Friday, May 29, 2020
Thursday, May 28, 2020
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Exercise: The GV Sprint Process
Practical Skills for Intensive Problem Solving Exploration
The Sprint process involves a progressive shift of attention, from learning about a challenge defined by people, to learning how people respond to a design prototype that tries to re-solve that challenge. The process is bracketed into 5 workshop sessions. The suggested structure and techniques are focused on how to manage time, space and people over the duration; techniques for decisions, organising, coordinating.- Session 1: Imagine the goal (sprint) - Make a map and choose a target
- Roles and Responsibilities
- Set the long-term goal
- List sprint questions
- Map the As-Is Customer Journey
- Ask the Experts
- HMW How Might We...
- Organising Notes
- Why Why Why?
- ABC Always Be Capturing
- Pick a Target Decide
- Session 2: Explore many possibilities (sprint) - Sketch competing solutions
- Lightning demos (three minute demos)
- Work Alone Together Research
- Divide, Swarm
- The Four-Step Sketch
- Crazy 8s
- Session 3: Decide the design (sprint) - Decide on the best
- Art Museum
- Speed Critique
- Heat Map Dots to Focus on Interesting
- Straw Poll Dots for Voting
- Supervote Dots
- Rumble or All-in-One
- Note-and-Vote
- Storyboard
- Session 4: Build, make, tinker, learn (sprint) - Build a realistic prototype
- Fake It
- Paper Prototype
- Wizard of Oz
- Trial Run
- Interview Script
- Session 5: Test, observe, evaluate our prototype (sprint)- test with target customers
- Makeshift Research Lab
- Magic 5
- The Five-Act Interview
- Watch Together Learn Together
Where did the GV Sprint come from?
The shift to agile - typically cast as scrum, lean, kanban and others - started in fact at the end of the 90s when extreme programming lit up software engineering discussions with the provocative mix of passion and principles presented by its creator, Kent Beck. Extreme programming provoked diverse and intense responses in its audience. From radical fervour to cynical skeptism it ignited discussions about how software is and should be designed, how programmers were and should be treated, how to treat each other and others more indirectly involved in digital production.
The GV Sprint method [Knapp et al., 2016] represents how far agile has spread beyond software engineering. The agile sprint has become a staple of venture capital driven product incubators. Organisations are experimenting with sprint style workshops for accelerated product ideation and prototyping in a 5 day workshop format. Teams generate and select ideas to further create and develop, from concepts to prototype level using storyboards, mock‐ups, paper prototyping or using digital platforms of their choice.
It is apparent that design management, product engineering, software engineering and management more broadly are mutually informing and intricately interrelated. We have observed the business world appropriate software engineering's shift to practice emphasis and experiential management. We have seen software engineering borrow design paradigms from architecture [Alexander, 1964] and product design [Kelley and Kelley, 2013]. The mutual connections between design sprints, agile software sprints and venturing sprints [Knapp et al., 2016] is obvious. More so now that digital has become integral to so much of the designed physical material world.
Tips on InVision App and the infinite whiteboard https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/design-sprints-agile-dev/
Tips on "The Design Sprint - GV" at https://www.gv.com/sprint/
Tips on design thinking shortcuts in Mural.co https://www.mural.co/blog/design-thinking-shortcuts
Source: [Knapp et al., 2016]
Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Harvard University Press, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts.
Kelley, D. and Kelley, T. (2013). Creative Confidence : Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All. HarperCollins Publishers.
Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., and Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint : How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Simon and Schuster.
Get comfortable with the controls in Zoom breakout rooms...
Review the Zoom support video for an introduction to using Zoom breakout rooms...
Zoom local recordings save location
By default, all recordings will be placed in a Zoom folder found in the following file path on these devices:- PC: C:\Users\User Name\Documents\Zoom
- Mac: /Users/User Name/Documents/Zoom
Note that "Local recording is not supported on iOS and Android."
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Friday, May 15, 2020
Design Sprint practice session
What is a design sprint? In extreme programming they talk about design spikes, a spike of activity focused on learning about something or testing and idea or making progress towards a hard goal that is too unstructured to normal problem solving.
A design sprint is a group action. You'll need empathy to both work together and to understand your client's needs. First working alone but together (also called `together alone'), you'll go out and learn stuff. You could call this individual research exploration, some of solitary desk research, some of it going out and asking stakeholders. This is when the attention of the group is productively dispersed, each person mainly working under their own steam, everyone looking into different areas. Each researcher gathers data and information and forms ideas about what they learn. Then we put those ideas down on paper or digital, first alone, then together to share our learning and ideas. But instead of competing between sets of ideas we deliberately seek to identify the best or most plausible or radical, and combine them. To do that we need make unbiased, personally safe, largely anonymous decisions, usually with some kind of secret voting mechanic. Then, with an initial set of ideas, we set about progressively designing and revising. When we design things the approach is to make rough versions as quickly and cheaply as possible to minimise delay and maximise the learning. These rough designs aren't even really prototypes, they're rough drafts, mockups with sufficient detail to test them with people who haven't been directly involved in the initial designing. Then as they say in extreme programming, `rinse and repeat'.
We'll work on Mural.co.
We've decided on a solution we want to creat 6 steps to a solution.
Then we test with a user test flow is a prequel to the storyboard.
User test flow (say six steps) is the journey a user has taken when working through the prototype (imaginary)
Then we make the storyboard.
Use mural templates for journey maps
Each contributor to fill in one line of steps each
Use Mural voting
Use Mural timer
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| Mural voting in progress |
For more see:
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Playing tabletop games at-a-distance
Options for online board games courtesy of Evan Leed at @Evandeel on BGG https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2425525/list-options-online-board-games
There are some awesome online adaptations of the best and most popular (not always the same thing is it?) physical world boardgames, games like Coup, The Resistance, Avalon, Secret Hitler, Mafia and Werewolf, Boggle, Banagrams, Scatagories, Skull, Liar's Dice, Dixit, Codenames, Catan, Risk, Diplomacy, Uno, Hanabi, Sushi Go!, Carcassonne, Fluxx and many more...
And the poster on Drive...
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
NetworkInPlay - Creating Diversity in Games
The goal of the Network In Play project is to create projects, events and documents that put equity, inclusion and diversity in game making and game playing cultures at the forefront.
See examples and project reports on https://gamedevelopers.ie/diversity/
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Microsoft Teams - Getting access
Navigate to Office 365 via UCD Connect - http://www.ucd.ie/connect/
Or login directly via Microsoft - https://www.office.com/?auth=2 with your ucd account.
You should use our ucdconnect.ie organisation account id/password if you haven't already logged in.
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| Select "Teams" |
Teams can run within browser but you should download the app/package to use the desktop app version.
Friday, May 1, 2020
6 boardgames you can play remotely...
A great way to keep those after-hours video chats lively is to play games together.
6 Board Games You Can Play Over Zoom
(Wired article) Don't let the quarantine turn you into a hermit. Video chat with some friends and play a game together. https://www.wired.com/gallery/board-games-for-remote-play/
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