For those of you who are involved with teaching.... I'd like to propose a classroom exercise, which is both fun and which helps our community make its research more accessible:
I call it "a misDesign" - a rhetorical vehicle, which aims to tie research themes to short, simple, and funny examples of defective designs. I've written two examples of 'misDesigns' to provide inspiration. You can have a look at: http://www.interaction-design.org/misdesigns/adobe_pdf_writer_wants_my_help_but_makes_it_hard_for_me.html It's similar to what 37signals had on their site some years back ("design not found" or something to that effect), only misDesigns aim to *make research accessible*. I believe the "format" of misDesigns (described further at http://www.interaction-design.org/misdesigns/contribute.html ) - are ideal for classroom exercises: It's *fun* to ridicule a defective design and it's *worthwile* to sum up the reasons *why* it's defective! Upon completion, the students may send their 'misDesigns' to our editors, which will adobt the best of these into the misDesign collection (through a Creative Commons licence). We could even make it a competition and let our editors vote for their favourite one (the authors of which would then get a small prize). I'm open for ideas. ------------- Conclusion -------------- - misDesigns are fun to write while at the same time require precise knowledge of the involved research themes - *concrete* misDesigns help ground more abstract discussions on research - misDesigns help make our own research more accessible: The point is to tie research themes (hard to understand, narrow audience) to misDesigns (easy to understand, wide audience). A misDesign becomes a path into research. - Students contribute to an *open-content* information source (as we use the Creative Commons licences). Thus, they help us researchers make our research accessible to other newcomers to the field. - If a misDesign is published, the student's work is very visible and "real", and thus more rewarding than completing a normal classroom exercise. --------- Why should you care about making your research accessible? --------- Many of us concentrate on research and give less priority to making our research accessible to newcomers. However, there is a large potential in putting some work in making your research accessible. For example, the last encyclopedia entry we published to our encyclopedia had app 3000 readers on its first week of publication and that number has slowly dropped to an average of 30 readers a day (this number only includes actual human visitors, visiting the page for a period of 3-12 minutes). Compare this to how many readers your own research has had in ACM's digital library of "actual" research articles. I hope some of you will participate! Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions! -- Best regards / Venlig hilsen --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mads Soegaard Editor-in-Chief Interaction-Design.org Address: Chr. Molbechs Vej 4, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark Mobile : +45 2629 5505 Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/mads_soegaard.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
