Students with experience in videography were asked to create short videos to help promote a local microfinance organization. I showed them a structured way to gather their assumptions and observations, shape them into compelling stories, and start to create videos.
The hardest part of a structured innovation process for the undergrads at CEDIM was understanding how putting up barriers can lead to breaking down barriers. As a reformed artist myself, I understood their desire to explore their own creativity, and I confronted it head-on by requiring them to make an explicit list of questions to guide research, and then to record and analyze their answers in a spreadsheet.
The students soon revolted, demanding from the adminstration that I let them be more creative. In order to show how creativity thrives on constraints, I used examples from history. Everyone agrees that Einstein was a creative rule breaker - yet he didn't simply pull Relativity out of a hat one day. Einstein couldn't just ignore Newton's theories, or pretend that gravity and inertia weren't real. He had to understand the existing physics and to account for the fact that it fairly accurately describes the physical world before he could supersede it.
Similarly, Michelangelo did not produce his genius out of nothing - it required years of study and research. In particular, it required accepting much of his inherited culture and finding ways to break out of it within its boundaries.
The abstract-to-concrete aspect of the design process helps to refine concepts while they're still in a very fluid medium. It was especially useful here to require students to back up their novelty-focused ideas with some evidence from reality.
CEDIM brought in CrediClub, a microfinance lender in need of promotional videos. Thanks to their specific requests and flexibility, the class was able to meet the deadlines we set out as well as take some educational detours. about Management
The brief included updating the client website.
See one of the resulting videos that was aimed at the borrowers: Crediclub Video Corporativo (Spanish).
I led the students through a design process from abstract to concrete: words, stories, pictures, and then video. By making explicit each set of decisions about assumptions, messages, and visuals, we opened the core ideas of each design up to critique and refinement. about Prototyping
I worked with students to develop a theory of interactive music videos and introduced them to Processing as an implementation tool.
I started students down the path of learning object oriented programming by building an example in class.
Students at CEDIM are familiar with brainstorming, post-it note clustering, and creating polished products in multiple media. My challenge was to show them how to use abstractions to help with the process. about Theory