Specification:

PILLAR:

Technology and Design

Design phase:

Evaluation

SOLO TAXONOMY LEVEL:

Relational

TIME:

Medium

This teaching activity supports students in presenting and explaining how values are integrated in their design to external audiences at public exhibitions or similar open events.

Through the teaching activity students summarise and argue for the values integrated in products, systems or services at a public exhibition. At the exhibition students exemplify and substantiate the way they have worked with values in design to an audience. The students then integrate the feedback and adapt their designs based on their interpretation of audience feedback to strengthen its value-sensitivity.

Often students do not have the opportunity to present their designs at open events or public exhibitions and explain or argue for their design to a wider audience. When students do not get the opportunity to receive, integrate and adapt feedback on their designs from a wider audience they might lack a broader value-check and validation of their values in design. By inviting external audiences to engage with and evaluate the values of the design, students are able to evaluate how successfully their products, systems or services embody and communicate the intended values in a meaningful and appropriate way. And, subsequently, how successfully they themselves are in acting as responsible, value-sensitive designers.

This teaching activity supports students in presenting their products, systems or services at open events or public exhibitions to external audiences. The exhibition focuses on students’ explanation, exemplification and substantiation of their designs’ values and value sensitivity in order for them to interpret and integrate audience feedback into their designs. This gives students the opportunity to adapt their designs based on the feedback they received so they become more value-sensitive before presenting them to a client or direct stakeholders.

After the teaching activity students will be able to:

• explain, summarise and argue for the value(s) of their design to external audiences,
• exemplify how their products, systems or services are value-sensitive and responsible as well as substantiate – in the form of a design argument, and why this is the case,
• adapt their products, systems, and services to be more value-sensitive through interpreting and integrating feedback from the audience.

Before running this teaching activity, students should have created a value-sensitive product, system or services targeting a design context and/or identified stakeholders.

• Secure or organise a public space for the public exhibition at a set time and date. The space can be a venue at a public library, somewhere on campus, online, a park or other such spaces that are open and accessible to the public. The exhibition should be advertised to ensure that an audience will attend the exhibition.
• Ask students to prepare a short pitch or poster suitable for communicating to an external audience. The pitch/poster should summarise, explain and argue for how the product, system or service embodies, creates and communicates (a) specific value(s). Look for online Publications to help create academic pitches/presentations or academic posters.
• Ask students to create scenarios, stories or use cases that the audience can engage with and that exemplify how their product, system or service works with values and transforms the design context for specific stakeholders in ways that are responsible and integrate values in design.
• Ask students to prepare feedback prompts that will engage the audience in discussing and critically reflecting on the value sensitivity, appropriateness and meaningfulness of their design in the design context. Underline the importance of framing the prompts in such a way that they focus the discussion on value sensitivity, responsibility and appropriateness of the design in relation to the design context and direct stakeholders.
• Ask students to make a plan for how audience feedback will be documented and/or collected (e.g., post-its, interviews, field notes, surveys, video- or audio recordings, sketches). Students can then interpret and integrate the feedback to adapt the product, system or service to better embody, create and communicate its value-sensitivity to the client or direct stakeholders.
• Ask students to show up at the venue or exhibition space before the starting time to set up the exhibition for the audience.

The teaching activity consists of three steps.

Step 1:

• Before the exhibition space is opened to the audience, meet up with all students to emphasise the importance of focusing the discussions on aspects of values in design. Also stress the importance of documenting and collecting audience feedback so that they are able to interpret and integrate it to improve the value sensitivity and responsibility of their product, system or service after the exhibition. The documentation or gathering of audience feedback can also serve as “proof of concept” in the argument for the finished product, system or service. Highlight that it can be advantageous to (also) get quite critical or contradictory feedback from the audience to create maximum improvement of the value-sensitivity, responsibility and appropriateness of product, system or service.

Step 2:

• During students’ public evaluations of values in design, teachers should participate on an equal footing with the rest of the audience. You should listen to students’ pitches or poster presentations that summarize and explain their work with values in design and engage in the students' exhibition and substantiation of the design in relation to design context and stakeholders. You may participate in critical discussion around the students' argument and substantiation for their value-sensitivity, responsibility and the appropriateness of the design in relation to the values of the stakeholders and design context. Focus the discussion on strong and weak points of the design argument as well as the prototype/product to help students strengthen both their thinking and design. It might also be helpful to enter into dialogue with external audiences in relation to the design to help accentuate the implications of the audience feedback and highlight consequences for the design and design argument.

Step 3:

• After the exhibition space is closed for the audience, meet up with all students to point out recurring patterns (strong and weak) in the designs and design arguments when it comes to value-sensitivity, responsible design and appropriateness in relation to the design context and stakeholders. Here, it can also be made clear how students can best work to adapt their products, systems or services and strengthen their thinking to become (more) responsible and value-sensitive designers. Finally, take some time for students to share their insights and feedback and discuss implications for their future actions in the design process and future thinking as value-sensitive and responsible designers.

To assess whether the intended learning outcomes were attained by the teaching activity the following assessment activities can be carried out (in class or after class).

Assess students' learning by asking them to create a value-based video pitch (summative assessment) focusing on presenting their design to stakeholders along with their explanation, exemplification and substantiation of their design’s values and value sensitivity. The video pitch should also incorporate insights and results from the public examination.

Assess students' learning by asking them to write a series of short blog posts (ipsative assessment) during the process: 1) summarising and arguing for the values of their design to external audiences, 2) exemplifying how their how their products, systems or services are value-sensitive and responsible, 3) documenting the public exhibition, 4) interpreting and integrating audience feedback from the public exhibition into their design and discuss whether it needs to be adapted, 5) reflecting on the received feedback and how that might help them to become more value-sensitive and responsible designers.

In the assessment activity ask students to focus on:

• explaining and arguing for the value(s) of their design to external audiences,
• interpreting and integrating feedback, insights and results from the public examination,
• reflecting on how the public examination highlighted values in their design and wider implications in terms of how to act and obtain an attitude as a value-sensitive and responsible designer.