Assignment 3 – Inception – MacKenzie Bates
Read the instructions I gave to the participants HERE
So…. After reading those instructions my three participants were rather confused and ended drawing things that didn’t look anything like what I had expected or wanted.
Were you confused by the directions? Most likely you were.
I switched EMS II sections, so I had already done an assignment very similar to this in Paolo Pedercini’s class. My first time around, I wrote very dry directions and my participants didn’t have much fun.
So this time around I tried to make the exercise fun for the participants, and my attempt to do so resulted in an utter failure.
The directions overall were rather unclear but step 4’s “Improvise!!!!” was the tipping of the scale. For some reason I had thought the directions were very clear and that all my participants would draw imaginary cities. Instead people didn’t know what to do and they used “Improvise!!!!” as their way out.
I would rewrite the directions entirely if I were to redo this experiment.
THE DISASTERS
By: Celina (Freshman — Design)
By: Keith (Sophmore — Industrial Design)
By: Random Person in Skibo at 1 AM (Grad Student — Structural Engineering)
MacKenzie: this is lame, flabby work.
I don’t understand how Drawing #1 could have resulted from a set of instructions that ask for a map. Perhaps it’s the sizzling tone of your instructions, or your generic call to “Improvise!”. It seems like you wanted people to create maps of imaginary cities; are the results really ‘masterpieces’, as you describe? Is there any “incorrect” way that your instructions could possibly have been interpreted, or have you just created a situation in which “anything goes”?
The assignment asks for “a paragraph in which you discuss the results produced by the executors of your drawing,” which is totally missing; WTF. I wish I saw more rigor in every stage here: specification, execution, analysis.