The Team Statement (TS) project results in a digital team profile document that presents your collective knowledge and experience with information design and relevant tools, and identifies the kind of communication problems you feel most competent at addressing. The TS is challenging because it requires you to assess and present your team's collective knowledge, experience, and abilities in a coherent, meaningful way.
The TS is the 1st assignment in the project set that includes the Team Statement, Problem Statement, Solution Prototype, & Solution Proposal. These projects are linked by team & topic. Once your design team chooses a focus for the Proposal project, that problem becomes the common ground for all 4 projects for your team. If your team has not yet selected a focus, review the Project Pathways & Knowledge Building section of this description as a team, & choose the problem that best fits your team's collective abilities & interests.
This project requires one submission. That submission includes the following documents:
For the full list of core and supporting documents/files, & specifications, refer to Submission Requirements.
The Team Statement brings together content elements from your individual Professional Toolkit documents into a coherent description of your full design team. In short, this doc serves as a declaration of your collective knowledge, abilities, & experiences. It also includes a statement about your teams' design goals & values. All of these content elements necessitate a focus on your individual & collective identity, then, as well. It thus serves as a reminder that although information designers must always make themselves aware of other stakeholders' needs & expectations, the designer is an essential part of the relationships between audience members & organizations.
Every assignment in this project series links to the whole design endeavor that confronts you. With that in mind, it is timely to discuss the notion of design bricolage in the context of content strategy & creation.
The terms bricolage & bricoleur emerged from architecture connected with the practice of harnessing the knowledge & abilities of available personnel to design architectural solutions for problems using the materials & equipment on hand. In other words, bricolage is about design enacted only with the tools, resources, & expertise to which you already have access. A bricoleur is a designer capable of such adaptation. Bricolage is a particularly appropriate design mindset for technical communication & information design, given the impact that immediate context has on the design decisions that lead to effective solutions.
For our purposes in this course, bricolage is your perpetual state of design. That is, you only know what you have learned so far during your studies & experiences, & the palette of tools you have available at any given moment is often limited either by their availability or by your level of ability to produce a professional solution with the available tools. The one element of the project you can control is your own level of investment & dedication to the tasks ahead of you. Thus, you are limited in this project series mainly by your current level of professional development & your degree of willingness to invest in learning what you need to learn on the fly to proceed with a professional information design solution for the problem you choose to engage.
Your team must choose one of the scenarios described below as a focus for its work throughout this project series. The scenarios provide framing & context, but your team determines what it judges to be an appropriate strategy for addressing the problem. Neither of the scenarios or organizations in them are real, although all elements of these scenarios are plausible & realistic.
The Community Farm. Food Is Life, a local nonprofit organization with a history of working to counter the City of Saginaw's federal designation as a food desert, has been gifted with a warehouse on a plot of land.
After much debate, Food Is Life decided to transform the site into a community farm. They envision using 3 of the 4 inner floors as a year-round hydroponic farm that grows vegetables & raises sustainable livestock (e.g., chickens), with the last floor serving several connected purposes: storing & managing produce; housing a kitchen classroom that serves meals to needy citizens & provides a space for teaching nutrition, food preparation, and so on. Food Is Life will establish a rooftop garden for crops that are difficult to grow indoors, & reclaim half of the site's green & brown spaces as community gardens that can be rented to individual citizens as family garden plots.
Food Is Life reached out to your design team to seek assistance in developing appropriate information solutions to support this project.
The SVSU Office for Community Connection (OCC). SVSU prides itself on community connection, work that resulted in the university earning the Carnegie Foundation's Community Engagement classification in 2015. The SVSU OCC serves the university by working to maintain the level of service activity necessary to maintain that designation.
One of the biggest challenges for the SVSU OCC is managing communication. Community organizations who are interested in seeking assistance are not always certain who to contact or what kind of activities are appropriate for SVSU participation. Students, faculty, & staff are not always made aware in a timely manner of the organizations seeking assistance or of the kinds of opportunities for service learning & public intellectualism that are available to them. SVSU also struggles to develop appropriate mechanisms for celebrating individual contributions & achievements of people who participate & who want a way of sharing such work with prospective employers or other interested audiences. The university has considered a special designation for diplomas, a badging, system, and more, but remains uncertain about how to proceed.
The SVSU OCC reached out to your design team to seek assistance in developing appropriate information solutions to support the OCC's work.
Deliverables: memo, team profile
Document scope: 150 words (memo), 1 page (refer to specs below)
Project value: 100 points
Evaluation rubric: _Eval_TeamStatement.pdf
Recommended tool(s): Figma (profile), Microsoft Word (memo)
The TS project requires your team to construct a 1-page, multipanel, tiled-content profile document that meets the specifications for content & design that are described below. Your document does not need to look like the samples that I provided to you in support of the Professional Toolkit project, but it does need to match the complexity and the strong sense of visual order demonstrated by those documents.
Before you begin working on your team profile, I recommend that your team retrieves & reviews those samples from Canvas Files: Williamson - Professional Toolkit.pdf, & Williamson - Professional Toolkit Example.pdf. You'll also need to draw on the profile docs that you each created in response to that earlier assignment as you construct your team profile.
Design your team profile doc using Figma. Although there are both overlapping & different content expectations, part of your challenge is to adapt the structural integrity & visual aesthetic of your individual Toolkit docs to this new information product.
Note. Design specs are presented in the final segment of this section. Make sure you review those before you begin assembling content on your Figma design space.
