ID Project 3: Community Resilience Design

This project replaced an earlier UX/UI prototype project that defaulted to apps and screens. The replacement was deliberate: UX/UI is one possible form, not the destination. When the medium is predetermined, students design for the medium rather than for the community. Removing that default — opening the form to apps, printed resource maps, wayfinding systems, kiosks, or anything else the research points to — changed the quality of the problem-solving immediately. Students who had to justify their medium choice through research arrived at more considered solutions than students who went straight to Figma because that is what interaction design projects look like.
The theoretical grounding — Norman, Sanders and Stappers, Putnam, Sweller — is built into the project structure rather than appended as a reading list. Students who use those frameworks as actual design lenses, not citations to check off, produce work that is more honest about what it can and cannot do. Buchanan's wicked problems framing is the one I find most useful in critique: a student who knows their artifact is an intervention in a system, not a fix, makes more defensible design decisions than a student who believes they are solving something.