Designing a product for learning Visual Thinking

Designing a product for learning Visual Thinking

Smit, R.D.

Van Mourik, F. (mentor)
Hoftijzer, J.W. (mentor)
Volkers, N. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Design for Interaction

2014-06-27

Visual Thinking is becoming an increasingly important and popular skill to learn. Yet currently there are relatively few products and methods available to people for learning it. This creates the opportunity to design a new product for learning visual thinking. The design of this product requires and understanding of how visual thinking itself works, and of the users and their context for which the design is done. Literature studies, in-depth-interviews and observations provided insights on the context of the target users who want to learn visual thinking. The understanding of the target users and context is formulated in the user model and the project design goal: “Design a digital interactive product, that facilitates the learning process of visual thinking and enables users to apply it in a company context." The context and user understanding form the basis for the project’s design phase. Through several iterations concepts were designed, tested and refined until they formed the basis of the final design. The final design is named PaperPlane. It is a digital web-based platform that facilitates people in learning the skill of visual thinking. PaperPlane offers users an new interactive way to learn visual thinking in cycles of four steps: By viewing the content, practicing, applying, and reflecting. Users learn by going through courses made up of small modules. Inside the modules is the learning content in the form of images, videos and other media, or links to external resources. Users practice by doing drawing exercises in every module and directly apply their visual thinking skills in assignments at the end of every course. The platform then lets users reflect on their learning process and drawings individually, and also in the form of a social system of peer reviews. During the learning process the platform guides people, but at the same time provides autonomy and a non-linear learning path, where the learner is in control. Outside of the learning process, PaperPlane provides two tools for enabling users apply visual thinking in their work. One is the Story Tool, which functions as a wizard for visualising stories from users’ work context. The other is the Visual Library; a collection of example drawings, templates and inspiration. These tools can be accessed from anywhere at any time in the platform. The design was evaluated with a final test of user experience and product usability, showing that the design fulfils the design goal.

Visual Thinking
Drawing
Experiential Learning
Graphicacy
Platform
Website

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:49bf6454-f465-466f-90c8-dbd48a3dbfb3

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Smit, R.D.