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Gary
In episode fifty-two, you very briefly mentioned a class where your Graphic Design students were working alongside Computer Science and Journalism students to create an app. Can you discuss the collaboration in a broad sense?
Neil
Sure, absolutely. This was a class that was started back in 2011, 2012 as a collaboration between the Computer Science, Journalism and Graphic Design departments in areas here at Drake University and the whole idea of the class was to get cross-disciplinary studies together and collaboration between the students and to give the students a kind of look into what their agency life might be or future workplace might be, so throughout this class, and this is the eighth iteration of it, there’s typically a four to five week intro where the Computer Science students are getting themselves up to speed with coding in the Android environment and then Journalism and Design students are working together on developing ideas for an app or narrowing an idea down for an app, going through user testing, going through site maps and wireframes and mock-ups and discussing user flow and user experience and then from there, we break them off into six groups and each group has one Design student, one Journalism student and three Computer Science students, so they go through two app projects.
The most current iteration of the class, the first project they had to create an app that promotes art, culture or music in the Des Moines area and the second app was creating an app that’s based on a color, so they had to do a little bit of mind-mapping and go a little bit in-depth to find a problem to solve and to create an app from…so anyway, like I said, the first four to five weeks, they’re split and then they come together for that first app project and the Design, Journalism and CS student, they all work together on focusing down an idea. They all work on their site maps together; they all work on the wireframes together and once that’s done, then the split off.
The Computer Science students begin developing in the Android environment and then the Design students and the Journalism students start working through personas, they start working through mock-ups, they start working through style tiles and user testing and then at the end, they all come together for a final pitch and they pitch their app ideas to the class, along with professionals that are out in the local Des Moines area and then there’s a Q&A session at the end where the professionals get to ask students about their choices, if they had thought of any different ways of doing things or additions for version 2. So that’s pretty much the class in a nutshell.
Gary
Well, before I get into the other questions, I have two curiosities. The first one is, why Android? Why not iOS?
Neil
That is a great question! The class started in the iOS…started with iOS and over the years iOS is more difficult environment to code in and at one point during this class, the students were developing for iOS and Android and that turned out to be a lot of work and the apps didn’t come to fruition because of that, so they backed off and just operated or developed in the Android environment.
Gary
OK, so that makes sense because I knew it had to be a pedagogical reason why they were always leaning towards Android because…yeah, that’s all. And the other follow-up question, again you probably don’t have the direct answer to this, but it’s interesting the ratios. So, doing this podcast, it’s usually there are more developers than there are designers and I’m thinking of like when you’re visual design, having a bunch of designers together is, there’s a point where it’s too many cooks in the kitchen, and so I’m just curious, did you see that happening with having multiple Computer Science students working on the project, working on the team?
Neil
I actually did not see a lot of that happening. They were very, very good at collaborating and dividing and conquering the work.
Gary
I love the idea of Graphic Design, Journalism and Computer Science students collaborating on projects. You even kick it up a notch by throwing in Journalism, because I’ve seen this done a couple other times but it’s just mostly Computer Sciences and Graphic Design but anyway, so how from a logistical standpoint, how do you manage to get a group of students from three different departments in the room at the same time without over-taxing yourself as an educator, so you have to meet at off-times and for the students as well?
Neil
So that, I am sure at the beginning of this brainchild, or at the beginning of this course it might have been an issue filling these courses but as time has gone by the students really, really want to get into this course to further their interactive knowledge so typically there is a wait-list of two to three students for this course in Journalism and in Design and unfortunately, students don’t drop this course, or at least Journalism and Design students don’t drop this course so there’s no…there hasn’t been an opportunity for those who are wait-listed to get in and part of this course is finding those Design students who are really invested, so these are students that really, really want to learn more about interactive development and they want to know more about app design and they’re driven to be a part of this course and if we don’t have that motivation behind a student, then it kinda falls apart pretty quickly.
As far as scheduling goes, we have pretty much two different class vacations here, to my knowledge, for classes and they’re studio and lecture and Journalism, Computer Science and Graphic Design, we all have lecture courses that run an hour and fifteen minutes, so we were able figure out a time when all three courses could meet. Now, it is a very limited time so we’re kinda…we’re touching base with them quite quickly during class and they’re doing a lot of work outside of class so it’s kind of like a flipped classroom and then over-taxing ourselves. The really nice thing about this course is that there is a Design Professor, Journalism Professor and a Computer Science Professor that teach this course, so the three of us go around and we talk with the groups about their progress and if they have any questions, which has been really, really nice to kind of go at it at a united front rather than doing it individually.
