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Untitled Hi team, 

How did the crits go in your rooms? In ours, the crits were friendly and productive—Prof. Kuwata was particularly insightful and helpful. To be honest, though, I was pretty disappointed in the work that was presented. The work was quite underdeveloped, to the point that it wasn’t a very good use of the critics’ time. Learning goals were fuzzy and the prototypes were not sufficiently concrete to show much design that could be criticized. So it felt like the work the critics did was at the stage of ideation, which didn’t really make use of their expertise. In several cases, I felt like we had give clear feedback to the groups that they hadn’t acted on, so the same issues came up again here.

Although I mostly feel like people just haven’t put in the time—to developing their learning goals and iterating their designs, conducting research (eg user testing), and making use of the lab to build prototypes—I’ve been thinking about what could be changed in the next iteration of the class. One thing I think we could do is require user research ahead of time, and to make the design idea pitches more formalized, so that by the time we get to this part of the semester people are designing rather than trying to find their design goal. It could help to work backwards from some final projects to identify the design goals and how the designed project met the goal.

I’ve also been thinking about what we need to do next. A few possibilities:

1. Send out a summary of our impression of the critiques.
2. Ask people to process and respond to the critiques in their lab journals. 
3. Ask people also to write their updated learning goals on the spreadsheet by the end of the week, and make plans to respond to each group over the weekend.