Media Design Studio Blog

As Team Pierogi, we, Kathleen, Sumi, Hassan, and Paul were tasked with developing ideas and sketches in response to our research completed thus far in our design challenge: developing more opportunity to spark interdisciplinary collaboration at Emerson College. In brainstorming ideas, we focused on our findings from field scans, observations, and interviews, that could utilize current Emerson spaces and resources that exist or break down access barriers for collaboration. We brainstormed both individually and collaboratively, and decided on multiple rough ideas representing a variety of approaches and ultimately focused on finalizing three contenders which we developed into more complete sketches. Our rough ideas included: Emerson Dance-Off Emerson Dance-Off Idea.  This is an installation game like Dance Dance Revolution, housed in a popular common area on campus, such as the dining hall, the Lion's Den, or maybe 172 Tremont. The goal of the game is to have a dan...

The Design Process Since Noah has been not feeling well these days, three of us had brainstorming process based on what we learned from the stakeholder map that includes staff, faculty and students at Emerson College. We conclude that students at Emerson feel there are barriers among different programs and student groups, in which case students don’t have a lot of connections across different disciplines because geographical separation and lack of channels . The initial idea is to create things that help students overcome barriers and get them more connected to each other. We have a lot of discussions about how to motivate people to engage in the things we design, and how we could design to create more interactions and conversations among students. We started with five ideas each. In the first brainstorming meeting, we three discussed 18 ideas. First, we presented our own ideas individually. Then we discussed it as a whole, removing four that had little to do with sparking colla...

Hand-made design sketches According to our observations and interviews, we found out that Emerson College as a community provides an abundance of collaboration spaces and opportunities. Unfortunately, these events are not regularly attended by students because of time, content, etc. When we were brainstorming together, we came up with several keywords that guided our thinking: “expression”, “shared the experience” and “working collaboratively”. In thinking about expression, we wanted to provide the Emerson community with a platform for students to express what they may be reluctant to express on a public platform. By shared experience, we wanted to give students opportunities to build and offer their skills to their peers through interdisciplinary communication. Lastly, working collaboratively meant that we wanted to encourage students to work or play together recreationally, not just academically. Moreover, we paid attention to the places where students spend most of their tim...