Project Presentation
Today we tried to put 20 students into our client's shoes for our group project. We began by simulating an office meeting where the "speaker" (me, miming to simulate our hearing-impaired client’s experience of work meetings) was presenting a pie chart on one side of the room while what was being said was being displayed on a projector across the room. The students were trying to watch what I was pointing to on the chart, read the text being displayed across the room, process the information and have an opinion on it simultaneously.
Here's the text and my special pie chart! (I called my character Jemima because she was miming…no one noticed this joke).
In the short presentation, the students couldn't see where/what I was pointing to and read the text at the same time. So, of course, there were no objections after I said a particular table of people were going to fail and I was going to reduce everyone's grades by 30%. Also, no one noticed that the pie chart didn't even add up to 100%...
Luckily, I'm not in control of their grades or any of the technical drawings for our assignment!
Lots of them laughed when I told them what we had done, but it seemed like a really effective way of making them see how serious the problem was.
Below is an "artists impression" of the app we designed. The client can see the transcription of the meeting while watching a video of what's going on around her. Heaps of ideas were tossed around from projector displays to google glass, but this best realised the client's requirements.
I even stole a line from my previous blog ("Social Engineering") for the end of the presentation where we had decided we wanted to "say something profound". Here it is:
"This simple system is important because we're levelling the playing field by allowing someone to demonstrate their ability and not their disability to their co-workers."
And that's how little projects like these are really part of something much, much bigger than they seem.
Love,
Emily
AKA Jemima
0 comments:
Post a Comment