Arwen Sadler

Over the course of a semester, I worked in a team of five to create a proposal for a product or service that would improve the lives of librarians. We are currently halfway through the project, and are in the process of narrowing down to a single idea that we’ll continue to develop for the rest of the semester.

This project was done for a class called User Oriented Collaborative Design. UOCD is a required course at Olin College where students spend the whole semester working on a single project for a specific user group, starting with conducting their own in-depth ethnographic research and ending with a proposal for a product or service that would benefit individuals in their user group. We learn about human centered design processes and techniques such as the creation of user personas and co-design methods, and practice those techniques by doing a project of our own. We also practice presenting our work and receiving feedback through three design reviews equally spaced throughout the semester, as well as a final design review at the end of the semester for our final product.

I led interviews as well as co-designs with our user group, and also assisted in note-taking and synthesizing our findings into physical and digital graphics we could use to help us in our design process. I also assisted with developing ideas with breadth and depth, and constructing frameworks to narrow down our ideas.