Courses
Constructive Design Research, The Sound of Smart Things, User Experience Theory and Practice, Researching the Future Everyday, Design for Behavioral Change, Matters of Transformation
I mainly followed courses throughout my master, in the expertise areas of C&A and U&S. During Constructive Design Research, we used our prototype as a vehicle of inquiry, just like in Researching the Future Everyday. Here, we deployed the designed online research artifact Dawn. We used existing focus group methods and altered them to our needs. We added methods like a scenario based design and online roleplay to give rich information. This showed me that we can alter existing methods to our needs, to gain rich insights. Although this is not something I usually practice, this course taught me a lot with the approach of ‘designing to know.’ This is when I started experimenting with design strategies and frameworks for research artifacts like in my research project and FMP.
During Design for Behavioral Change, I learned how to combine theories in order to make design decisions and look at them from different viewpoints. I could also practice dealing with scientific information, which helped me while writing for DIS2021. This has always been something I found difficult, but I thought it was really interesting and shaped my professional identity.
I also followed User Experience and Practice, where I wrote the manifesto “UX needs to be meaningful,” which shaped my professional Identity and Vision. This course gave me methods like The empathic formation compass, self-determination, goal setting, and action planning, fitting my empathic approach to design for better physical and mental health motivation.
The course Matters of Transformation showed me the relationship between aesthetics and various concepts from human sciences. Taking different perspectives resonates with my current professional identity. This course took a different approach, in my opinion, more exploratory, just like the course The Sound of Smart Things, which helped me use different modalities like sound in my designs. It also showed me how sound can be interpreted differently by everyone. This knowledge helped while designing the sound during my FMP.
