Whaddya Think

A capstone project for the Graduate Diploma of Creative Technologies at Media Design School. Whaddya Think is a physical brainstorming toolkit that helps design students map the complexity of a design problem before trying to solve it. It includes a card set, two worksheets and a facilitator booklet, packaged in a drawstring bag.

The Challenge
Second year design students were asked to define their own projects. Many chose large, complex topics such as climate change and social inequality, and found that freedom daunting. The research question asked how a toolkit could promote an ecologically literate design approach among undergraduate students. The underlying theory was abstract and dense, drawn from Félix Guattari's three ecologies (mental, social and environmental) and Joanna Boehnert's work on ecological literacy in design education. The challenge was making it engaging and useful for students in the middle of choosing a project.

The Work
The project began as a documentary on human ecology in art and design. Early prototypes explored video, Processing, motion graphics and digital illustration. With the purpose still unclear and documentary production beyond the available resources, the project was reframed. The audience became undergraduate design students, and the medium became education.

Three workshops tested how to communicate the theory.

• Video workshop. A short video and discussion prompts produced little conversation. A feedback questionnaire showed that students' confidence came from familiarity with a topic.

• Speculative objects workshop. Three students assigned functions to three speculative design objects. This produced far more discussion. Students shared more openly when there was no "correct" answer, and handling physical objects increased engagement.

• Final workshop. A 30 minute session with second year Bachelor of Media Design students, built around their own Special Topic projects. Each student worked through 22 cards, each carrying a word linked to the three ecologies, a short definition and one or two prompts. Students mapped connections on an A3 sheet. Topics were framed as "happenings", so the cards could work for any subject. Students reported that their topics gained clarity and wider scope. Time was identified as the main constraint.

The final toolkit brought these findings together: 22 durable cards, a Chaos worksheet and a Reflection worksheet, and a facilitator booklet covering the theory, instructions and ways to apply the thinking beyond academia. It stayed physical, informed by research linking non-digital platforms to higher level construal thinking. Illustration was used throughout to make dense theory approachable, and to stop the Reflection sheet from feeling like a test.