Design activity #5: sketching
A sketch is nothing more than putting a smidgen of effort behind an idea, progressing one small step toward seeing how one’s thought might work in practice. Now that we have a good sense of our subject, our position on the subject, and our target audience (from the Learning activity), an evolving idea of what the user experience with our collection might incorporate (from the personas and scenarios of the Envisioning activity), and a start at figuring out a design strategy
(via the brief and the Strategizing activity) we can begin to synthesize all of these swirling thoughts and sketch our collection experience into a more concrete existence.
For designers, initial sketches function as low-effort idea generators, similarly to your initial drafts of personas and scenarios. The goal is to give an idea enough structure to see what it reveals about the design situation and to invite comment, from oneself and others. A sketch is an opportunity to expand on selected aspects of a design while for the moment ignoring others.
Most of the literature on sketching comes from product design and architecture, and notions of sketching focus on the depiction of physical objects and representations of the built environment.
However, information architects and user interface designers also sketch, often with less visual emphasis. Web site maps and wireframes show structural components in schematic form, and are a form of sketch. Software menus and commands may be mapped out as text hierarchies, in preliminary sketch form. A classificationist might “sketch” out categories and relationships in a taxonomy or thesaurus. At the beginning of a project, these representations are rough and tenuous, ready to be changed or scrapped. As the project continues and the design begins to solidify, the sketches become more detailed and represent the results of one’s various design decisions (closer to Buxton’s memory drawings). As Buxton emphasizes, sketches at various levels of sophistication are useful for communicating ideas to others and soliciting feedback (as with Buxton’s presentation drawings). Eventually, more refined sketches supplement specifications and facilitate implementation (analogous to Buxon’s technical drawings), and document intended features and uses (Buxton’s description drawings).
Initially, your sketches should be just that; loose, disposable, and multiple. As with Sketch-orama, try a few different means toward the goals articulated in your brief and scenarios. If the sketching process illuminates some glaring holes in your previous work, excellent! You should be more worried if it doesn’t
do that. By the end of the project, your sketch will be more like a presentation drawing; it will be coherent and consistent, and show enough to clarify what your video library would look like, if you had the extra months to implement your entire vision.
A note of caution here: even at the end of this class project, your sketch is not meant to represent a final product. Your goal is not to produce a library of 20 videos! Your goal is to show what, given the time and resources, your final product would look like. The sketch is one aspect of that vision. Your scenarios and brief complement and expand upon the sketch, filling out your intended design.
Although your final sketch will be “drawn” using the open video toolkit environment, you may decide to begin with paper sketches, or to supplement your experiments in the toolkit with paper.
For the next class, February 25 , bring an initial set of sketches that show your basic information architecture and page design for your library’s home page, collections page, and individual video record. You may create these sketches on paper or in the open video toolkit. Or you may do both to show alternate approaches. In addition, begin actually describing 1-2 videos according to one or more of your potential descriptive approaches (to do more, you probably have to use paper).
INF 385 U, Digital Media Collections Spring 2010

For your final sketch, you must implement all the open video toolkit features described in the outline given for the brief, in the Strategizing activity instructions. If you want to include, as part of your design, additional elements not possible in the toolkit environment, you may describe those in your scenarios, or include additional paper sketches, or both of these options.
Another note of caution: do not feel constricted to use any toolkit features in the way you might think they are “intended” to be used. For example, you might use the browsing categories seen on the left side of the home page to group sustainable activities, as described in videos, that might be performed Right Now, With a Little Planning, and For the Long Term. Or you might use the
Roles metadata to describe whether a video is produced by a Corporation, an Academic, Local
Government, or an Individual. Whatever! Bend it to your will.
INF 385 U, Digital Media Collections Spring 2010