Design Briefs

In 2019, The Dribbble platform introduced “weekly warm-up prompts” for interface designers to “flex their creative muscles”.

Read the introductory post.

Some examples:

To find more prompts:

Ask the students to take part in the IxDA Student Design Charette.

The term “charette” evolved from a pre-1900 exercise at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France. Architectural students were given a design problem to solve within an allotted time. When that time was up, the students would rush their drawings from the studio to the Ecole in a cart called a charrette. (…) Today it refers to a creative process akin to visual brainstorming that is used by design professionals to develop solutions to a design problem within a limited timeframe.

Julia Corrin, Carnegie Mellon University Library

Website: https://www.sdc.ixda.org/

Some of the previous briefs:

2022 brief: explore how rethinking systems can enable cultures of inclusion and equity
“You are challenged to select either education or the workplace as a focus, identify interesting or provocative use cases, and propose new systems to address a barrier that your use case illustrates. (…) Design an experience (it can be a product, service, or program) that illustrates for the SDC judges and IxDA community how someone’s life can be impacted positively by the shift in your new system. The goal is less about solving a specific problem and more about proposing how to address biases, assumptions, and barriers that marginalize participation and inclusion.”
https://www.sdc.ixda.org/design-brief-22

2021 brief: Our Data and Global Wellbeing
“How might we achieve greater collective wellbeing through the power of our individual data? hat might data about us, as individuals, contribute as part of global initiatives for the good of society? You are challenged to explore issues of global health and wellbeing, identify interesting or provocative use cases, and design for the outcomes our 21st century world demands, through transparent, empowered, participation with data.” (source)

Video of the 2021 design charette, the topic: “Our Data & Global Wellbeing”. The winning team, PulseAir, decided to focus on the negative health effects of air pollution.

The 2020 brief, sponsored by Amazon Design: Using voice to create empowering moments
“How might voice experiences improve the lives of people facing unique challenges? More specifically, how can Alexa better address the needs of the deaf, blind, disabled, or neuro-diverse? We want to hear your ideas for new devices or services that can empower those who may need it the most”. (source)

The 2019 brief, sponsored by Microsoft Design, on the theme of Empathy: “Design an experience (this can be a product, service, or program) that allows (…) to better understand a day in the life of someone with misunderstood or ignored differences” (source)

The 2018 brief, sponsored by Microsoft Design, focuses on one of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals: “Quality Education”. (source)

The 2017 brief, sponsored by Intel, had the theme “Everyday Magic”. “We want you to look at the everyday life that surrounds you and how, through design and the creative use of new technologies, you can make it a magical”. (source)

The 2016 brief, sponsored by SapientNitro and written by Daniel Harvey, had the theme: “The Future we deserve”. “Each day of our lives, we depend on services — from buses to traffic systems, sanitation to healthcare — to survive and thrive in the places we live. What would five years look like, if you could shape public services by tapping the opportunities we have at our disposal today that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve in the past?” (source)

The 2015 brief had the theme “Envisioning the Wearable City”: “What if you could imagine new ways for people to connect to their city through wearable technology — to improve their life and their city? What would you measure or share? What problems would you solve? What new relationships between you and your environment would you facilitate?” (source)

The 2014 challenge had the theme of “child health records”.

The 2013 challenge had the theme “Playful Technology”

Create an augmented reality poster using Artivive.

Getting started: https://artivive.com/resources/getting-started/create-your-first-ar-artwork/

Some examples and case studies:

https://www.ravenshane.ca/case-study-ar-poster

Augmented poster by Ta-Daa Studio, Geneva

The format doesn’t necessarily need to be a poster: it can be a postcard, an image in a publication…

When working in the non-english-speaking world, it’s a common scenario that a typeface used for a design is missing a small number of diacritics or glyphs used in a specific language – german, icelandic, norse, polish…

A language that uses the latin alphabet “plus some special characters” is the Pan-Nigerian alphabet. By adding those characters to a font that was missing them, the font becomes usable for millions of people. Nigeria has a population of approximately 216.7 million, speaking over over 525 native languages.

In this exercise, students receive the task to make an open-source font available for the Nigerian native languages, by adding the missing characters.

The list of glyphs needed:

The first edition of Genuary was launched in January 2021: the website genuary2021.github.io provided 31 prompts – 1 per day – to invite participants to “make beautiful things with code”.

GENUARY aims to make it possible for people to do 31 daily prompts, one every day, during that day.

On the Generative reddit board, Piterpisma writes:

it started in Inktober, when a couple of generative artists remarked they found it difficult to apply the prompts of Inktober to generative art. Then I thought I came up with the name “Genuary”

Productions were to be shared on twitter using the hashtag #genuary2021.

Some participants documented their creations on a website, such as data scientist Ram Narasimhan (who codes using the Python extension of Processing).

Genuary 2022

Another edition takes place in 2022, the website being genuary.art and the twitter hashtag #genuary2022. Some of the prompts:

A github issue collects prompt suggestions for the 2023 edition.

See also: Plot Party

A similar five-day prompt was launched in November 2021 under the name “Plot Party” by the pen plotter community. The prompts were:

Results are gathered on the Pen Plotter Artwork Blog, and can be found via the #plotparty hashtag.

A few years ago, Taschen released a heavy volume of web design history –Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today.

The survey in the book ends in 2018.

In this brief, students are asked to continue the story by adding a new chapter – how does the current year in web design look like? They will have to identify current design trends, major innovations, notable websites, and organize the information following the examples in the book.

Depending on the number of students, they can work on one year, or on several missing years (2019, 2020, 2021…).

This brief is inspired by this line, by photographer Joséphine Michel, on her collaboration with Mika Vainio:

Écouter tous les matins un de ses albums, puis aller photographier des lieux en correspondance avec sa musique. Dans la nature, ou dans les musées de sciences

Source: Fisheye Magazine

Engage students in a tournament of “layer tennis” (also known as Photoshop ping-pong”. According to Wikipedia:

The players pick a starting image, or one is “served” by a player, then another player makes some sort of alteration to the image in any chosen image editor (matches are not exclusive to Adobe Photoshop). They then send the altered image to the other player or players, usually via e-mail or by posting the image to a Photoshop tennis forum, who then edits that image and sends it back to the first player. This process goes back and forth until a predetermined number of rounds have elapsed, or the players otherwise wish to end the game.

Ressources:

In the 2014/04 issue of TM-RSI, Helmut Schmid writes a recollection:

My first typographic exercice under Emil Ruder was twenty variations of a small size newspaper ad. Eight of them were shown in November 1961 in Graphisches abc, a german magazine for apprentices of the graphic trade.

Students have to design a website for a historical figure (maybe from a list provided by the instructor).

Example carried out in 2021 by student Messaline Piette at Eracom, Lausanne: