Design Jams, Part 2: The Shorter Version

Last time we met, I promised to tell you all about the second kind of design jam, so here we go!

Design Jams, Part 2

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So I’ve Got This All This Great Data and Scholarly Writing About My Specialty, And I Want To Do New Things With It, But I’m Not Sure What That Might Be Or What’s Possible

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The Focused One

If you’ve got a project that you’ve been working on for a while, and a set of data that’s answered the questions you initially set out to answer, but you’d like to bounce some ideas around about how you might explore answering new questions or presenting the results of your scholarship in new and exciting ways, have we got the design jam for you!

This kind of design jam is really about looking at your data in new ways, exploring new questions to ask of it, and designing refreshed visualization and presentation of your scholarship, so it’s a much more focused consultation.

So what do we need from someone who wants to do this kind of design jam with us and how should you prepare? What a great question, I’m so glad you asked. What do you want to communicate about your work? And who’s your audience? Have you seen other websites or data visualizations that you liked, and if so, what was it that sparked your interest?

Once again, you need to give some thoughts to the existing constraints on this research. What’s your timeframe for completing this work? Is there additional data that you need to collect and analyze? What sort of budget are you looking at for producing the end results? Any other constraints? If you’re coming to us, there’s assuredly a digital component, and we can help you better understand the technology, the costs, and how long the work is likely to take.

We’ll schedule a meeting for you with a Scholars’ Lab expert or two who have the expertise you need given the type of data you’re working with, maybe the librarian who specializes in your discipline, and potentially, experts from another of the Library’s technology units with skills we don’t have in the Lab.

The overall goal of a focused design jam is to come out of it with a project plan for visualizing, or re-visualizing scholarly work. Sometimes that’s a plan for the scholar/researcher to do the work themselves, sometimes the end product is a list of requirements that will feed into a grant application, including both technical specs and budgeting needs, and then sometimes what’s revealed in the consultation is fresh data gathering so that new questions can be asked of the data. Like everything we do in the Lab, this variety of design jam is meant to be an iterative process: consultation to work iteration to results review to refined work iteration.

So what would an agenda for this kind of design jam look like? You’re full of great questions! Here’s a sample agenda:

• Gathering
• Introductions all around
• Scholar introduces their work, shows current digital outputs and visualizations, if any
• Chat about adjacent projects and projects that you admire

The goal for a meeting of this type is a full understanding of the new questions you want to ask of your data, and your new ideas about how to present the results of those questions to your chosen audience(s), so that we can assist you in generating an initial workplan, and potentially provide you with the information you need to create a grant application to provide the funding to collect any new data required and to create the new digital products.

Sound interesting? Have some cool scholarship that you’d like to look at with fresh eyes, or communicate about in new ways or for new audiences? Please contact us! We’d love to chat with you about your ideas!