For the most part,I really appreciated the assigned reading. I think the selection of articles helped me broaden my understanding of human habits and behaviors and the ethical considerations surrounding our work as designers who aim to change our users’ behaviors.
Of course we can’t talk about this class’s reading without mentioning sketchnotes.
This is the first time I’ve had to do sketch notes and at first I had very mixed feelings about them. The activity felt forced and I struggled to see the purpose of having to do them.
I enjoyed that they provided me with a chance to engage with my more creative side; being forced to spend some time working on a visual assignment was a great way to de-stress.
What made me appreciate my sketchnotes was when it finally clicked how effective they are at helping me recall details from the articles we’ve read. One day I was telling a friend about “Tiny Prompts”, a topic that we covered weeks ago, I found it easy and straightforward to remember the key facts of the article I have sketched. Even weeks later, I can still recall the general structure and surprising amount of details even for some denser readings that I found challenging to engage with.
I had a blast working on our team project. We picked up a challenging topic: language learning is a vast problem space with a wide range of users and it took us some amount of time to narrow down our scope just to multilingual couples learning their language.
It was great to talk to different people about their experience with language learning as there are so many aspects that shape that experience – cultural, emotional, cognitive, goals and ambitions, hobbies, motivations.
