Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum located in the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile in Manhattan. It is one of nineteen museums that fall under the wing of the Smithsonian Institution and is one of three Smithsonian facilities located in New York City. I have been there twice. The first time was a field trip with professor Nada. It was a pretty impressive experience, different than visiting other museums. I didn’t see many traditional paintings but the contemporary design works. According to the introduction of Wiki, it is the only museum in the United States devoted to historical and contemporary design. Its collections and exhibitions explore approximately 240 years of design aesthetic and creativity. The second time I visited there was to finish the observation assignment so that I intentionally noticed more details.

This museum has a perfect location in New York, near the central park. I remembered clearly it was a sunny day. Trees, flowers, people, river, all the things are so wonderful around this museum. However, it’s hard for me to recognize it’s a contemporary design museum because of its classical architecture style. I thought it might be a traditional museum as others in Europe. No matter the colors or decorate details of this building, it’s really hard for me to associate Cooper Hewitt with contemporary design.

I love this museum. The exhibitions include many masterpieces. The visiting experience is so comfortable because of the digital pen that visitors can use it to create their personal digital archive through the picture code. After they back home, they can see the interesting design works they picked up on the official website by entering the unique code on the tickets. It’s really a good way of sharing the database through the network. On the other side, it can be defined as a good transformation design. People feel more relaxed when they walking in the museum instead of taking pictures by smartphone all the time. To be more specific, the digital archive is a record of human history. In a similar way, the design is all about human requirements. In order to stay objective in the digital archive, scholars come up with an idea called archival studies thinking, a comprehensive understanding of records. I can see it’s a great record arrangement in Cooper Hewitt. It divides the exhibition into several parts; the first floor is Tablescapes and Process Lab; the second floor is Nature by design, Iridescence and Immersion Room. This arrangement leads the visitor to understand design comprehensively. According to Caswell, value is another core archival studies concept and it doesn’t mean archivists have to keep everything. When choosing an archive, archive users have to make decisions to choose the relevant important records (6). This decision is also connected with the structure of power in special events or society. For example, the artworks visitors choose to record by the pen are not only because the works are beautiful, but only because I notice the work are made by the famous designer who made a big influence on society, like Paul Rand.

The first-floor permanent exhibition called Rebeca Mendez Selects is pretty unique. As Norman contends we humans are biological animals. We have evolved over millions of years to function well in the environment, to survive. We are analog devices following biological modes of operation. People learn from nature, get inspired by nature. In that exhibition space, many birds specimen are shown by the clear display. From a broad view, the exhibition shows graphic design, fashion design, product design, painting, jewelry design, and those works are all related to the birds’ specimens by imitating its colors and shapes. For example, there is a necklace made by the black feathers, the introduction of it shows, from utilizing real feathers, in the case of Mecky van den Brink’s necklace, to imitating their appearance, as for Tone Vigeland’s hammered-nail necklace, there is no end to the influences of birds on designers. By visiting this museum, people can have a deep understanding of design, not only seeing the beauty of surface but also decoding the visual form because Cooper Hewitt exhibits the process of how to make this design instead of complete results.

Process Lab makes me feel so familiar and moving. It reminds me of the college time being a design student, working all day with materials to find potential usage. The more imaginations designer create, the more ideas will come to their mind. That’s the very beginning of every design project, start with a model, a material and finally make the experiment ideas into real. The Process Lab perfectly shows the process of how to make a design product. It has different colors of papers on the table, the visitors can make their own design style which makes them feel more involved in the design field. Moreover, the video in this lab is also professional. It describes how designers use fabric to develop multiple kinds of textures to make design works.

