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briefs ideas

Another year in web design

A few years ago, Taschen released a heavy volume of web design history, edited by edited by Julius Wiedemann – Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today.

The survey in the book ends in 2018.

In this brief, students are asked to continue the story by adding a new chapter – how does the current year in web design look like? They will have to identify current design trends, major innovations, notable websites, and organize the information following the examples in the book.

Depending on the number of students, they can work on one year, or on several missing years (2019, 2020, 2021…).

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briefs ideas

A music app for seniors

An idea for a UX design assignment that emerged while listening to the Wireframe podcast Episode 2 of Season 3, where Miriam Johnson asks:

Now, imagine this: you’re tasked with designing a music app that is specifically for seniors, and you had no idea how to do that, and you’d never done anything like it before.

Miriam Johnson, at 10:50

The podcast features an interview with Sophie Kim, a product designer at Studio Red, about how she worked on an app called Octave, where the typical user is 65 years old and passionate about classical music.

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briefs

Wikipedia Biographies

An assignment described by Dawn Bazely, University Professor in biology at York University, Toronto:

In 2014, I developed assignments requiring students to edit Wikipedia. One had them choose a woman scientist or an ecologist of any gender, and either start a Wikipedia page or add to their biography. This was partly to lure students into learning some HTML-style coding, but also so they would hone other important, transferrable skills. As a new Wikipedia editor, you learn to follow style rules and policies; you learn how to put work into the public domain while still guarding your intellectual property and how to create fact-checked Open Access Internet resources. I hope, too, this work instills a public-spirited enthusiasm for sharing knowledge.

Source: Washington Post, 8.10.2018