1st Day of Class

Announcements

• Class meets next week on Tuesday, September 8.

Intros

Let go around the room and introduce ourselves; state your name, your year, your focus (game design, animation, web or mobile development, etc) and what you hope to get out of the class.

Class Overview

• What is design?
• How do you go about “designing” something?
• What about user-centered design?
• What’s Open Data?
• Trenton
• The Knight News Challenge

Syllabus

Let’s review the syllabus.

Assignment

• Log into Google Drive and create a new presentation, title it “Design Notebook”

Useful data for building communities

• Read the Knight News Challenge Brief
• Look over the Isles, Inc. website; be sure to look over the “About”, “I Want To…” and “Learn About” menus.
• Create a new slide in your Design Notebook and title it “Useful data for building communities”.
• Consider the following quote from the challenge:  “We believe that data can unlock useful information and that information is key to stronger, more knowledgeable communities.”  
• Write a paragraph or two describing what kind of data you believe would be useful to helping Isles with their mission to “foster self-reliant families and healthy, sustainable communities”? How could you collect that data? Where might you be able to find already existing data about communities in Trenton and New Jersey?

Contextual Awareness

• Read Why contextual awareness is about to change the way you use tech.
• Create another slide in your Design Notebook and label it “Contextual Awareness”.
• Think about how the kinds of data you identified in the previous slide might be made contextually aware. What kinds of devices would be needed to work with that data? Would most people in Isles communities have access to those kinds of devices? Write another paragraph outlining your thoughts.

Submitting Your Work

This week’s homework assignment is due next week before class. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (1st Day of Class), including a link to your Design Notebook.