Showcasing prototypes

Presenting prototypes to community of users

STAGE: Deliver

Keywords: HCI; prototype; user-centered design; presentation.

Aims and Rationale

The aim of last activity of The Hilali Toolkit is to enable each team of students presenting their prototypes to the community members. This is a prototype of a mobile application for the self-documentation and/or the safeguarding of community ICH. This is also an opportunity for the students to look back and reflect on the whole design process and importantly, how participationin the educational experience led them to the specific proposed design.

Learning Outcomes and Associated Areas of Knowledge

Design a showcase for future users of ICH digitally mediated technology

Evaluate feedback received from future users of ICH digitally mediated technology to inform the prototype design process

Evaluate how one’s own learning processes and participation links to the design process

21st Century Skills

Public Speaking and Presentation

Materials

A large room with enough seats for the community members and a projector.

How to

This involves students designing, implementing and evaluating at multiple levels.

Community Visit Preparation

Prearrange the visit from the community members and the facilities for the presentation. Each team should prepare a 15-minute presentation. The presentation should be designed to focus on:

  • The ICH problem they attempted to solve and the relevance of this to the community;
  • How they approached the community to elicit the needs and perspective of the users in the design process;
  • The feature and characteristics of the application and how these are informed by the insights from the [ICH-HCI workshop].

Community Visit Facilitation

Allocate time for the students to implement their presentation design and also enable discussion with community members after each presentation so that the prototypes can be evaluated by the community and so that these evaluations can be recorded as important data (and subsequently the students can self-evaluate based on this feedback).

A broader discussion at the end of the session would allow some of the wider issues around ICH documentation, participation and community ICH to be revisited.

This session could have a celebratory flavour to wrap up this experience in a nice way and maintain relationships for future collaboration.

Challenges

Give the open nature of this activity, the feedback from the community may focus on other aspects than the design, the features, or the apps. Community membersmay naturally hone in on any sort of mistake and misrepresentation of their ICH.

In our experience, this happened with a misspelled Bedouin word and the photo of (as later discovered) a non-Bedouin tent used as background for an app screen. Community members tended to highlight these mistakes. This led to wider discussion which moved the focus of attention from the apps. It is important to leave space for free talk around these issues as they concern ICH representations which are important to future users. However, as the facilitator of the showcase, ensure that the agenda comes back to a focus on the prototype designs. This could be achieved by having and communicating to community members that there will be a separate section for ‘snags and flags’ where the community are specifically asked to look at this topic. This is better placed after the students have led their feedback sessions.

At the same time, you can also prepare your students for this type of real-world experience and to be readyto address a variety of questions that may not have direct relevance to the prototypes or other aspects of students’ presentations. Showcasing presentation tips, including how to deal with difficult questions, may be worthwhile in your preparation session for the community visit.

Assessment for Learning

The presentations to the community provide an opportunity for the students to assess their showcase designs. The feedback collected and communicated during the community visit provides a real-world opportunity for the students to evaluate their designs and formulate ideas for future iterations.

Evaluation of learningis a key area of assessment for learning in this activity. Providing a space for students to evaluate how the application of their own learning processes and participation link to the prototype design process is really important.

Assessment 'How to'

Before or after the community visit, debrief sessions where students are encouraged to reflect on both the feedback and their own learning are really important to consolidate learning. Although the prototype product represents one tangible outcome of the experience, the process of how these were developed and the students’ input into this is of equal importance.

TIPS

  • Prepare the students to the possibility of having to address questions and comments not immediately relevant to the design process.

The Hilali ToolkitbyThe Hilali Network, Kingston Universityis licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.