Gary
So, how many Graphic Design students do you have in your section?
Neil
I have six.
Gary
OK, and is that a normal class size or is this kind of like an exception?
Neil
No, no, that is the normal class size, so we…Design has six students, Journalism has six and then Computer Science has eighteen, so altogether it’s almost thirty students in the class.
Gary
Oh, OK, all right, so this is a note to the Deans and Department Chairs out there. So it sounds like this is something that, in the first couple of years when you start this, you’re probably not going to have the numbers that you really want; it’s not until it starts getting rolling and it starts getting a buzz around the students that people would then be excited about it and the enrollment issues will kind of fade away. All right. Another thing that I have trouble wrapping my head around is synching up Design students who are far enough along in the Graphic Design program to have the necessary visual design skills to work alongside the Developers. So, how do you get the pairing of the right skill-sets?
Neil
(laughs) Well, most of the Design students that are in this course are Seniors in Graphic Design and most of them have had Web Design 1 here or they’re currently taking Web Design while they’re taking App Design and that seems to play off one another really well and then as far as pairing the students more in a broad sense, as we have been interacting with the students in our courses, each Professor knows the strengths and weaknesses of the students, so the Professors, we all get together and then we decide the groups that are going to happen for each app project and go from there on that.
Gary
This is a bit of an aside that I didn’t think to ask until just now! But, when it comes to the visual design, iOS has some pre-built stuff; there’s certain interactions that are just kind of pre-can that you can’t really change. Is Android the same way, like you have to pick their scroller, you have to do…or is it kind of, can the Design students just, whatever the heck they imagine, the Developers can use?
Neil
Well, so, a good question, one. We have been, this year in particular, we have been using Material Design Standards for the visuals and that has helped a lot with the students, so they’re not coming up with their own buttons, they’re not coming up with their own cards on screen; they’re all pre-built and this year I purchased a UI kit for Android, so they were able to pull those elements and then focus more on the imagery that they’re including, focus more on the typefaces, the colors and the experience rather than these UI elements and earlier in the semester, those first four to five weeks where everybody’s getting up to speed, we hand out Android tablets to the students and tell them to use it for a week to get used to all the interactions, the animations, the look, the feel and what an Android user would expect to encounter when they’re using the platform.
Gary
Ah, that’s a good idea; there’s also kinda like similar advice for web design that you should be using a different web browser each week, just because they do have their own subtle differences in how they display things and some of their own built-in how they render stuff. So, following up on this, this is another thing that I’ve never really thought about is, what’s the visual design deliverable? What do they hand off to the developer and in what format: is it Sketch? Is it Photoshop?
Neil
Yes! So, the Designers, they use the Material Design UI kit for Android and they’re typically using that in Photoshop; there was a…there were a few students that used Adobe XD to create their mock-ups and the Developers, when they got to a point where they could incorporate visuals, the Design students exported the buttons or exported images in the format that the Developers needed, so we had to remind students that there was a lot of communication that needed to happen throughout this project so at the point where they’re splitting off after wireframes and site-maps have been completed, they still need to collaborate, they still need to talk to one another and ask, what do you need, what format do you need? How do I provide that to you?
What’s the best way to provide that to you, so it was really a great collaboration and communication experience for them to kinda get through that so the final deliverables for the Computer Science students was a working app; it may not have been uploaded to the Google Play Store but it was a working app and then for the Design students, we made them put all of their screens into InVision and have one user-flow documented in InVision, so you could really get the look and the feel of the app, get the idea of what the app is for, but there was just no back-end to it on InVision.
Gary
OK, so it’s frustrating because most Graphic Design programs have one or two Interactive Design courses that need to cover web design, app design, which we’ve just said, there’s different parameters for designing for an app than there is for a website and then we’ve got to cover user experience and we’re doing it all in these two courses and the rest of them are usually dedicated to print, so with you dedicating one of those limited courses to…that’s entirely dedicated to a collaboration like this, students potentially could lose out on learning how to refine visual design. So, what benefits does this collaboration have that makes up for that time that they could be learning something else in this over-crowded curriculum, I guess?
