Examples
The example below is intended to promote user-oriented creative design. For this, it is convenient to organize the students into groups of 2-3 people, so that each group addresses one part of the problem.
Prior to the development of the activity, it is convenient to discover the motivations and interests of the students through questions in order to adapt the story in the most convenient way. In the example in question, these are students who are very interested in the uses of technology and with some knowledge in programming on IoT (Internet of things) devices.
Next, they are exposed to a story that consists of reading the diary of a person with special needs. In the diary, “Mary” tells what a normal day in her life is like. In the story, her hopes are exposed so that in the near future someone will “invent” a device that will help her to “open the door” of her closet automatically when she is around. Her parents installed a small automatic system for her, but it doesn’t work exactly the way she needs it. Mary has investigated different alternatives on the Internet, but they all have advantages and disadvantages that for different reasons do not convince her.
Based on this brief account of the difficulties that “Mary” has in finding a solution that suits her needs, the students must “put themselves in Mary’s shoes” and argue in an argumentative way the different alternatives and find how to solve them.
Once a global design plan has been established, each group can draw up a diagram that includes Maria’s needs, how each of them are solved, how the different solutions are integrated, and what sequence of steps must be carried out to obtain a prototype.
The story can be continued or expanded so that the students themselves can discover inconsistencies and flaws in their designs based on the experience that Mary collects in her journal about the use of the artifacts that the students have designed for her. Storytelling is a technique widely used in the creative process because it connects the designer with the potential user and because it helps them understand and assimilate the problems that the different available technologies contain.
