I really like the model described in the article of Karen Brennan. Designing, personalizing, sharing and reflecting seem like simple concepts when they are treated individually. However, when a system/activity could successfully integrate them all together, it is a very powerful learning and creating cycle. 

Designing something is always a good starting point to learn something unexpectedly. Conventional design education defined the first step of designing is to look for a problem and turns the problem, always an ill-defined one, into well defined ones. The process from ill-defined to well-defined, for me, is to break an unknown scope into several known but unfamiliar scopes. By relating, referencing and learning knowledge from these known but unfamiliar scopes, a designer equips fundamental knowledge and further assemble (design) them to solve the ill-defined problem.

Once the the solution for the ill-defined problem is generated, the designers kind of creates a new scope of knowledge which actually didn't exist before. The new solution/knowledge is very unique and personal. We can also say the solution itself has the designer's personal style. However, the solution still needs further judgment, testing, adjustment and modification by sharing with others to get feedbacks and corrections. In design school, critiquing is the format for publicly sharing, discussing and collecting lots of feedbacks. A designer get feedbacks from others and also contribute feedback for others. Critiquing also involves a public presentation where lots of personal created knowledge are demonstrated. Designers actually learn solutions of others unconsciously. 

Reflecting is the final part. After the sharing, the designer gets feedbacks, learns others' solutions and also has approvals from experts for the good parts of his solution. By removing the wrong parts and integrating learned parts, the designer generate new version of solution which is ready to be put into another cycle of creating.

There are different kinds of course evaluations. One is exam-based, the other is project-based. Reviewing my studying history, I actually didn't performed well until college. This phenomenon might because of that ways of evaluation in high school are mostly exam-based (performance goal), and that in college and graduate school are project-based (learning goal). An exam based evaluation always has a "right" answer for each questions, while a project-based evaluation usually doesn't have a predefined "correct" goal for student to figure out. This also explains why I feel learning lots of new knowledge and getting valuable experiences while doing a project, but struggling a lot while preparing an exam. However, I still think these two types of exams should coexist. For skill-based courses, there could be more exams with performance goal. For discovery-based courses, having more evaluations with learning goal would be better.

I was participating in a project named "The Heart of Hsinchu" in 1999 when pursuing my first Master's in Taiwan. At that moment, the Taiwanese government was pushing the idea of "Community Rebuild" by adopting "Participatory Design" method. We invited the residents of Hsinchu city to join the design process of rebuilding the "East Gate", an important relic built in Ching Dynasty of China. Due to locating at the center of the city, the East Gate is later named The Heart of Hsinchu.

During the process, we studied the history of Hsinchu city and prepared plenty of posters to illustrate and represent design backgrounds to the residents. We held many forums to discuss and collect design requirements and conducted several workshops to invite residents to design their dream ideas. Here came one important issue: the residents didn't have any design background to convert their abstract ideas into concrete architectural representations. So, the role of us is kind of a converter or a drawing hand for the residents; we listened to residents' ideas then turned them into architectural solutions. We went back and forth between their non-visualized ideas and our visualized drawings. During this process, while residents eventually learned the language of architectural representation, we learned what residents' ways of thinking. The outcome was very fruitful and everyone was satisfied.

13 years later, I am raising a question: how to design a computational participatory design system that can help participants with different expertise to learn from each other. Different from current "Meta Design" system, such as scratch which mainly help people to learn programming skills by applying to different domains, such a system of "learning different skills to apply to diverse domains" seems a bit more complicated to define and design.

I am a Mies fan during my undergraduate in architecture design. His design philosophy is "Less is more" and he is always good at using minimum amount of vertical and horizontal walls to "compose" a plan of a building. His building plans, if I don't tell you, looks like abstract paintings. In this turtle art activity, my goal is to make a Mies style plan generator.

After dragging some blocks to make a turtle moving back and forth virtually and horizontally. I start to play with the parameters and using the magic wand to regenerate drawings. It's really fun and is close to the idea of generative art/design which adopts computational method to discover the infinite design space.  

Session 2 Activity

I actually had many objects of my childhood which played different roles of my later development of career. LEGO building blocks aroused my interests of making shapes and possibly leaded to my undergraduate in Architecture. APPLE II and Nintendo gave me lots of experiences of interacting with digital content and seeded my current focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) 25 years ago. I can keep giving examples to relate every tiny object with every crucial movement of my life. However, none of them dominated my life in a structured way. The current "I" is kind of assembled piece by piece through time randomly.

