Here are some notes about the history of developing the seminar and the things we are thinking about changing for our next iteration.
The current version of the learning materials comes from the Winter quarter 2022. This was the fourth iteration of the seminar. The original seminar was developed by Cindy and Kathryn Shroyer in the winter of 2020. We started the seminar sitting around a table with each other and passing around physical postcards. It was wonderful to interact physically with each other's postcards. However, since Seattle was the first place the pandemic hit in the United States, we ended up having the last two sessions on zoom in the midst of tremendous uncertainty. We then pivoted to give the seminar fully online in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic was raging. All of us in that iteration of the seminar felt deeply grateful to spend time deeply reflecting with each other on design processes in the chaos of the spring of 2020. In the fall of 2020 Khadijah Jordan joined the Dear Design team and along with Kathryn and Cindy delivered another fully online version. In this iteration we were more consistent across the slide decks and were able to have a more coherent message about design awareness and design signatures.
In the winter quarter of 2022, we took the materials from 2020, and adapted them for the fourth iteration of the seminar. These are the materials that you find here. We ran two sections of the seminar, with Yuliana and Grace each leading one of the sections. There's always a significant amount of work to adapt someone else's curriculum to your own teaching situation, and Yuliana is leading the work on an analysis to describe that work for these materials. The final set of slides that you see here, and the scripts that go along with the slides is the result of that adaptation work. In this version we have more developed in-session exercises, a slide set and message that moves more coherently towards the final assignment, and scripts for some of the slide sets.
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