Week 1_lesson 1

Group research about the 3 topics making Visual Mappings + Tagclouds.

We chose the subject:
Nature Routes for Expats

Week 2_lesson 2

The Expat is someone who is unfamiliar. Unfamiliar of the culture and the country they visit. They usually don't know the language of the country they are not originally from. But this ofcourse depends per country and person.

Double diamond diagram
(Visual metaphor)

Context is "a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation".

Pyramid of Maslow

United Micro Kingdoms diagram

The question that was raised by the teacher about our diagrams and the feedback he gave us was about; How to provoke a message more, even if it's in something as simple as a diagram?

We made 3 different diagrams with our group.

Week 1_lesson 3

Design a mapping of your user and a mapping of the collection.

The text from Stuart Hall about representation made me think about how everything in general and in design is about language. To convey something in a specific way.

Type ≠ Stereotype

Mapping the self and the other (Expat) exercise with a Venn Diagram.

Week 2_lesson 1

Researching interfaces.

Two different definitions of an interface:

"Interface is a point where two systems, subjects, organisations, etc. meet and interact".

"A surface (…) serving as a common boundary between two different bodies, spaces and phases, a zone of physical contact where machines and users meet each other and engage in mutual interchanges over time and across space".

Different meanings of systems:

Knowlegde
Content
Information
Body of thought
A human body
A program
Organisation
Institution
Infrastructure
Datasets

What is the role of the user?

An interface is a tool for communication between a system and a user.

Interface exercise

Week 2_lesson 2

Diagrams made after the feedback.

The first diagram is about the disadvantage some expats have, not knowing the language. This creates an obstacle between the expat and a nature route.

The second diagram is about an expat not having accessibility on information because of the division of the expat and the nature routes.

The third diagram is about how an expat brings their own culture to a different country and how this culture they bring transforms and creates gaps because of the new culture of the other country.

The last diagrams explains the path some expats take coming to a country for economic reasons and take the path under the obstacle,
or take the path of going over the obstacle to learn the culture.

It would be good for our group to devision the expat into multiple user groups and dive deeper into different expats.

The Triadic Ballet.

Rogerio mentioned that the use of shapes to give definition to something as to what we did with the diagrams reminded him of this ballet.

A Bauhaus inspired ballet. The Triadic Ballet.

We choose the expat student as our main user group focus.

We found that we can link ourselves to the student and have more knowledge because of this of the user group and put ourselves in their position more.




Something Rogerio said was; "When you buy someone a present you want to find a present that matches the person best".

This best describes how to combine the user group and the interface.

Week 2_lesson 3

We had to come up with 50 signs each (together 150) about semiotic signs of our user group.

This lesson introduced the term "knolling'. Knolling is organising a number of different things to categorise them in a way that makes sense. A way that explains how they are made or how much things, one thing consists of.

Organising things through knolling can uncover new information about the things that you might not see at first glance.

Knolling can also unravel signs that can be stereotypical because everything is put into the same categorie.

Knolling also resembles reverse-engineering.

The knolling of bird species with standing in the middle the person(s) who organised it.

The teacher told us that we could zoom even further into our user group. Making it from International expat students to international expat students that are in the WDKA.

We choose to put the focus of our user group on the international expat student at the WDKA.

We made our own knolling with our group about the 150 signs we previously collected.

By choosing the specific user group we discovered positive and negative meanings of synonyms of word international student. A foreign student sounds excluded. An immigrant student is more likely to be perceived as poor. Even though this is of course not the case. An exchange student is an exchange between human beings for a short period of time and does not cover the international student in its full being.

Week 3_lesson 1

To research a user can be done by coming up with scenarios in the role of the user. This helps define more who the user is.

Our group made each 3 individual user stores and discussed these afterwards with each other.



The next step for the user collection will be to make a collection that defines the user and the route the user can take linked to the nature routes. By the end of the research we have to put our flashlight on usefull features that appear to the users.

What is useable for the people who are going to use the nature routes?

Week 3_lesson 2

Stereotypes are made as an assumption by un-informed people to convey their own opinions about a group of people and to generalise them.

Stereotypes are about inequality, not only about assumptions.

With the group we had to find signs about stereotypes and what they really are.

Our group wanted to have information about international WDKA students without making our own assumptions or looking up 'facts'. We decided to make a Poll that international WDKA students could fill in:

An assignment about the stereotype of international students.

Résumé Research Lessons

After the final research lessons of Gabrielle, Mark and Rogério. I made the final presentations for the 105 interface collection and the mapping of the collection and the user together with my group.

Final presentations:

The final group research made me think about what concept I could think of for the interface that is going to be designed. Researching the nature routes of the staatsbosbeheer and not seeing a lot of accesibilty for international students triggered me to solve this problem with a new interface about the connection between international WDKA students, nature and art. I made the link early in the research between nature and art, because there is a lot of art existing in nature. This art could be interesting to international WDKA students and here for guide them through nature with a possible interface.

I looked back at the Staatsbosbeheer website and what they offer for the international student. I discovered the not working "English" button. This makes it choose a nature route on the site for the international student user.

I tried to follow a route putting myself in the role as the international student and managed to find a route only by looking at images and names of places.

The difficult road I took through the website in the role of the international student triggered me into thinking about what would help the user and what would attract the user. I think art would first and foremost attract the international WDKA student. So I want to combine art and nature into an interface for nature routes.

Art in nature will be the focus of my concept for the interface.

Final persona:

The user group will be the international WDKA student. This student came from another country, to study in the Netherlands. The student did not come here for only the school, but also the country and wants to enjoy nature outside of school hours to relief stress and explore the environment they live in. The WDKA
international student is attracted to art and therefor wants to discover art in nature with the help of a user-friendly interface.

The most important feedback note I got from the teachers about the user / collection presentation is that I need to keep questioning everything I research and conclude.

Feedback Presentation:

The box structure design I made for the 105 group interfaces, afterwards felt like a good starting point on how I want the interface I will design to look like. The simplicity and clearness of the boxes and the symbols I used could be helpful to guide a user through an interface.

After presentation research

Upon developing my concept about art in nature places in Rotterdam. I started to do research about these places and looked on Google Maps what un-named nature places there are in Rotterdam. I searched for random places of nature like grass fields and little spots of nature next to roads and water.

I did not want to only look for nature in parks, because I wanted to find places of nature that international WDKA students might not know yet. During this research and during the collecting of the images of nature places.
I discovered a variety of different environments, with different colours grass and different types of trees. Nature outside of parks is more wild and so are the grass fields and the trees.