm wondering whether such techniques could be applied to "soft" projects like university module (re)design, in other words "Designing for Thinking". 

Or would the use of personas lead to stereotyped views of typical students?

Going green - a simplistic approach to Chroma Key

After a Summer School session recently I attended a demo of Chroma Key - superimposing one video shot on another, eliminating the background of one shot and substituting the second shot as the new background. This is done by shooting the first shot against a green (or sometimes blue) screen - hence the alternative term "green screen". The green area is then subtracted in software - either "on the fly" as in the UWE setup, or in later editing.
This started me thinking what minimal facilities could achieve this effect, so I experimented with shooting the "front" video using my Android phone against the evenly lit UWE green background material. I then shot the second scene outside, again with the mobile phone.

I combined the two shots in my editing software (Corel VideoStudio 12), and this is the result:

The alignment isn't perfect, but it demonstrates what you can do with a mobile phone, an evenly lit background and the right software.

Capturing the moment

A common feature of my classroom practice is that I capture things that happen in the classroom - I almost always carry a digital camera and a voice recorder. Broadly, my objectives (not in any order of priority) are:

• To facilitate students reviewing their experiential learning within the classroom
• To allow students to compare the work of other groups with their own
• To capture content-heavy "guest lectures" for students to analyse later
• To produce a record to help develop future sessions
• To capture materials for disabled students who would otherwise be disadvantaged in the particular classroom situation

I haven't particularly used the captured "artefacts" as an assessment mechanism, but that might be a future possibility.

So what do I actually do?

• Sound recordings of guest lectures (disabled students sometimes do this themselves and share the recordings with me)
• Photos of whiteboard diagrams developed during discussions or analyses, drawn by myself or by students
• Photos of flip charts (ditto)

The new reflective whiteboards are easier to clean but they are very reflective, which makes photographing them very difficult. It is possible to manipulate the image to clean it up (Paint.net is a versatile free Windows photo editor), but sometimes the images are just about legible but not good enough quality to post.

In this case I rapidly redraw the diagrams on a white sketch pad - it doesn't take long - and photograph or scan the result.

Other things I might try?

• Photographing from the visualiser (the proper name for the computer epidiascope) - Using this for video capture too, as explained in Summer School or in SALT session.
• Polarising filter to cut out reflections from glass whiteboards - will depend on the coating material on the glass, and on how well the filter deals with reflections from multiple light sources.

An unedited photo of a diagram drawn during a tutorial discussion. 

This is on one of the "old" whiteboards - messy but few reflections.