Monday’s meeting delved further into the agenda of our upcoming design workshop, ending with the beginnings of a discussion about a paper by Pelle Ehn. I didn’t take any pictures, but there are a lot of notes below.

Today’s agenda

1. Updates from the group about event
2. discuss Pelle Ehn paper
3. create schedule together

Notes

Event updates

• learning activities -> lunch -> prototyping
• pre and post surveys
• after: continue conversation where people can still keep talking about ideas afterwards

Camera Idea

• Vasudhara has created a Flickr account
• still in the works

Need: before spring break, add one more level of detail

To do: In an email to Dr. DiSalvo on Thursday:

• Learning activity + goal
• Prototype + goal
• define goals

More to think about

• what specifically are going to be the learning activities for the morning?
• don’t think number of activities, think that you have 3 hours
• APRIL 5 = DRAFT 1 MATERIALS DUE // DiSalvo to send schedule of what is due
• don’t plan to do things that we can’t pull off

What if we did an activity that starts off with, Describe the process of picking blueberries.

• How could you do this if you couldn’t see?
• now imagine you were picking blueberries only once every 3 days

Need to start with farmers’ expertise!

• cards achieve this, but we could go a step further
• need to get very specific
• what happens on the farm when you are away at the farmer’s market?
• whatever we do in the morning should show up in the afternoon

Design activity ideas:

• Mad Libs?
• cards?

MAKE SURE WE INCLUDE SOCIAL NETWORKS IN THIS

• there should be additive parts
• if it becomes about discovering specific themes and tools, make sure they have things like facebook and mobile phones
• would be awesome if they could use cell phones

think physical and fantastic

We talk about sensors and things, which is our terminology. How can we expect anyone to understand things that we aren’t experts in?

• We can find a list of sensors created
• We can define the basics, like resistors, voltage
• Important to know what can and cannot be sensed
• We’re not asking them to be experts in science, only in what they do
• What’s difference b/t being a designer and an engineer?
• Can we find a corollary b/t what they do and what they build? // farm is procedural

Will have a technical info boot camp!!!

Afternoon activity:

• should be additive
• specific to the materials of the farm and their practices (eg if participants request something to measure the health of the soil, then we say, how do you know that the soil is healthy?)
• should result in something physical
• particular enough to get ideas for summer workshops
• actually teach farmers things they didn’t know 6 hours ago

Be careful: it is embarrassing if you don’t know the answers

To do: activity emails

Anna: email morning activities (incl. goals, props, specific activities)

Vasudhara: email afternoon activities (incl. goals, props, specific activities)

To do: More things we need:

• Poster for GVU Demo Day (April 16) // Anna to get info; DiSalvo to handle; Ethiopia to make
• Laura, Ethiopia, Delisha to add existing posters to T-Square
• need to create documentation posters (Beth and Ethiopia)
• Carl to send out Laura’s text to use for posters

PELLE EHN’s Paper

Scandinavian school: began with workers
Required by gov’t to engage in participatory design

Project where he was teaching kids RFID and Barcode
w/in an hour created code to create music

• attractive b/c KIDS out in the streets
• was annoying to a lot of people
• this is a “dangerous thing”
• attractive to audience

What is Meta-Design?

• meta design about how you create tools that allow other people to design?
• how do you do that when the designer is not there?
• Things like photoshop != metadesign, but are open source things

Participatory Design as a method of ethnography

What we should think about is this:

• Paper opening up paper b/t different fields; sets up a new notion of what design is

When thinking about this project, here are some questions:

1. What are the objects and things of sustainable agriculture? We need to understand it as a thing (Latour)
2. What are all the non-human objects that are involved in this that we maybe need to attend to more?
3. What are the infrastructuring strategies we are using?
4. What is relationship b/t farms, publics, and controversial things?

//we can write a paper where we take these things into account

March 18th, 2010
Topic: Day in the Life, Research Log, Uncategorized, growbot Project Documentation Tags: None

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 1:50 am and is filed under Day in the Life, Research Log, Uncategorized, growbot Project Documentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.