Introduction to the Course 2018

Ice Breaker
Today's Agenda
What we are trying to do

This course is tasked with serving two masters: it's "User-Centred Information Systems Development" in INF and it's "Human-Centred Design" in KMD. The impossibility of doing both of these justice in twelve weeks makes my job both harder and easier. Harder because I'll try to do that and easier because I'll end up doing it my own way.

In this course you will acquire a set of mindsets and concrete skills. You will have a working knowledge of what human centred design is and what it's good for along with a portfolio of concrete skills to use in your own projects and to teach/lead others in the development of innovative solutions to problems that are worth solving.

Who am I? Who are you?
How It Will Work Week to Week

The default structure for the class will be a fairly rigorously scripted three hours:

  1. (15/15) Icebreaker
  2. (5/20) Review of how we got here
  3. (60/80) Workshop I
  4. (10/90) Break
  5. (45/135) Lecture
  6. (25/160) How-To Exercise
  7. (10/170) Take-aways
  8. (10/180) For next time
About TakeAways

At the end of each week's class we will pause and give ourselves opportunity to reflect on the class session and post 1 to 3 take-away lessons or observations. These will go into a database and be shared with classmates. Participation in this collaborative information resource is a course requirement.

Let's Learn How to Break Up into Groups

Many of the activities in this course will involve alternating bouts of group work, solo work, convening, reporting out, responding to one another's ideas. In order to maximize the amount of actual intellectual interaction we will have with one another we will frequently re-arrange ourselves from a class of 40 into various configurations (4x10, 5x8, 8x5, etc.). As simple as that sounds, there is no reason to assume that a random collection of three and a half dozen primates can pull this off with any efficiency. So, we'll develop some protocols and practice.

Simple Counting Off

Sometimes we just want to form a certain number of groups of a certain size. For this purpose we'll have cards that we pick up on arrival that will have four numbers on them
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
1,2,3,4,5
1,2,3

Assessment and Grades