Design Jam #1!

Posted by Shannon Roux, Taylor Harper, Doug Worsham, Kian Ravaei

We’re thrilled to host our very first design jam!

Design jams give us the chance to share ideas and prototypes in progress with the WI+RE community and get essential feedback on our work. Today we organized our jam session around 3 design challenges from our current projects. For each, we set up a table and facilitated a quick, 15-minute activity to gather insights and inform our next steps. Participants got to visit each table to provide their ideas, feedback, and advice.

Design Challenge Tables

❶ Reading strategies

What are the top challenges with academic reading? What are your favorite reading strategies?

To address these challenges, we’re currently gathering ideas and storyboarding. Our initial approach is to explore creating a series of very short (1 minute or less) personal narratives that introduce a wide variety of reading strategies. Our hope for this project is that we’ll be able to help learners think about and expand their reading toolbox.


❷ Communicating with instructors

What are your tips and advice for communicating with instructors via email and in-person? We’re exploring a variety of formats, including infographics and interactive websites, to help with this challenge!


❸ Expanding perspectives in your search

In this project we’re exploring how to help researchers expand their search beyond their initial ideas to include a more diverse set of perpectives and resources.


Wrap-up chat:

To wrap things up, we had did some whole group brainstorming and generated some great ideas for potential future projects and events:

What are your ideas for new design challenges?

  • What do I do with feedback from my instructors? How to interpret and use instructor feedback?
  • Proposal writing.
  • Advocating for your work and ideas.
  • Imposter syndrome.

What feedback do you have on this meeting? IL/IW/WI?

I like:

  • Open format, can join any time
  • Creative conversations and idea sharing.
  • Bringing together instructors, students, and staff to talk about learning challenges.

What if?

  • What if there were a WI+RE roadshow, where we take design challenges to various campus groups to get feedback during their scheduled meeting times?
  • What if there were puppies? And cookies? at the meetings?.
  • What if we partnered with the Cross-Campus Teaching Innovations Group? Maybe hosting a quick roadshow at one of their meetings?
  • What if we offered drop-in hours as part of our regular work - i.e., drop-in and provide feedback when you have time.
  • What if we invited students to share their challenges with us somehow within the library? e.g., a "feeling stuck?" pop-up.

Slides and other materials from the event

Here are the slides for the event:

WI+RE Design Jam 1 by by the WI+RE team

Many of the activities were drawn from the Build Something Toolkit.