Neil
Well, I don’t think it fills in for gaps in their education; I think the App Design course it builds on it so our students here, if they’re in the BA program or the BFA program, they’re required to take Web Design, no matter what, and then App Design is an elective and we also have an Advanced Web Design course here as well, so the idea is that they would take Web Design, then App Design, then Advanced Web to cover all of these skills that are needed when they go out into the workplace.
Now, on the flip-side of it, being able to collaborate and understand what other team members would need when developing an app, if students are able to get into this app course, they do miss out on that experience, which is a bit of a shame, so they kind of miss out on that if they’re not in the course, but that makes it more of an exclusive course and more of a wanted course but these…that collaboration is really important for those that want to go into an interactive career and not all students want to do that. I still find that there’s…I wouldn’t say maybe four or five students out of twelve or fifteen that want nothing to do with web still or interactive design, which is a very needed skill-set these days or now in the field.
Gary
But OK, so another aside. So you’ve got students that just like, no, we just want to do print. Is that a real…is that realistic for them, do you think? Maybe it’s regional but I know in Baltimore that that’s just not a reality, that they’re going to be doing something print only, unless they get to the Senior Art Director level.
Neil
I feel that it is very unrealistic to stick to just print. As the students go through the curriculum here, we try our best to inject interactive work into our Print Design courses so that they have that experience and even in our Practicum course when we start pulling up job descriptions or job positions, in there, every single one of them have HTML, CSS, UX, as job requirements so, however much I can…or however much I tell them that they need to have interactive skills and experience behind them, for some students, it just…they still stay the course on print and that’s something that the industry will sort that out!
Gary
Yeah! You’ve got to be a…those are few and far between and you have got to have some phenomenal jobs to create a niche for yourself like that. One thing you just mentioned is that you said that you put some interactive projects into your Print courses. So, I actually like that idea better than having a siloed curriculum where, here’s Print, here’s Web or Interactive, however you want to define it, and I like the idea of when you’re teaching Typography, here’s a grid and how you print it out and this is how that grid’s going to behave on a website. So, how do you do that? What are some of the…can you give us examples of that cross-pollination or whatever you want to term it?
Neil
Sure. So, one of our courses here, Form and Concept, in that course, they have to animate, I believe it’s a letter-form, so they’re taking a…they’re taking something very two-dimensional and they’re going right into Four-D with it! Which helps them think that way. This coming spring semester, one of my colleagues is going to be incorporating an animated poster into their course and from…where, I think it was at SECAC conference this year, there was a presentation on animated posters and even that has gained traction out in the social sphere, so I think that could be a really fun project for that.
Gary
Just for the listeners that weren’t at the SECAC conference, I wish I could remember who it was but basically, their presentation was there are now such things as movie posters that when…they’re being on screens now, that means they can have animations in them and so it’s a new print…posters have found a new medium and it’s animated posters, so it’s worth checking out Animated Movie Posters; Google it for everybody.
Neil
Last year in our Senior level elective course, Context and Process, I did a lot of image-making experiments with my students, so, using only torn paper and the copy machine to come up with an image; using three-dimensional material to come up with an object and then based on those experiments, they had to create a thirty second animated looping video that had to do with biking, so whether that was commuter or recreational, so they had to use bits and pieces from their image-making experiments to then apply in their animation, so that was another way that we’ve been including interactive work and time-based work kind of without them knowing, but them knowing! But I don’t think that the label of interactive work is associated with that; I think it was more from the student perspective, oh, we’re just making a movie.
Gary
So this is another question that, unscripted, so sorry if I through you for a loop but it has to do…OK, so, with the App Design course, you are introducing user experience design and user research and user testing and all these basic principles, correct?
Neil
Correct.
Gary
So, in the last episode, it just from the natural conversation, we kinda came to this idea that user experience that they learned at the Senior level would be applicable, literally all the way down the Freshman level but we’ll say Sophomore level for any number of courses; it could be used, that same methodology could be used in Print Design, it could be used in Web, App, whatever. And so, I’m just kinda curious why do we introduce user experience as a Senior level skill when in reality it’s really a foundational level skill of all the design disciplines?
