keyword: systems

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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
Categories
briefs

Internet Famous

An assignment created by teachers Jamie Wilkinson, Evan Roth and James Powderly, at Parsons (The New School for Design). It was carried out in 2007 and 2008.

This course is dedicated to learning how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online. We study the art and science of getting hits. And in an academic first, students’ grades will be awarded by a piece of software that helps students track their websites & online accounts and monitor their popularity in real-time.

Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati, Alexa, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more will be mined for data relevant to the amount of attention a student is receiving, such as view counts, friend counts, inbound blog links, the length and intelligence level of comments, and more. This raw data is calculated into a “Famo Index Score” that will be mapped onto the Parsons Graduate Grade Scale Description, and each student given a grade from an A to an F.

Dedicated website (Archive) : https://web.archive.org/web/20111103100655/http://internetfamo.us/class/about

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Categories
briefs

Urban Hacking

Evan Roth, in interview with Constant:

It is really about the idea of hacking. The first assignment in the class is not to make anything, but simply to identify systems in the city. What are elements that repeat. Trying to find which ones you can slip into.