Today’s class 1.Refamilizaring ourselves with the big picture. 2.Debriefing preliminary reflections and user research. 3.Characterizing the user/audience. 4.Getting familiar with envisioning. 5.Storytime.

Um, what are we doing? We are designing a collection of videos on the subject of sustainability. That was easy!

What does “designing a collection” mean? A design is a plan. An architect designs buildings; a construction team builds them. You are collection architects. A design can be represented in various ways. Buildings are represented with blueprints. Your designs will be represented through three documents, which together form your blueprints: A set of personas and scenarios. A design strategy brief. A “sketch” of your collection using the open video toolkit environment.

What does “designing a collection” mean? A collection, for us, is more than a set of documents. A collection is a set of documents that is selected, described, arranged, and made available through a digital library interface. The documents, metadata, information architecture, and various user features are all part of the collection experience. You are designing, or planning out, the entire collection experience. Your particular challenge in doing so is to use the collection to articulate a unique point of view on the subject of sustainability that is persuasive to, and satisfies the information needs of, a particular audience.

How are we doing this? As we discussed last week, our work is structured through an interlocking set of activities. Each class session, we will both discuss the activities we pursued the previous week and prepare ourselves for the activities of the following week.

Where are we now, and where are we going? Last week, we discussed the preliminary reflection and learning activities in class. You were asked to work on these and bring your products to class this week. This week, we will share and discuss the work we did—the preliminary reflection and user research. We will also prepare to undertake the envisioning activity, where we create personas and scenarios (one of your design documents). Next week, we will prepare to begin the strategizing activity, where we create a design strategy brief. We will also be introduced to the sketching environment, the open video toolkit.

What will our final product look like? The “sketch” component of your final product will look like one of these samples, but totally customized for your collection. The “sketch” illustrates your ideas in one way. The personas and scenarios also illustrate your ideas, but in a different way. The design strategy brief explains the rationale behind your approach.

What will our final product look like? For example, let’s say that you want your collection to emphasize the importance of reducing waste to the overall idea of sustainability. Your brief might describe your idea of the audience as being more easily interested in simple techniques for individuals than in more elaborate long-term policy and citizen action. But you, the author, think that both are important. So your plan is to feature videos with simple ideas for home waste reduction on the home page while creating subcollections that link both topics.

What will our final product look like? Your sketch might show a featured video on home composting and a subcollection that combined videos on topics like reusing grocery bags and on corporations that purify and sell their waste carbon dioxide. The descriptions you use would emphasize your rhetorical points in language suited for the audience. Your personas and scenarios would show how a particular person might interact with your collection; what might lead that person to investigate composting videos or what might send that person screaming into the Internets. Any features that you can’t implement in the sketch would also be described here.

Clear as mud? Oh yes, now I am so excited to challenge all my creative and analytical faculties on this fascinating problem!!!