Neil
You know, I agree with you completely. I want to say the reason why it’s introduced so late is because the first…here at Drake anyway, the first year is our students going through the Art Foundation program and then from there, then they go into their respective discipline, so Sophomore and then usually between Sophomore and Junior Year is when they take Web Design with me and in that course I focus on user experience, it’s one of the first projects we do in that course, and it’s kinda…it’s centered around a nurse intake form, so when a nurse is taking your blood pressure, your vitals and then asking you about your family history and what-not, the students have to create a form for a nurse at that moment in time so we really dive into the issues of what are the needs of the nurse, what are the needs of the patient, how is the nurse communicating with the patient and how easily is the nurse able to input all the information into the form, so we get really deep into the user experience and what better than this shared experience we all have, going to the doctor?
So they have that knowledge in their Sophomore Junior year for Web Design and then that trickles over into the App Design and Advanced Web but generally speaking, I do agree with you that user experience should definitely be part of a foundations program but during the foundations program or foundational years, they’re learning these principles of art and design; they’re learning how to create a composition, they’re learning about loading form and meaning; they’re learning about grids and typography and I don’t know if having user experience in there would just really scramble them further or if it would help. So maybe, I mean, maybe the first year isn’t the best place for that but the second, Sophomore or Junior year I think is the perfect time to introduce that.
Gary
Yeah, and I think that’s what I meant when I…so yeah, that’s kind of what I referred to, what I meant by foundation because most universities, for year universities have that, like you said, that Freshman foundations; that’s untouchable! That is going to be what it is and Design areas have absolutely no authorship over that. But we do have authorship over what courses do they take their first semester, their Sophomore year and I’m just like, would a UX course that is media independent be more beneficial there than sneaking it in later on? I don’t know, it’s just something that popped into my head.
I wanted to follow up with one other question. I love the idea of designing a nurse intake form, because I’ve seen them; I’ve peeked out the corner of eye when I’m in there, for my Doctor’s appointment at that form. Where did you get the form…so you know what to…how did you find out what information they need to collect and all that stuff?</dd>
Neil
So…that came from personal experience of course, and then I have friends who are in the medical field and I have some nurse friends in the medical field and I just asked them, so what type of information do you need to collect and how easy is it to do that right now! So, they gave me a form of sample questions which was really, really helpful. As we get into the classroom and as we start, as I start engaging with the students as to what questions do we need to bring up between the nurse and the patient and there’s been some really, really interesting conversations that have come out of that. So, some questions have gone towards the area of what religion are you, because there are some medical restrictions there.
Also, there are questions about LGBT health, which is something that is really…has really had a lot of focus lately, which is a good thing. So these questions that I wouldn’t normally have thought of, in conjunction with the form that I was given and then the chat with the students, it just it goes into directions that I wouldn’t have thought of and I really enjoy that the students are thinking that broadly about patient care, number one, and thinking about that interaction between the nurse and the patient and then how that information is being relayed to a third party for insurance billing or for the doctor or for whomever.
Gary
So, another follow-up question on that is, I’ve been again thinking a lot lately; so, a project like that, I don’t care how good of a designer, visual designer you are. A form is a form, there’s only so visually interesting you can make it. But that is a powerful project that really shows depth of thought; it shows a lot. So, how do you get students to display that in their portfolio so that a potential employer will look at that and really appreciate what went into that project?
Neil
I am currently trying to figure that out. So, this past fall I taught our Portfolio Prep here at Drake and some students had that in their portfolios and the feedback from outside reviewers were, it’s not…it’s a form! It’s a one-page form so there’s not really a lot of meat to it. So, I think in the future I’m going to have to tell my students that they should include this in their portfolio but it needs to be framed as more of a user experience case study, rather than here’s a project I did in Web Design.
Gary
Yeah, that makes sense because I also taught…it wasn’t a collaborative but the interactive course, we discuss app design, usability, create persons and all that kind of stuff and the project the student ended up coming up with was an app…oh, it was directions, I think, for blind people. Or people who have difficulty seeing and so the app’s…it’s huge buttons, it’s really simple, easy to see colors and so the design is…there’s no way to make it look fantastic and that’s what she ended up doing, making it into a case study where the first image on their visual, on their online portfolio is a blind person crossing the street and then it goes…the imagery to draw in the user, draw in the person who’s hiring, then it goes into the case study, what they did, how they got there and what the last screens at the bottom are what it looks like. But that’s really difficult, though, to make that process, that process that’s more important than the outcome to make it center.
