Design-Manifesto
Project maintained by ksnoddy
Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Welcome to My Personal Page!
Introduction
Hello! My name is Ken Snoddy and I am currently a Junior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute majoring in Management Information Systems with a minor in Computer Science and Data Science.
My current interests include managing big data, and overall utilizing my skillsets in a vast majority of ways.
Some fun facts are that I am half Japanese, and fluent in Japanese.
I go to Japan every summer to visit relatives and also attended school in Japan.
In this design document, I will be explaining my main takeaways along with my own portfolio of projects from the Human Computer Interaction Course (CS 3041) here at WPI.
Projects
- Good Design / Bad Design
- This assignment had us find what we think are good designs and bad designs on the WPI website. For my design document, I chose to write on WPI’s Global Portal. With plentiful opportunities for students to study abroad, the global portal is a great way for students to explore IQP and MQP sites. From this assignment, I was able to start training myself on the overall design of things and the user interface that it provides for the user. For more information, please visit the medium posts below.
- Link to Good Design
- Link to Bad Design
- Design for Others
- This assignment made us redesign a webpage to a specifically assigned demographic. In this project, my group decided to redesign the Technocopia webpage to meet the needs of K12 teachers serving the Worcester Public Schools District. We redesigned the overall webpage to be more user friendly to teachers, having an easier way to engage their students in the Technocopia makerspace in Worcester. This assignment allowed me to understand the importance of visual designs and paper prototypes as it is very helpful when mapping out your design. For more information, please visit the medium post below.
- Link to Design for Others
- Design for Understanding
- For this assignment, we were assigned to use two different visual communication techniques to present the same data set. In my group of four, we split up into two where we analyzed employment after graduation by major through clear communication and reasoning and persuasive communication and storytelling. My partner and I analyzed the data to present it in three different ways that portrayed a clear portrait of the data for the user. I believe that this is project was important as data can be easily understandable for some users over the other. Therefore, it is important to either specialize your data presentations into separate categories based on your users or have a good balance for presenting data visually. For more information, please visit the medium post below.
- Link to Design for Understanding
- Design for Tension
- For this assignment, we were assigned to create a chatbot that tackles a tense topic in our world today. Our chatbot tackled the tense topic of renewable energy sources to strive to inform the people who do believe in the use of renewables with new information on different renewable energy sources. The chatbot also tried to sway the opinion of those who do not believe in the use of renewables by providing them with important facts about the need for the switch. This assignment allowed me to understand the overall flow of conversations between the user and the chatbot as well as the importance of making the chatbot as realistic as possible so that the user feels more comfortable. For more information, please visit the medium post below.
- Link to Design for Tension
- Design for Wellbeing
- For this assignment, we were assigned to design a website that reacts to the user’s emotions to promote wellbeing. My group achieved this my designing a website that took the user’s level of joy listening to different music genres. From there, the website would provide the user with a recommendation for a new music genre to look into. This assignment allowed me to get an understanding of coding in javascript, as well as the significance of understanding how a computer can analyze the user’s emotion just from their facial expressions. Although affectiva was not the most accurate, we were able to take the user’s overall experience with listening to different music genres to provide them with new genres to explore. For more information, please visit the medium post below.
- Link to Design for Wellbeing
Conclusion
Throughout my time in this course, I had learned new design philosophies. These philosophies are found in the various projects done above. I have taken these skills of brainstorming and designing a final product to develop 5 major steps of a design process. My conclusion and further explanations of the 5 design processes can be found in the design document below on medium.