keyword: maeda

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briefs

Role playing panel sessions

Another experiment by John Maeda, carried it out in 1996 (his first year of teaching computational design at the MIT Media Lab). Described in his book Creative Code (2004, p. 217):

I always wonder what a session with a panel of experts at a conference achieves. Having been on many and hosted a faire share of them, I decided to put students on the spot by making them experts in an impromptu schedule of panels. This role-playing activity forced students to contribute their own perspectives.

Some of the session topics invented by Maeda:

  • Static, Physical, and Hyper-real
  • One shot performance vs. Continuum
  • Coding vs. Caching
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briefs

People as pixels

An experiment carried out by John Maeda at MIT (Computational Media Design Course) in 1996. Described in his book Creative Code (p.216):

As a continuation of the collaborative coding process, we attempted an experiment to better understand visual design on the computer. In the atrium of the Media Lab, we rigged up a camera on the fourth floor pointing downward; in the lower lobby, we projected the image seen from above so that the students (as pixels) could see themselves. The idea was that each student took charge and “programmed” the pixels, whether by script or direct commands.

Maeda mentions the source of this idea:

My inspiration for this experiment was a Bauhaus story of an old Master taking his students to the gymnasium to walk on the paths of large circles to graps the form’s essence.

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briefs

One-line-at-a-time collaborative programming experiment

An experiment carried out by John Maeda at MIT (Computational Media Design Course) in 1996. Description from his book Creative Code (2004):

One day I brought a computer and projector to class. I opened up an empty Java program skeleton, and asked the class to edit the program as a collaborative process, whereby one line of code was entered by each person.

Categories
briefs

user empathy challenge

A brief created in January 2018 by John Maeda, then Head of Design at Automattic, for members of the design team:

“Our task was to pick one of our fellow designers’ blog posts and come up with a plan to get it over 1,000 views on a financial budget of $20 and a time budget of two hours.”

Read more on the Automattic Design Blog.

An evaluation of the results was written by professional blogger Kitty Lusby.

Some context on the rationale of the exercise:

The design teams at Automattic like to do periodic exercises called Empathy Challenges. The goal in these exercises is to get us thinking in our customers’ shoes, to understand their contexts and challenges.

Thomas Bishop