This semester the Art Department hosted a “Demo day” where the studio arts invited the larger campus community to engage with their students and work. There were interactions offered with the painting and ceramics faculty and students.
In the Human Centered Design class (Art 25), students are early in their case work for their semester long design projects, we took the invitation as an opportunity to look for cross discipline engagements between the UX design students and the students and faculty in the ceramic arts. We started by posing a problem statement: “As a Kingsborough Student I want to understand why I should take a ceramics class.” The UX students spent some time writing out basic interview questions that might help them understand the problem and our group headed over to the ceramics room to meet with the ceramics students.
At first there was some warming up, it was our design students first time being asked to do field work and go up to “users” and ask candid questions, but since the whole point of the demo day was to explicitly elicit such an activity, it was something that the students seem to ease into quickly. We spent 20-30 minutes together while UX design students chatted with the ceramics students, building a rapport and taking notes.
Following this, we thanked the ceramics students and faculty and went to the classroom to have a facilitated discussion around the problem statement. There were several themes that students pulled out. Some students were able to connect the idea of experimenting with ceramics to what we call prototyping: Seeing a connection between the iterative process of drafting and forming test objects without being too “precious” about the specific outcomes.
Several marveled at how the ceramics process was natural and came about intuitively as students worked with their hands. There was also an idea that the process of forming the ceramic objects allowed practitioners to connect unconscious thought to physical form. Another mentioned how this process connected to natural forms like animals or natural objects, allowing a “hands-on” connection to nature. Another take was that by working on a project for the whole semester, the ceramics work helped to foster patience and became a therapeutic practice that built enjoyment into the learning process.
One student marveled at how much one could earn from selling pottery, something they hadn’t considered before. They were also surprised to find out that at least one ceramics student would often take inspiration from expensive objects they saw in stores and replicated them as a way to produce beautiful work without it costing too much money.
In total the demo day was quite successful and a helpful way to think through interdisciplinary work within the Art department while exposing students to meaningful interview skills that can help them in their design research practice. It was quite fun too! 🙂