From my perspective, the most treasurable advantage of this museum is that it not only shows the design works but also help people understand design thinking. Another impressive design exhibition is called Table Scapes: Design For Dining. The designer uses rubber material to produce tableware. It has a special texture on the back of the bowl. The colors are very simple, only black and white so that I can’t notice the difference between those products for the first time. By observing the details, I feel very respectful because designers have to think a lot before they make those details. For instance, how to make it more functional, how to improve its beauty. It recalls words said by Paul Rand, the designer of IBM, the design is relationships. In contemporary society, design thinking doesn’t only belong to designers, everyone is equipped with this skill, a way to read and understand the world. To be more specific, the design process can be divided into three basic parts, researching background, finding problems and solutions. Almost all the jobs need researching process before people get into their work. Traditionally, when people talk about design, they think about arts, graphic, beauty. However, the design has become a way to solve multiple problems, including networks and management. In this sense, everything happens has its own value especially the problems.

To sum up, the Cooper Hewitt Museum is unique and professional. It has many masterpieces. Every design exhibition in it with high quality. Also, it makes good use of digital archive in a smart way, to let the visitor bring design works to their home through the internet. I would definitely check the exhibition lists to plan another visit in the future.

    Work Cited

“Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Hewitt,_Smithsonian_Design_Museum.

“The Archive” is not an archive: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Atudies Michelle Caswell

Norman, D. A. (1998). The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer is So Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. MIT Press. Chapter 7: Being Analog

On Monday, April 8, 2019 from 6 to 9 PM about 70 participants attended a workshop aimed to redesign how immigrants and advocates connect on immigrationlawhelp.org. The workshop was organized on MeetUp by the New York Chapter of UX for Change and was hosted by Convene (101 Greenwich St.). Additionally, members from The Six, an innovation and strategy consultancy, were present as well as team members from the client organization, The Immigrant Advocate Network.

According to the event invite, “One of their primary platforms, Immigration Law Help (www.immigrationlawhelp.org), strives to connect individuals with legal resources and advocates based on specific parameters such as detention centers served, type of immigration legal services, zip code, etc. While ImmigrationLawHelp.Org maintains the only national directory of its kind, there are opportunities to improve the current user experience and functionality. The vision is to provide a marketplace to connect users with legal providers leveraging dynamic content based on user-specific parameters.”

My intentions for attending the event was to learn more about how UX hackathon-type events are run and to observe the following:

1. Structure of the event – Background, agenda, facilitators, participants, space, etc.
2. Background research – Who did the research for requirements? What methods were used? How will designs be tested to ensure success with defined audience? Generally, how participatory was the target demographic engaged to gather requirements for improvements?
3. How were teams divided and what tools were employed for the process?
4. How were ideas/proposals generated within the group(s)?
5. How were ideas presented?
6. What was the level of success of the event and by what measure?

Upon arrival to the event, I was impressed how nice the space was and how many people were already there. Many attendees were talking and there was food and drinks so the atmosphere was very lively. The work tables had Post-Its, Sharpies, and stickers for each seat and a large projector screen displayed a PowerPoint presentation while portable whiteboards were scattered around the perimeter. There were some materials about current immigration issues posted in a couple places as a means, I assume, to generate empathy for the target users of the site we would be analyzing.

Our host, Kandis O’Brien, who co-organized the event spoke a bit about the mission of UX for Change, which “connects non-profit organizations with the UX community to raise awareness of how the discipline of User Experience Design can contribute to the goals of any organization.” Then she introduced a representative from the Immigrant Advocates Network (IAN) to speak a bit about their mission, products, and services, and to introduce the website for which there were seeking design help. Rodrigo Camarena, the Director of IAN, described how individuals who classify as DACA, people under temporary protective status, and asylum seekers are currently threatened by our current political climate and how IAN is a non-profit, legal, tech organization that seeks to connect their network of over 8,000 national members with immigrants who need legal and other types of help.

The website, immigrationlawhelp.org was created in 2011 and is not responsive, does not fully support all languages, does not meet accessibility standards, and is text heavy. IAN are pursuing a re-design that helps to increase empowerment and engagement among the immigrant site visitors and families who have a variety of languages and backgrounds. Rodrigo mentioned that, based on site analytics, it is mostly visited during business hours—with peaks during times of crisis, which signals that legal and non-legal advocates may be the primary users of the site.

After the introductions, each table of participants operated as a group and we began with created Lean Personas based on the information we received from the client. From that, we created “How Might We” Post-Its to try to narrow in on the key problem our group should aim to solve through design. Then we used the whiteboards to create a User Journey that might address the problem based on our Persona and HMW’s.

After the team work, we individually began a “Crazy 8’s” sketch session to ideate eight ideas for the translation of the User Journey into an interface. With that exercise complete, we each chose one of our ideas to then extend into three interfaces as a more developed feature. In our groups once more, we all voted with our stickers to decide which solution (or combination of interfaces) we would present as a group. We loaded images of our solutions into a Google Slide document and each group presented on their thought process and outcomes.

I was surprised at how similar each group’s solutions were given that we all had different personas (i.e. ‘immigrant’, ‘family member of immigrant’, ‘service organization’, or ‘legal advocate’). The client team members expressed gratitude for the help and seemed genuinely interested in the solutions that were presented. The organization was open to continuing the conversation after the event if anyone was interested in volunteering.

From a UX student perspective, I was encouraged that all of the activities we completed were mentioned (in some form) of Jentery Sayers’ “Before You Make a Thing” including: personas, user stories/journeys, wireframes, and paper prototypes. And the mission of IAN seems in line with the point about “resisting oppression” through engaging directly with the power of technology and to examine the “default settings” and for whom and by whom technologies were built.

Personally, I was impressed not just with how organized the entire event was, but also how diverse the UX participants were, which is encouraging in terms of how important participatory models for design should be in the field, as discussed in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s “Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice.” Having groups that are vested in helping non-profit organizations who have limited budgets while also helping students and other new to the UX field get experience and connect for future volunteer opportunities is a mutually beneficial situation and I’m glad for the experience.

References

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2018). “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696.

Sayers, Jentery. (2018). “Before You Make a Thing: Some Tips for Approaching Technology and Society.” Retrieved from https://jentery.github.io/ts200v2/notes.html.

A field report by Peter K. Defenderfer

I attended a few panels at the Early Child Development Symposium at Scandinavia House, where I already work, held in conjunction with Sarah Lawrence college. The event’s full title is actually quite long, and includes a clause at the end about expanding the Nordic-American dialogue on early education. So, in the foundation’s terms this was not a “rental” event for them, but the panels were not exclusively reflective of issues centered in the Nordic countries either. One speaker with many perspectives was from northern Italy, another Danish and Turkish, and some American. It was general in international connections, about migrants, identity, pyschology and their negotiating in practical and positive teaching. 

I gathered a lean in almost all the panels (roughly three or four total, in full or in part) toward practical learning, that is deconstructing essentially xenophobic biases, and toward inclusive and possibly origin-revamped image maintenance. Early in an anthropology class, where I was my first semester of college, you might quickly learn the terms (and difference between) ‘cosmogony’ and ‘cosmology.’ When studying a culture as we could parallel in any classroom setting a cosmogony or origin story would seem constant and important. Just as say the Aborigines traditionally represented almost all abstract facets of their life through a concept called the Dreaming, which they represent in art, it might seem unfair that other cultures are grazed with narratives that are not as vibrant or affirming. The presentation of origin stories and heartened images in multicultural settings via somewhat autonomous and probably always equivocating teachers seems to be acknowledged as a point of constant debate. 

And somewhat collusive with diffusing threadbare and inconsistent narratives, the stated goals of the Sarah Lawrence Early Childhood Development Center—long name, but from what I can tell it’s basically a preschool and kindergarten school with an research branch—have much to do with practical learning; and this emerged as one of the encompassing if not satisfactory lights at the end of the tunnel to most of what the panelists discussed. The mission statement near the top of the Sarah Lawrence center’s website for example readily dishes anecdotes of having children make applesauce in an age when they might otherwise be adept with a microwave, etc. But aside from flippant examples, the question of the right level, and nature, of stimulation and identity presentation feels compelling.