Note. Figma allows you to connect with one another as a team. In that context, you can share design assets (e.g., Toolkit docs) with other team members.
Note. Remember that FigJam supports real-time interaction & sharing of design assets. When used in conjunction with a video platform such as Microsoft Teams, you have a work environment where your team can collaborate.
Rate your team's collective/average level of experience & accomplishment with the categories of design knowledge listed below.
The rating system for ranking your experience with Design Knowledge is detailed between the descriptions for Panels 4 & 5.
Rate your team's collective/average of experience & accomplishment with the design tools & tool categories listed below your preferred tool that serves the same purpose.
Clarification. If you have experience with a tool that is not listed, but that accomplishes the same design goal(s) as something listed here, replace that title with your preferred tool. The two exceptions to this are Figma and FigJam. Do not replace these titles.
Example. If you have more experience using Audacity for audio editing than with Adobe Audition, replace the rating for Audition with a rating for Audacity.
The rating system for ranking your experience with Technology Knowledge is detailed next.
When you rate your knowledge & experience with Design & Design Technologies, use the following scale. Each rating is progressive, meaning it includes the level of accomplishment of the previous rankings.
Be careful not to over-estimate your abilities. Consider these rankings on a professional rather than personal scale. For example, if you are truly knowledgeable & experienced enough with a design category or tool to teach seasoned working professionals how to use it (rather than teaching friends who just know less than you do), then you should rate yourself as an 8 (Mentor).
Several of you rated yourself at Mentor, Expert, or Leader level with some areas of design knowledge or with specific design tools. Such ratings are highly unlikely, given your collective lack of professional experience. An advanced student might strive to achieve the level of being called Competent, Knowledgeable, or even Confident after several months of intensive application to learning more. Remember, even if you rate yourself as Beginner or Basic Knowledge with everything, it is merely an acknowledgement of where you are at in your professional development. We all start at the beginning with new things. There is no shame in that.
Reassess your scores before you compute a team average.
Your team profile should be a proportionally tiled document, like your Professional Toolkit. Refer to the sample documents for visual references. That leaves you with a lot of space to create, as long as you establish & maintain a strong sense of order & consistency.
Design your team profile document so that it conforms to the following specifications. Refer to the sample docs for general guidance on dimensions & layout.
Note. The background color for your content panels must contrast well with the textual content of the panel. That is, the text should be much darker than the panel background.
Your project will be accompanied by a memo of transmittal. That category of memo introduces the document it accompanies, providing context for its audience(s). Your memo should be addressed from you to me.
Your memo should incorporate the following content and design elements.
Consult the sample documents (refer to SVSU Canvas Files: Project Support) for additional guidance.
This section is designed to help you anticipate and avoid problems as you work on this project. Therefore, as you work, consider the following hints and tips.
Approach this assignment & the whole project series like a design bricoleur. Harness your collective energy, creativity, & knowledge. If you encounter a word, concept, tool, or anything else that you cannot confidently & accurately understand, seek knowledge. You have an incredible array of tools & services available to you for gathering new knowledge: the SVSU library; professional social media platforms; peers & colleagues; internet-based research tools. Adapt & overcome. Become a resilient, self-reliant, strategic information designer.
Remember that writing in professional & technical contexts values highly the ability to write and speak with economy, directness, and professionalism. Another way of saying this is to make every word count. Stay focused on the details necessary to communicate effectively with your audience(s). Write and rewrite until your textual content makes sense and represents careful, concise, professional communication.
Consider what it means to establish a strong, consistent sense of professionalism & attention to detail visually and structurally (organizationally) with your design choices. Professional designers use words such as clean, logical, and orderly to describe document designs they appreciate & respect.
If you want to explore the opposite of these design values, feel free to do so. Make an alternate version of your profile document where you make unprofessional font, color, and design choices. Create something ugly so you might better appreciate professionalism in visual design. Just be sure you don't accidentally turn in that version as your project submission.
Edit carefully, seeking to express your ideas clearly and concisely. Edit out loud with the intent of writing in such a manner that your written content sounds professional and focused. Work to meet the design specs. Scrutinize your work so it is consistent, professional, and of good quality. Refine your document continuously as you work.
Read and attend carefully to these submission guidelines. Failure to do so may result in points lost on the final evaluation of your project.
Create a folder for this project inside your shared class folder on Dropbox.com. Remember, I can only view files that you place inside that folder. Until you place files in that space, you have not in practice submitted them.
Name the folder Team Statement.
Make sure the files listed below are available to me in the project folder by the submission deadline. Model your filenames on the listed examples:
Note. Do not share the individual files or project folder with me. By placing the project files in the project folder, and by placing the project folder inside your class folder, you have already shared them by default.
This section describes the standards by which your final submission will be evaluated.
The final project submission is worth 100 possible points. You will earn points according to the standard described on the policies page (see Policies for a description of these categories).
The specific areas of emphasis for the TS project are drawn from this description and our discussions of the project (including the supporting teaching materials that I provide to you along the way). Review the project rubric (_Eval_TeamStatement.pdf) for the specific qualities and characteristics emphasized in each evaluation category.
Remember that I will only post the point values for projects on the Grades page in SVSU Canvas. I will provide the supporting details relevant to that evaluation in your class folder in a project-specific file. Look for a Microsoft Word file in your shared class space on Dropbox with a filename that that follows this pattern:
TeamName_Eval_TeamStatement.docx.
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