Creative Explorations
Before we began our design explorations, we wanted to avoid making blind assumptions about tweens, so we completed a set of exercises to help us understand our point of view.

To do this, we cut out words and images from magazines and placed them on a “swipe wall” from which we developed a series of panels that explored the themes of technology, personal agency, and engagement—three concepts that we were given to frame our study. The sequencing of the images varied from “stream of consciousness” to a thematic chain where the juxtaposition of images created new possibilities for visualizing the themes. Through this exercise we were able to free ourselves from our biases and approach the design process from a fresh perspective. For example, we noticed that our visualizations of techonology were cold, silver, pointy and smooth which differed from the way tweens described technology as warm, comforting and fuzzy.

We used these creative explorations along with our interpretive tools from the research to help us “leap” into the design process. Each student designed a sketch which we called a “creative leap”. These sketches are merely starting points that will provide us with different ways to approach designing for tweens. They represent our thinking on paper as we take the creative leap from research to design. The creative leap book can be viewed on the DVD in PDF format.