But there is one thing worth to mention that I like to watch people's faces and to tell if they lie. This traced back to my lonely childhood. My mom and I lived in a suburban area, and my father worked in town and only went home once a week. Every time he got home, I was extremely happy. But as soon as he left, I felt so bad. So, as long as my father was home, I always sticked with him and didn't let him leave my sight. My father had to make up stories and reasons, such as go to bathroom, go pick a stuff in the garage, go pick up the newspaper at the front door, etc., to slip away from me for work on Monday morning. After several times of being cheated and heart broken, I leaned how to tell my father's facial expression and body language intuitively.  

According to this childhood experience, I equipped basic ability of observing a person's emotion while talking to him/her. This made me many good friends and had a very good social life in high school and college. This ability also benefited my first graduate study in Taiwan where I mainly focused on Design Cognition. I conducted so called "Think Aloud Protocol" to retrieve designers' mind via verbal and graphical evidences. During the experiments, I was extremely good at asking right questions to tell if designers were making up their stories of design. I was also interested in how their facial expressions related to their thinking processes. Later on I devoted myself into the study of HCI in Carnegie Mellon and was eventually ended up with a job as a User Experience Designer in ASUS for the past three years. I actually can't believe that my professional skills were built up so early when I was three years old, but indeed it happened.

Tinkering with physical parts and materials seems to be the core activity and value for tinkers to create and learn. However, as a designer, in addition to tinkering with physical representation, I actually tinker more with visual representation which is my own sketch. By randomly grabbing a piece of paper and a pen, I can freely and rapidly visualize questions, ideas, assumptions and whatever in my mind. The interesting part is that, by sketching, I can not only visualize my existing mental images but see some emergent images and solutions through the process of sketching.

My personal experiences are actually proved by researchers in the field of design study. In Donald Schon's classic paper [1], he indicated that designers always have conversation with their drawings. In seeing-moving-seeing model, designers perceive drawings, retrieve information, generate reflection and draw new ideas on top of existing one. In Liu's research [2], he even simulated that designers are capable of seeing something that non-designers could see. These "emergent shapes" are always the value of an expert designer and also origin of creativity.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0142694X9290268F
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0142694X9400001T

I am now comfortable with using micro controller to manipulate actuators and sensors. And I have to thank my previous advisor, Prof. Mark Gross, who leaded me into the Tangible Interaction Design field by using a weird way, at least it was really weird for an asian student like me.

As I remembered, after handing over us a "small computer" named Handyboard and giving us a short "hello world" introduction in the first class of Architectural Robotics in 2005, he gave us a crazy assignment: use two servo motors to make a robotic arm which can write a character "A". Two students formed a team and the assignment was due in one week. Most students in the class were architecture background and had no experience of programming. Making a robotic arm was not hard for us, but controlling it was really an issue. The key for controlling the arm to write a character "A" is the equation which takes x and y coordinates to convert into two servo rotation degrees. 

After intensively working for days, we still couldn't solve the question. I was highly interested in learning physical computing but felt so sad about my ability of math. I called my wife (she was an art teacher working in Taiwan at that moment) for daily chatting. While I was telling her my tough assignment, she was complaining about students in her calligraphy class. She said students always didn't follow the provided red grid to make the writing correct. "Grid!" This was exactly the key for my problem. I definitely couldn't make an equation, but I could write an A on a grid paper and manually tried out different rotation combinations of servo motors to reach intersections of the A and the grid. I wrote down all the rotation combinations of intersections and stored them in an array for the program to reference, and it worked.

The next day, before I presented my result. I told Mark that I was using a bad method because of my lack of math. After the presentation, Mark said it was the most creative way he've seen in the class. As an asian student, we are taught there is always only one correct answer for a question. However, through the class, it was my first time feeling that, firstly, there might be a correct answer, but there should be many creative ones. Secondly, some key ideas are always generated by randomly chatting and reviewing other people's works, experiences and life. Thirdly, one's passion on learning can help break through hurdles. These experiences totally fit some ideas that are described in the computer clubhouse paper.     

In my learning experience, there was always a teacher standing in front of a blackboard talking about the content of a thick bible-like textbook. It's just like the metaphor of a "Tea Pot" continuously pours "Tea" into a "Tea Cup." Even in the college, this kind of learning format occupied 70% of my learning experiences. I was so lucky to major in architecture so that I still have 30% of learning life under the so called prenticeship.

At the fist day of my architectural design studio, the teacher leaded us to the front door of the university and asked us " what do you think of the door? why did the architect design a door like this?" Then, he gave us a whole day to discovery the answer. For a group of kids who just graduated from high schools where they were taught to think by following instructions and principles, solving such an open question with probably no correct answers was extremely hard. I don't plan to describe the final results of our findings, but I have to say it was really a messy process. While some students were blaming the teacher giving such a nonsense question, others were angry at themselves for not getting good grades to enter a medical school. Some even fought each other for figuring out whose answer is correct. 

