Hi, This article will take you through a journey about why designers and innovators should not give up on ideas which come to them, when they are in the “flow”. Why it is very important to note your ideas down and to be committed and passionate towards making it happen through collaboration with different teams.
1. Design Learnings from IIT Guwahati’16
Being an Interaction Design student at IIT Guwahati, i got to work with some really passionate, inquisitive friends/folks/professors from the Department of Design (DOD).
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Design Education in initial years of college had made us quite sensitive and active observers about the problems around us and introduction to HCI by Prof. Keyur Sorathia, had given us an overall view of making human interactions with computer more natural through innovative interaction methods to solve various problems in the field of Learning Science.
My friend Rohan Vijay had been quite sensitive and inquisitive about the challenges in traditional way of teaching and learning pedagogy of computational thinking concepts (aka. Programming Concepts), as well as the research done by MIT Media Labs on the same for K-12 students.
We joined hands in coming up with Code Bits, a paper based tangible computational thinking toolkit that is inexpensive, portable and scalable and was aimed towards making it easier for K-12 student to learn programming concepts in a more interaction, fun and collaborative way using Augmented Reality. [Video] [Research Paper]
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While working on this project, we realised the utility of Design Research (specifically Literature Review) and Rapid Prototyping using Unity and Gamification Concepts needed to solve problems and come up with innovative solutions in the field of Learning Science.
Based on my understanding of HCI and evolution of interfaces, while working on this project I realised why cant we use Gestures as a natural input method to enable kids to give instructions to a system about different functions to solve a problem, which they find it boring to understand naturally.
Recall reading and memorising weird syntaxes while learning coding in your school’s computer class? Did you hate it?
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Seemed like a crazy idea, but still we tried parallelly exploring Leap Motion to detect certain Gestures which would give instruction to a turtle who is try to navigate through a maze. Due to certain technical glitches and the deadline of the conference for submissions we could not bring this idea to a working prototype, and published the AR enabled toolkit.
2. Innovation Culture at SRIB
I was fortunate to work as a UX Designer with some amazing folks at SRIB, on conversational design experiences. While working at SRIB, i was actively involved in a lot of ideation contest for different products and services, as well as liked the innovation culture in teams to come up with innovative patents to solve core design + business problems.
Innovation oriented culture keeps mind focused to being a designer aimed towards solving right problems and fuels creativity
Along with working on commercial projects for business, i always wanted to work on side projects which keeps the creative mind active. I started thinking of how i could bring back certain ideas which were not executed earlier in my journey due to constraints and about which i was passionate as well.
While at home one day i realised how homo sapiens interacted with each other using gestures first than any other form of language like visual or voice commands. This made me start working on a side project CodeFruits, which was aimed to use Gamification Techniques and Hand Gestures to teach programming concepts to K-12 students by playing a game. [Video] [Research Paper]
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3. Passion, Perseverance and Collaboration
For this project, i collaborated with some talented folks, Dileep Mohanan whose experience in Computer Science and Game Design Principles helped create a Purposeful Game with strong Game Design Principles and Simran Chopra whose understanding of storytelling and writing skills helped us get the research paper correct and got published in CHI Play 2017.
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With continued efforts we are also able to get a patent for this idea/ framework of Teaching Computational Thinking Concepts through Hand Gestures and Gamification Techniques.
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This project taught me how belief in an vision + collaboration with right team can give you intended results
This journey has made me realise that passion and perseverance is what is needed the most to bring your vision and ideas into existence. Also how you need to connect the dots from your past experiences, observations and literature research available to come up with creative solutions.
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Currently i have taken up the challenge to work in the field of Design Education and creating Learning Experiences. I hope you enjoyed this read, if yes do share in your thoughts and ideas. Written with utmost passion and sincerity by Me.
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Don’t give up on your IDEAS was originally published in Designerrs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.