At the request of Bob Hughes, a long-time professional associate, staunch CHIFOO supporter, jazz enthusiast and professor at Clark College, I entertained the class of 15 UX Design students for about 2 hours.

The class syllabus is a wide-ranging survey course on UX methods, ranging from Norman’s framework, through LATCH, incorporating Goal Directed Design and much more. The students were in the midst of a design challenge: reconsider the library space on campus to make it more useful (many students were unaware of the various study spaces available, for example).

Similar to the PSU Lecture a few weeks before, I pulled most of the material from Chapter 2 (which discusses Design Thinking as the foundation to PrD). I split the time roughly in half: about one hour on theory, and the rest on a series of exercises.

In this lecture, I relied on a completely different set of objects and switched up the exercises to enhance the differences in ways of thinking.

The class was split into teams, and each team was offered a common everyday object found around the house. Each team was asked to brainstorm about the object they had been given. The focus of the brainstorm shifted with each exercise, helping illustrate the differences between deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning.

Throughout the class, students were asked to consider in which quadrant best related to the associated type of reasoning (using the Owen/Kumar/Sato model). Interestingly, as this was the second or third time I’ve asked folks to consider where to position the reasoning types, I may be shifting my positioning of the types:

The final 30 minutes of the class was reserved to address questions the class had raised about Presumptive Design.

If your organization would like to learn more about Presumptive Design, please get in touch! We’ll be happy to provide intact training.

And, if you’d like a copy of the presentation I gave to the Clark College class, all you have to do is ask.