The Dashblog

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta gave a little plug to the Dashboard, which pleases our meta design tendencies. And it’s an interesting site – worth a look.

Don’t forget you can download the Dashboard pdf and print it out on paper if you don’t happen to have a 3D printer handy. This one shows an idea for labeling buildings that was suggested by a couple of students at the Institute Without Boundaries this year.

For a variety of reasons, I was asked to give a presentation at the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto yesterday. As I’ll take any opportunity to force others to hear me talk, I readily accepted.  The first half of the talk focused on The Dashboard while the back end was about how the Dashboard was used during the Costa Rica project.

What was, in several timed performances, a 20 minute presentation turned into nearly an hour.  People were interjecting, asking questions, and challenging assumptions.  All good fun.  Since KMDI is essentially a collection of scientists, it was funny getting their reaction to the less clinical world of design.  I’m also not sure people were always happy when I answered queries about user-centered design by waving the Dashboard around…

Regardless, the giving the talk was a good time, and it was, I hope, the first of many more.

The Dashboard website went properly live today. We’ve got a press release and everything. So now it’s over to you. We’re wondering what you make of it. Go on, we can take it…

Teresa Miller, design maven, grabs a new analog Dashboard fresh from the 3D printer.

The Dashboard was used publicly for the first time last week. At a design charrette for the Chateau Masson community in Windsor, Ontario, Luigi Ferarra, Program Director IWB, whipped out the analog slider to explain the design intent for the three days. Setting the slider to co-create he called on everyone needed to work together to achieve a good result.

The Institute Without Boundaries was asked to host a design charrette for Chateau Masson, which is a community facing enormous social disadvantage but is being transformed though a partnership with the students from the University of Windsor’s Social Work program. The Institue was asked to explore options for a redesign of the building to meet very different needs of the residents and improve security and health.

Attending he charrette were graduates from the Institute, the faculty, students from the University of Windsor, CMC, representatives of the City of Windsor and the residents of Chateau Masson.

This is, we hope, the first of many instances when Dashboard can help inform social design projects. We’ll keep you posted.

We intend to keep the world updated with Dashboard related news here.