The first unit in our course on Advanced Design and Prototyping focused on Value-Sensitive Design, and a couple of the assignments we did as part of it were pretty fun.
The first was to do a sketchnote on the concept itself. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical of the concept of sketchnoting – I thought it would be fun, but I didn’t think it would actually be all that useful. In doing it, however, I found that it helped me to coalesce my thoughts a bit – though, admittedly, that may have more to do with the fact that it forced me to go through my typed notes again than the sketchnoting itself. Still, it was a fun way to do that bit of studying, so I think I’ll try to add it to my workflow in the future.
Another activity was to put together a presentation, going through some value-sensitive design processes and presenting our ‘findings.’ Of the available prompts, I chose the one that boiled down to “your team has just been hired to design a photo-sharing application; you’re in charge of the VSD portion. Go.”