Neil
Yes. Very!
Gary
And then I know people, students who are still…actually, I don’t know, I haven’t talked to hiring firms or what-not but I’m assuming that expectation is that you’re still going to show up with some kind of…you’re going to have something to share visually at the interview, so what does that look like in that context when you’re no longer online but live and in person? Since you taught the course, did you think about that at all? What kind of…what materials should they be taking to an interview?
Neil
Is this in reference to the App Design course or the nurse form? Or just in general?
Gary
In general, in general but yeah, those too.
Neil
Yes, I have, and teaching, again, teaching the Portfolio Prep course this last fall gave me a really good overview of our program and the projects that students have in their portfolios to show to potential employers and unless a student is really confident and knows what job they want after, because we have a handful of students who are double-majors in Magazines or Advertising and Graphic Design, so there were a few students that were very focused on going into the magazine industry, so for them, their portfolios were centered around that, pretty much, but for those students who just wanted a job, or just want to go out there and start working, there was a balance that had to be shown in their portfolio between print, between branding, between interactive, between all of these different areas so thinking about the end result, if you will, in App Design, having that InVision project put together where a student could post that to their website and a potential employer could actually click through that app and see what it was all about, that’s really important, that visual, and in terms of other projects that we do here, it’s really important to frame the visual effectively, so like we were just talking about the nurse form, it is a form and there was a lot more to that form;
it was an exercise in user experience and this was the outcome but there was so much more to it but the problem there is, how do you document that process? How do you document the thought process of jotting down what items you were thinking about, then how that makes it into the final visual: that’s not too compelling unless you’re in person and you’re speaking passionately about it to a potential employer, then it’s really engaging, so some projects I’ve encouraged students to not include on their website but include in their print portfolio to kind of bridge that gap; it depends on the student, it depends on their body of work and what-not, but we definitely try to give the students a solid, well-rounded portfolio when they leave here unless, again, they have a very focused idea of what they want to do when they leave here.
Gary
So, getting back on the regular line of questioning. So, now that you’ve completed the semester-long app project, what are some of the insights or lessons learned that you would never have thought of if not having that experience teaching with the three different disciplines?
Neil
You know? It ranges. So I was pleasantly surprised at how much the students loved the cross-disciplinary collaboration. They really enjoyed meeting students from other disciplines and working with them and having the experience of working through that development process with them and learning that there is vocabulary that they share, but the definition is completely different. And for me, personally, it was really insightful to see other Professors teach. So, unless I ask another Professor to sit in their course and watch them teach, I don’t really get to see how another Professor teaches their course and doing that is only one day, whereas throughout this course, I was with two other Professors for a whole semester so I was able to see how they guide students to an answer without giving them the answer!
And seeing how other Professors deal with ideas that maybe aren’t great or maybe aren’t the best that the student has at the moment and seeing how other Professors kind of push those students to produce more. And the biggest take-away for me was, learning when to just let the student figure it out! So, when a student is grappling with a problem or an issue or not even a problem or an issue, but more of a question, like, do we do this or do we do that? I don’t know. And then they look to us for the answer and we reply with a question, which then they give us a question back and we give them a question and then at a certain point it’s like, well, you either have to do more user research, you either have to do more market research, you either have to do some AB testing; you have to work through this, we can’t give you the answer for this: you have to give the answer.
So it was really, for me personally, teaching in the classroom and improving those methods, it really helped being in the presence of other Professors and seeing how they teach. And doing this course again, I feel like it went pretty well this past semester. The one thing that I would change is earlier in that four to five week intro time, I probably would’ve gone over the Material Design Standards a little more in-depth with them and how that UI template, how to use that and how to use that with Photoshop or how to use that with Adobe XD. I think that would prepare them a little bit more but they still figured it out which was really great to see.
Gary
I am shocked at how much programs rely on teaching software when in the reality is, the students will figure that stuff out on their own quick; you just need to give them the little nudge over the hump and it’s like, point out some of the power tools or things like that. The rest, they’ll get it on their own; they always do. But one thing I wanted to point out and I think the fact that the students liked the collaboration in that class, I think you need to take some enormous amount of credit for that because most of the time when I’ve heard of other collaborations between departments, it sounds like it’s a train rack and the students ended up hating working with each other so I think it’s the fact that if the students enjoyed it, that says something about the people who were teaching it.