There were two Sarah Lawrence students (undergraduates, I guess) helping with the event and also a table outside the main auditorium covered in academic papers from the center’s past researchers or teachers, bound in soft color covers and often with a sub-labeling “occasional paper series.” Not all these papers were terribly recent either. They were freshly printed for this event but some were from 1999 or 2000. To make a few notes about attendance and composure, it was mostly all women in the auditorium (audience varying slightly panel to panel) and this was even acknowledged at one point, one of the women said something like “we’re all women here” in a tone and impression I guess would call maternal since other comments were made about mothers’ instincts for these issues, but “thank you to any men who are here.” Aside from that there was a chatty, inclusive and rarely slightly feisty tone to the audience comments. With regard to the two Sarah Lawrence students assisting, I did catch one memorable exchange between them and one of the Scandinavia House building managers. The in-house restaurant had made generous and upscale box lunches for the entire event, including vegetarian options, but the two Sarah Lawrence students claimed there was hardly anything in these for them, and asked if their outside lunches could be paid for because one of them was vegan and the other was gluten-free. The building manager with lightly tugged patience said the restaurant would be able to handle it. I needed to include this because I don’t know how it is either relevant or irrelevant, and Joan Didion wouldn’t be remiss to include it. 

One of the consistent themes I certainly connected with was the role of pathogenic environmental factors, or harm, overstimulation and chaos, be them either racially-originated or from circumstantial direct and indirect human factors. This seemed essentially like one of the points that branched to multiple subjects throughout the symposium, such as migrant and refugee identities and media coverage, and government intervention. For example some time was spent on the role of media in refugee coverage. Gary Evans, an ‘environmental and developmental psychologist’ from Cornell, was talking about human interest stories as portraying refugees as in need of support, which is claimed as a turnoff to “western” people, but moreover I had the impression of a confluence of both image and identity maintenance with domestic environmental factors as incredibly predictive and affecting of children, or on people any of age for that matter. 

One way to state the connection it seems to me is they are both curated, ‘soft’ factors in way—not inherent, and not a specific teaching instruction that could be theorized about in an either successful or unsuccessful gauge. Evans also mentioned IQ tests (setting aside the problems with that) as less predictive of grades than pathogenic environmental factors. The question of what is an inherent trait or temperament practically feels like it could be connected to direct teaching styles, or rather intended learning outcomes, while the effect of implied outcomes and environmental impositions that are not intentional in the same way (dysfunctional family members, stimulation breaching to chaos and anxiety) mount a second, comparably invisible force which holds much to bear on productivity.

Similar to my idea of implied image and environmental factors as invisible, Evans from Cornell commented on the role of “involuntary attention” as integral to motivation for voluntary attention or rather intentionally instructed tasks. The image on the involuntary attention slide was a typical fountain the plaza of some building. Evans suggested that this didn’t require the same kind of attention as an instructed task, but a child’s ability or freedom to engage with it, as an environmental factor but one that isn’t overbearing, was facilitative of them being able to tackle an intended task more at will, or less emerging from a place of clutter. 

This stretch of that panel also allowed them to reemphasize motor skills as the obvious and crucial way we learn and become familiar with the world. As tooling with objects around the house (provided they are safe) is substantiating, so too we might gather is the freedom to loosely focus on a fountain, or whatever else is innocently present in urban or natural settings. 

And with regard to deconstructing these other, human-implied factors, it seems to me to reach the core concerns of the Information Science field: Intersectionality, design, and also I would say a crucial and structural address of the question “what is productivity?” or “what is creativity?” Along with certain design approaches, a reasonably abstract answer to that starts to feel as predictive and perhaps in a better and more open way than unattended implications from existent axises people may just incline to rely on.