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This paper was hefty to say the least, it was a huge paper with lots of technical speak in it. In the paper, they discussed the importance of different perspectives when it came to design and researching. How important each method was and why to be a good designer, you needed to consider all of them when working.

They wanted to test eight different techniques and they had fourteen different students to test them on. All these students came from a background of technology, media and design courses in university, first years to third years. They were put in regular classrooms for three hours a day for ten weeks. They were given problems and certain research resources and ordinary resources (Pens, paper, stickers, glue, coloured pencils and coloured paper.) This was so they could form groups and use different research and design techniques or “Perspectives” to help come up with multiple solutions to the problem they were originally posed. This is interesting because the paper was originally about discovering new research and design techniques, this is a unique way to do so. Give students a problem, very basic resources and see what they do to solve the problem at hand, their processes were documented and how they got to their problem was more important than the solution they actually came to.

In class, they presented questions about the problem they were given in order to help them voice their opinion on it and start communicating about it. They would then discuss their approach to said problem and their fellow students would voice their opinions on the solution that was given. Finally they would all talk about the outcomes of not only the problem and solution but also their whole day.

This course offered people who were bad at one form of research, a more hands on approach with that piece of research In order to get good at it, to practice. They would all combat these problems but only under the supervision of the faculty and under time constraint. They wanted to see what they describe as “Design thinking.” They thought the type of design they chose was reflective of them. They were all expected to do nine hours outside of the class room’s ten hour work load. The problems discussed included, “Home design”, “hierarchal decomposition”, “Park construction”, “Help with medication” and Evidence of the course working and then an overall discussion of the course to finish off.

“The goal was to position students to experience the perspective directly through a problem.” This really sunk deep down with me and explained the whole paper in one sentence for me. They also displayed how effective communicating a problem was in order to realise more solutions. They included this by having thirty minute class discussions after each session of problem solving.
Ideally the writers of this paper, David G. Hendry and Batya Friedman, want to live in a world where “Someone who studies geography” can use methods of design from someone who studied computer science, different natural methods of design from one subject can be alien yet helpful to other subjects and if everyone adopted all these methods, we’d all be a lot more productive.