July 2020 – Experience Design

29 July 202029 July 2020

You walk through the aisles of a grocery store, and two different boxes of cereal catch your eye. Instead of pulling them down off the shelf, holding them side-by-side to compare them, you simply point your phone at each one. The ingredients, nutritional information, expiration date and allergy warnings appear on-screen, overlaying the image of the box. You have all of the information about the products – that which is printed on the box and more – complete with video and animation possibilities. Imagine pointing your phone at a box of pasta and instantly accessing videos of recipes in which it can be used.

The advantages of such packaging isn’t mere convenience. It allows people with limited mobility to easily access product information. People who are visually impaired can hear text spoken aloud via headset. In warehouse stores, with towering shelves, shoppers can point their phones at items on the top shelf and learn about them without having to wait for assistance. It also means less handling of products, making shopping a more hygienic experience. All of this is possible with augmented reality.

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The Face of Distance Learning

17 July 202017 July 2020

Everyone is struggling with what school will look like this fall in the face of our current pandemic; likely, many students will be taking classes remotely. If it’s true, as the American Psychological Association states, that “interpersonal relationships and communication are critical to both the teaching-learning process and the social-emotional development of students,” what effect will distance learning have on this generation of students?

Almost one-fourth of the American rural population doesn’t have access to reliable broadband internet service, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Fortunately, there are other options. There are countries using broadcast media to disseminate lessons, says the World Bank. Some guidelines propose distributing chapters of textbooks in print or videos via memory cards or CDs. Television and radio along with printed materials could provide a robust distance learning experience without internet availability.

But even with every student able to access at-home learning, we need to address the psychological effects of educating without the benefit of in-person interaction. Social-emotional education must become more intentional, both because we have limited access to cues like body language and facial expression and because the pandemic is creating chronic stress. This means discussions that help students identify emotions in themselves and others and express those emotions appropriately. It means one-on-one counseling for families. These cannot replace in-person social interaction, but they can mitigate the isolating effects of remote education.

In designing a remote learning curriculum that takes all individuals into account, we can incorporate art, writing projects and a variety of communication tools for students who struggle with expressing themselves in words. Outdoor, socially-distanced meetings can serve students, like those with special needs, for whom in-person instruction is absolutely vital. Design may also take on the role of improving video conferencing to make it a more sensory, meaningful experience for teacher-student interaction.

Education without the benefit of in-person group dynamics presents a challenge, both in accessibility and psychology, but we can seize the opportunity to explore the various methods by which lessons can be shared. We can create more robust social-emotional learning and come out of the pandemic a more emotionally intelligent society with a more dynamic education system than we have ever seen before.