Friday, January 17, 2014

Language learning in the wild - Lorenzo Polo, Anna Clara Rendahl, Frida Åberg


Learning Swedish "in the wild" - Nelson, Maren & Tove



Learning Swedish "in the wild" - Fanny, Ela & Jenny

Journey Map










During this assignment we met with Yaser, who is a studying Svenska För Invandrare (SFI) at Folkuniversitetet. We met him twice and at the first meeting we made a Journey Map of his previous day. From the information he gave us we identified key moments in his everyday life to further explore possible service encounters. 


Experience Prototyping












To test our ideas we made basic prototypes so we could test the experience at our next meeting with Yaser.

Website

A collection of existing services and tools for learning Swedish. It could be connected to another service / company or as a part of the learning materials given from SFI

Board game

A game based on the subway system map to be used in a static context such as Språkcafé or home, for extending vocabulary. The colours of the three lines stands for the word classes; nouns, adjectives and verbs. 

Subway game

A game based on the subway stations, to be used when travelling with the subway. For example Liljeholmen can be divided into Lilja and Holme, with written clues on one side and images on the other, resulting in learning a subway station and two new Swedish words. The game is meant to work as conversation starter with Swedish people. 

Conclusion
The proposals we tested with Yaser did not work as we thought but gave us a lot of insights in how we could change them. The interaction was the most valuable and would probably never had happened if the three of us weren't in the roles of "researchers".
Fanny Carlsson, Ela Celary and Jenny Markstedt































Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Assignment 4 - Service

Assignment 4 explores ‘service’ processes in design, taking a starting point in design’s growing role in the area of public and social service provision. A challenge of design in this area has been how to engage with those who should receive public and social services such as education and care, ie. the widest possible diversity of people. Public services are often dynamic and rely upon co-production between “users”, service providers, and other actors. To address this, design methods have learned from sociology, anthropology and hybrid methods such as co-design. These approaches transform the role of people other than designers in design, in which they are not considered as passive recipients of services delivered to them but as active, knowledgeable and creative.

In this assignment, we start with a particular group of people in a specific context – adult Swedish-language learners in Tensta. Students explore different ways of understanding and engaging the practicalities of their lives, their knowledge and creativity, informed by methods from design anthropology. The goal is to develop a design proposal for how language learning can be further supported in the everyday life of learners. The assignment will also be guided by guest teachers Brendon Clark and Kajsa Davidsson from Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

This assignment starts Jan 7 and concludes with a Show-&-tell on Jan 17. There are two tasks in the assignment, one focused on learning from people and context, the other on making and trying out a design proposal. The reading circle discusses these:
  • Clark, B., Wagner, J., Lindemalm, K., Bendt, O. (2011) Språkskap: Supporting Second Language Learning “In the Wild”. Proceedings of INCLUDE conference.
  • Sangiorgi, D., and Clark, B. (2004) Toward a Participatory Design Approach to Service Design. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference.