Author Archives: Steve
Week 8: Designing a Self-Care System
Week 7: Goals, actions and feedback loops
Decks from class:
Class
Pangaro [PDF 3.3MB]
Assignments for this week:
1. TEAM PROJECT: Modeling Your Personal Thoughts on Health
TEAM ONE: Fred, Ji Hyun, Carl
TEAM TWO: Ryan, Doug, Suvarchala
TEAM THREE: Paul, Jamie, Ju Yun, Craig
TEAM FOUR: Valentina, Kimi, Frankie
You will meet with your team and spend no more than 1 hour sharing your personal Thoughts on Health. As one person shares, another team member will act as a post-it scribe and identify in your story components of a cybernetic model: systems, goals, actions (behaviors), sensing mechanisms, environment, disturbances, comparators, feedback, etc. Group these accordingly. And document your group process with photos.
After each team member has shared their story on health, you will collaborate as a team to identify a system that includes two feedback loops that cut across all your stories where one loop is nested inside the other (a second-order system).
CYBERNETIC MODEL
As a team you will first create a diagram of the system and then save this as a PDF that can be printed out on a single sheet of paper.
1. You will identify the components of the system and their functions.
2. Describe the components in cybernetic terms.
3. Visually represent the relationships between components.
4. Give your team and system a title.
The diagram is meant to help your audience answer these questions:
a. Where is the boundary between the system and its environment?
b. Where is the boundary between the observed system and the observing system?
c. What is the goal of the observing system and of the observed system?
d. What kinds of disturbances force the system away from its goal?
FURTHER ABSTRACTING
After your team diagrams the 2nd order model, you are then to create a SECOND REPRESENTATION of your model that abstracts the cybernetic components in a way that is different from the type of diagram we’re familiar with. Here are some suggestions to help kickstart your ideas:
* Refer back to Tobie Kerridge’s work on Vital Signs
* Performance, skit, dance, movement
* Using everyday objects
* Using sound
* Using videos, slides
* Shadow puppets
Have fun with this.
DUE: Post your team’s photo documentation of your process and the final cybernetic diagram to the blog by SUNDAY NOV 6 AT 5PM
PRESENTATION: On Monday, Nov 7 your team will have 15 MINUTES to present your SECOND REPRESENTATION
Week 6: Body as interface
Decks from class:
Class
Assignments for this week:
1. I want you to think about these questions carefully.
* How do you define health for yourself?
* What’s important to you about your health?
* What do you want to work on that improves your health?
* What does a healthy moment (or day/month/year) look like to you?
Look at these different component’s of a person’s health and well-being.
* Body
* Mind
* Relationships
* Money
* Work
* Environment
* Happiness
Are there any that are missing? What do you already do in terms of self-care for each of these components? What do you wish you could do more of? And what don’t you do but wish you did? What type of products and experiences might you create that would inspire you to be as healthy as possible?
Think of yourself as a designer of your own health.
Write a 1-2 page response to these questions as a blog post titled <your first name>’s Thoughts on Health. I respect that you may not want to share your response on the public blog. If so, please email me your response.
2. Read pp. 370-385 from Designing Design by Kenya Hara titled “Exformation, a New Information Format”
After you read Exformation, I want you to choose something from one of the component’s of a person’s health and well-being that we’re all very familiar with and brainstorm a process of making things unknown. Generate 2-3 ideas that explore Hara’s idea of exformation. Create one page or one slide for each idea. Keep these loose. Sketches are fine. Articulate the ideas in whatever way you’re most comfortable doing. (Think back to our QS fantasy system exercise.)
3. Read pp. 43 – 67 from Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne titled “Para-Functionality: The Aesthetics of Use”
Imagine that you are going to write a chapter on the aesthetics of use for an upcoming book about health and health care innovation. Borrowing from themes outlined in Dunne’s chapter, research and find a project that exemplifies what Dunne calls “para-functionality.”
Create a blog post with your entry. I will leave the title up to your imagination.
POST TO THE BLOG: BY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 1st AT 12 NOON
Week 5: Habit formation
Decks from class:
Class
Reading for this week:
a. Open Loop Models and First-Order Feedback Loops from a working draft of Introduction to Cybernetics and the Design of Systems by Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro. // We’re grateful to Dubberly & Pangaro for permission. // Do not distribute.
“In order to achieve a goal, a system must be able to sense its environment, compare what it senses (current state) to a model of its goal (desired state), and to act in a manner that moves closer to the goal. As a shorthand, we refer to systems that are so organized as “cybernetic systems”. In general terms, a system experiences disturbances from its environment that move it away from its goal. The system must be able to respond so that it can achieve its goal despite the disturbance.” – Paul Pangaro
Assignment for this week:
Your will create 3 diagrams of 3 different systems that include automatic feedback.
System 1 & 2
Identify an existing system that relates to the theme, goal, and/or set of behaviors that you’re considering for your final project: a self-care system. For example, I’m thinking of doing a self-care system around losing weight and so I might diagram a first-order feedback loop where a body scale was involved.
System 3
Find an existing system that’s completely out of your domain of interest. This system can be observable to you in the environment or it can be something that you research. For example, I barely know anything about cars so I might like to model how a carburetor works.
Create 3 diagrams total and save these as a PDF and post to the blog.
- Identify the specific components of the system
- Describe the components in terms of the canonical form of a 1st order feedback loop (sensing, comparing, acting)
- Diagram the relationships between the components visually
- Give your system a title
- Refer back to the reading as needed.
POST TO THE BLOG: BY 5 PM SUNDAY 23 OCT
Week 4: The School of Life Sunday Sermons, Round 2
Read comments posted by your classmates on The School of Life Sunday Sermons from this week. Select a new video to watch and provide your reaction as a comment to this blog post.
Tell us why you chose the sermon, what you learned, what, if anything, you heard that you’d consider incorporating into a system of self-care as an idea, a method, a design constraint, etc. Include the video’s title and link.
Week 4: Mass Interpersonal Persuasion: An Early View of a New Phenomenon
Week 4: Creating Persuasive Technologies: An Eight-Step Design Process
Week 4: The Primacy of Self-Regulation in Health Promotion
The Primacy of Self-Regulation in Health Promotion by Albert Bandura
Week 4: Don’t Shoot the Dog
Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor.
Read Foreword, Ch 1, 2, and 4. (Book handed out in class.)