Turn-in link: Critique via Google Form (do this three times!)
Due date: Wednesday, March 4th, 11:59pm
This is a clarification post for the critique part of the first Design Challenge.
For the critique portion of the challenge, we would like you to to evaluate the designs of at least three of your peers. Designs will be anonymized with a two-digit identifier and placed in Box here. You will submit these critiques via a Google form, denoting the randomized identifier and your critique and evaluation, helped the rubric below. After all critiques are submitted, we will distribute the critiques to the authors, again via e-mail.
We will send everyone an e-mail (to their wisc e-mail address) with their three assigned IDs, and a few optional assignments. Use these IDs to critique those critiques in the anonymized Box folder of designs. Please fill out the critique via the Google Form for each assigned design. You are more than welcome to submit critiques for more than three designs.
The Design Challenge Rubric
We thought it might be helpful to have some sort of guidance when critiquing everyone’s designs. In your critique, you do not need to respond to every point in the rubric, but instead use the rubric as a way to direct your own critique.
1. Motivation / Rationale: What task is being addressed?
- Is the task (or tasks) clearly articulated?
- Is it a relevant/important task (or tasks)?
- Is the connection between the design and task(s) clearly articulated?
- Is the design well-motivated by the task?
2. Design Communication: Can you understand what the design is?
- Is the description / sketch clear as to what the design is?
- Can you imagine what the design might look like “for real”?
- Is the sketch/description presented in a way that you can assess how well it might work?
3. Design Evaluation: Is the design any good?
- Does the design address the stated problem?
- Are there potential pitfalls that aren’t visible? (e.g. details that might be too hard to work out, kinds of data that would create problems, …)
- Does the design “scale” to data beyond the sketched example?
- Does the overall strategy seem to address the problem?
- How well do the details of the encoding choices work and scale?
- How does the design address the greater range of potential problems? (is it very specific to the particular problem? are there a range of other tasks it might work well for? is the range of tasks it is good for large/important enough?
4. Iteration: Where does this design lead to?
- What are the best elements that might serve as inspiration for new designs?
- Are there specific suggestions for how to improve the design to make it more functional?
- Are there specific elements that should be re-considered since they aren’t working?
You should discuss each of the 4 topics for each design you critique. You might not address each sub-point for every design – just pick the ones that are relevant. The sub-points are there as a way to help you structure your thinking.
In addition to writing responses to the four questions, we’d like you to assign numerical scores (from 1-5) for the first three questions. (it doesn’t make sense to assign a numerical score for question 4).
We recommend that you write your answers first, and then copy them into the web-form so that you don’t lose your work if there’s a web problem while typing.
Grading
We will grade your critiques. Each of your critiques will be scores on the same scale we use for discussions. If you submit more than 3, we will pick the highest 3.
These critiques will also be used in the process of grading the designs.
