<aside> 🔮 This project is part of Deshonesty — my design MFA thesis on documentation and reflection. Visit the interactive thesis site to see this work in greater detail!
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Promotional “infomercial” video for initial course recruitment — student response far exceeded enrollment capacity for the course.
Documentation for Designers is designed to take designers deep into their process — to help them reflect on their everyday creative choices and overall goals. As a completely new type of design class, I had to develop the entire media ecosystem from scratch, from initial outreach to the syllabus + assignment sheets.
Recruitment for Documentation for Designers began in the summer of 2021. Anticipating that the subject of process documentation might not generate much interest on its own, I created a suite of promotional materials to engage undergraduate students in the possibilities of documentation to enrich their practice.
These materials are designed to be equally at home in an email inbox or posted to social media. The course booklet (below) doubles as both an informational PDF and a seamlessly scrolling multi-panel Instagram post. I also created a semi-satirical infomercial video for the course (above) that sums up the key outcomes for the class, YouTuber-style. Student response to the materials, particularly the video, was robust — indicating the potential of new media strategies in inviting students to consider new courses.
Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award — UC Davis 2021-22
Savageau Award in Design — UC Davis Department of Design 2022
Faculty Choice poster award — SOTL UC Davis 2021
The course recruitment booklet — a multipage PDF and a continuous scroll for Instagram.
I configured the Documentation for Designers course materials as a wiki — a living database of interlinking documents. Using the Bit.ai platform, I created a series of rich documents with interactive embeds. The syllabus (below) links to all the other individual assignment sheets in the ecosystem, and also contains searchable resource databases containing information on freely accessible software tools and documentation inspiration.
Class assignments — AKA “recipes” — are designed to ease students into unfamiliar ways of documenting and reflecting. By allowing students to concentrate on gathering materials and following sequential steps, the recipe format emphasizes process over outcome, and even integrates mindfulness cues throughout each procedure (take a breath; take a break and come back...). In this way, course recipes offer students a blueprint for embodying their practices at a slower, more contemplative pace better suited to reflexive learning.