Of course, after a semester, we all loved this new way of learning by which we could look for interesting topics to define problems and generate creative answers. What we learn from the studio is not a series of knowledge on textbooks but an attitude to figure out those undefined territories. Till now I still can't forget the teacher of the studio and the question. It's actually a key for my life to enter the territory of invention and design. If you are interested in the picture below, would you please also try to tell me what do you think of this door? 

Session 4 Reflection

After reading the three articles, I eventually realized what the notion of "powerful idea" is and transferred into my own words, which is probably not 100% accurate but is the best way that I can understand. So, for me, the powerful idea is a logic which can not only be used to explain what things are but to create what things ought to be. It's a framework of thinking that can adapt to different scopes to generate diverse solutions.

In these articles, the examples of powerful idea pretty much focus on scientific facts such as the idea of "zero" or the concept of "probability." However, as a architectural designer involving in more humanities and social sciences than science and engineering, I think a powerful idea is a "design philosophy" that designers uniquely equip and strongly believe. The design philosophy could be a way that a designer uses to "explain", "represent", and "make use of" his design production.

Take Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for example, he is one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture adopted the motto of " Less is more" to explain his famous design philosophy of minimalist design. I have no idea how he generated the idea, but once having it he applied it on every aspect of his life, including his way of interpreting the world, his life style, his building design, his furniture design and his paintings. So, "Less is more" is his powerful idea that empowered his thinking and creating processes.

One of my own powerful idea is "contrast." The word "contrast" is  always used to describe the visibility of an element on a background. If the contrast is high, the element is easier to be distinguished from the background and vice versa. However, it is not merely a visual phenomena and could by applied on many aspects of our life. For example, in a class discussion, you could raise your volume to generate high contrast to make people remember your ideas. You could also come up with very unique point of views to have high contrasts. You could also sit beside a silence classmate to make your talk having high contrast. 

If you want to highlight yourself in a specific occasion or to be successful in your life journey, pleas "contrast" yourself.

Session 3 Reflection

I felt that learning by making is very close to so called "design behavior" in the filed of design education. In design education, students are encouraged to discover unknown design issues and solve them by observing the real world, asking questions, generating potential answers, applying the answers to the world to test, observing the improved changes, then going into the next iteration. This process turned me into a good student in college in architecture from a bad student in general high school in Taiwan where I was requested to follow and memorize terminologies, equations, instructions and processes to produce exactly correct answers. 

My mom had a conclusion that I have better genes of design than that of scientific subjects. However, I didn't agree with it. I think I just need a right way to learn which Taiwanese education system didn't offer at the moment. In high school I tried very hard to only memorize things before I fully understood them. When studying architecture in college, I learned and even created more ideas whenever I had better understandings of real situations. Figuring out ill-defined problems of daily life to learn and create knowledge is better than learning knowledge (answer) of well defined problems on textbooks.

When I was a college sophomore, the 3D CAD tools were just introduced to Taiwan. I immediately fell in love with this amazing tools which enabled me to do things that conventional media, such as pen, paper, foam and cardboard, couldn't afford. With 3D CAD tools, I was capable of creating and erasing 3D objects quickly. I could use boolean operations to dig holes on an object and to glue two objects together in seconds. These operations always took hours to achieve when playing with cardboards. 

Even though the CAD tools are so powerful at the moment, I merely treated CAD tools as a more interactive, flexible and efficient media to assist my processes of thinking. I didn't think CAD tools essentially changed my way of design thinking until the notion of generative design was introduced during my graduate study. Generative design, unlike conventional CAD tools focusing on visualizing external representations of design, is to assist designers to realize internal rules of thinking. Designers no more treat their thinking processes as a black box and have to turn their ambiguous thinking into rules which computer could understand and operate. Generative design leads architectural design into a new era where designers are forced to translate the contact in the black box into understandable computational languages.

I never enjoyed the learning by creating until getting into college. I really feel that I waste lots of time on using the worst learning method of the world which still affects and limits my ways of thinking until now. If I had MindStorms and Scratch in my high school, I definitely will do better on my math and physics. If I could really visit mainland China, I will have remember more things from my history and geology courses. In my later college and graduate learning, I learned how to experience through physical environment and to make clear my blur thoughts by translating them into what computer can read. 

I understand problems physically and rationalize solutions digitally.