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Design Objective - WatCHI Challenge

Organize a design competition to demonstrate the value of designing for specific users and a structured design approach.

Teach design by creating an environment that encourages learning through doing.

Understand/Observe - WatCHI Challenge

• Identified issues for improvement based on judging previous competition

• Reviewed competition material from similar competitions from other organizers

Visualize - WatCHI Challenge

• Created a draft format for the challenge

• Met with other organizers to brainstorm, challenge problem, personas, and logistics

Evaluate/Refine - WatCHI Challenge

• Created a seed persona as a guideline so that other organizers could participate in writing personas

• Met with organizers to get input and feedback on the challenge structure, and personas

Implement - WatCHI Challenge

• Created posters for advertising event

• Wrote design challenge context and problem

• Proofread and finalized all personas so they were aligned with the context and could yield interesting solutions

• Finalized challenge structure and timeline

• Briefed judges on the competition context and structure

• Moderated dry run of the competition

Alex Tam - WORK

Design Highlights • Interaction Design • Product Design

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Interaction Design Projects

Understand/
Observe

Visualize

Evaluate/
Refine

Implement

WatCHI Design Challenge
Waterloo ACM CHI Chapter (2004)

Design Objective:
Organize a design competition to demonstrate how to design for specific users and the value of a structured design approach. Teach design by creating an event that encourages learning through doing.

Design Solution:
Organize the format of the design challenge to follow a structured process that encourages brainstorming. Give different teams unique personas to demonstrate how different users will need very different solutions.

Result:
The participants responded well to the structured process and were able to generate a great variety of solutions.

Poster used to attract participants

Each group was given a persona to design for

Links:
Request competition package
ACM CHI page
WatCHI

Time: 6 meetings to plan, 3 hour competition
Tools: Flipcharts
Team: 5 organizers, 4 judges, participants.

Marks were given for designing for the user

Structured timeline of challenge

Panoramic photo of 2003 Design Challenge

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