Neil
Well thank you!
Gary
Kudos!
Neil
Thank you! I feel like it was…we all three of us had a very good working relationship and we all had really good rapports with our students so I think that had a lot to do with the environment too but yeah.
Gary
This is a new question I just wanted to throw at you, and this is selfishly just for me.
Gary
This semester, my Design students in my Web Design course are…each semester I have them re-design a website. I have a faux client come in and so they can kind of like do the interview the client and things like that. So, this semester I found a developer who is using publicly available bus tracking data to create a website where you can find out what time the bus is coming and this is going to be…he’s specifically doing it for…he’s using the Baltimore bus system but the developer’s located in Dublin, Ireland, so since now I’m going to have designers working with a developer but I’m going to be doing this remotely. I’m just wondering if there’s any kind of suggestions that you would have for things to look out for, things that I should be thinking of, just based on the fact that you’ve already done this collaboration?
Neil
Whoo! So, I’ve never done an international collaboration!
Gary
But it’s the same thing.
Neil
Oh yeah. I would say the biggest things are to have a schedule that everyone involved agrees upon and having those…that schedule of due dates, if you will, or deadlines, to make sure the project keeps moving forward and that each party is getting what they need out of the collaboration and if the developer’s in Dublin, correct?
So, what might be really neat is for the students to have a meeting on Dublin time to work with the developer and I don’t know if you can create that, but…
Gary
Well it works out, it actually works out because essentially, this developer’s doing this project on their own…this is like a…this is a side-project for them and so they do this after work and with the time difference, he will be getting done with work right when we are in the middle of the class, so we’ve already set up our first Skype but that is…I’m glad you mentioned the production schedule, if you will, because I’m so used to just having it very loose and we can shift things, but I did set a time-frame for our first meeting and he seemed to really like schedules and I think that’s…I’ve gotta remember that out there in the real world, people have schedules and they like them.
Neil
Oh yes, yes! And having expectations written out is really important as well in collaborations, so whatever each side is expecting of the other, having those written down and agreed upon before you get into it side-steps a lot of challenges.
Gary
No, and that’s a good one too that I should…what are the deliverables for each? I mean, I do call this a faux client because I did kind of preemptively say look, these students, this is their very first shot at designing a website: I doubt you’re going to get anything usable from this, so this is just really more of a philanthropic thing for you and if something did work out of it: great. So I do preface it as that but I should try to kind of formalize it more so maybe that they do get something more usable than…
Neil
No, there’s definitely value in experimentation! I wish you luck with that project.
Gary
But I think just like in the past, I’ve said this is a faux project and I think by just starting it off by saying that, I think you’re setting up the expectation that it’s not real and I’m just thinking…the power of language!
Neil
Words mean something!
Gary
Yeah, so maybe I should just remove that word “faux” from the vocabulary and just say, in this “real” project…
Neil
There you go!
Gary
I’m going to have to do that this semester because while I’ve told him it was faux, I haven’t told the students yet, so they don’t even know about it yet. So all right, Neil, I just kinda noticed where we’re at with time, so before I let you go, is there anything that you are working on personally or is there something that you would like to share or promote?
Neil
Yes, actually.
Gary
Cool.
Neil
It’s a new project that I’ve been working on and it is coming together quite nicely, so I’m starting a resource website that focuses on Assistant Design and Interactive Educators and their career paths to tenure, so it’ll be a resource to hear about how individuals got into education, reasons behind career choices, so, if they moved or when they moved to a certain location; why they picked a university or a certain college; if they shifted jobs what were the factors surrounding that and then how they crafted value behind their scholarship because in the Design field, there may or may not be a legacy of work to draw from for your scholarship and then any advice they would like to give to those starting their career in Design Education, so I’m really excited about it; it is tellittoneil.com and the website and the calls for interviews will be coming out probably in the next month or two.
Gary
All right, that’s going to be a tremendous resource and I wish I would have had it before the fact that I’m submitting my tenure application packet this fall, but…so no real time to course correct from all the good stuff that’ll come out of that, but I look forward to it.