1) Number of participants?

30 students, plus instructor & TA. Ashley Peterson from the SMFA was also there to observe.

2) Who was the audience for the class/workshop/activity?

Mechanical Engineering senior design students. (There are two sections of ME 43; I did totally different things for each of them.)

3) Describe your experience planning with the instructor.

I met with the instructor beforehand (in person) for about 90 minutes to talk about the class. I got a very clear sense of what the class needed—everyone was already in teams, and had a product they were designing. We started off talking through some basic info lit options, and the instructor asked “ok but what are you really interested in?” so I was like “WELL HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT COMICS” and voila, a beautiful collaboration was born.

4) What were your goals for the class/workshop/activity?

By the end of the session, students will be able to:

• Analyze comics and graphic novels in order to identify components of effective visual communication
• 
Create visual representations of their product’s use cases in order to facilitate conversation and feedback with potential users

5) Describe the session(s) and the logistics of any hands-on activities.

This was a 75 minute class in Blake Lab (at the SEC)—the classroom has whiteboard tables, which makes group stuff extra fun.

Materials needed:
Comic books
Gel pens/markers/something fun to draw with
Paper
Powerpoint or other visual aid

Intro/welcome:
Asked everyone to sit in their project groups, worked with faculty to contextualize the workshop—the goal of the session is to help with refining product designs and everyone will leave with two options to share with potential users

Analyzing texts with the observation wheel:

• Draw an observation wheel template
• Distributed comics to class
• Read or skim a text: consider images, layout, etc—it can all be “read”
• Fill out observation wheel
• Pair/share & group discussion

Pep talk for visual storytelling

• Everyone in this room is already a producer & consumer of visual communication (examples—emoji, product specs, Ikea directions, XKCD comics)
• You can use images to evoke feelings even if you don’t consider yourself an artist
  Walk through some examples in power point—guiding principle=“there are no neutral visual decisions”

Storytelling activity

• Individually: write down a feeling or concept you want to evoke, then draw the story of someone using your product/tool
• As teams: look at each other’s drawings. What do you notice? What do they have in common? What differences are significant?
  • Did the drawings evoke the feeling they were intended to?
  • What came up that surprised you?
• Decide which story concepts you want to combine or revise to show your users

Wrap up/Q&A
Additional time for reflection/group discussion

6) What went well? What might you do differently next time?

The session was extremely well received—everyone participated fully and there were rich conversations. Ashley described it as “inspiring.” To be fair, this is probably an exception rather than a rule—not every professor will be game for teaching with comics, and not every class is ready to dive in. Things that helped were using a phone timer to stay on track, and the instructor and I teamed up to draw & design a product together. If you’re going to ask people to be creative and vulnerable, you’ve gotta get in there with them. I don’t know what I’d do differently next time—honestly this could be two sessions instead of one, so maybe with more time there’d be other possibilities. I think I’d also experiment with which texts were used—the ones this time were a mix of what I picked and what the instructor picked and we didn’t coordinate those ahead of time.

This can really be adapted to any class or assignment; visual communication and storytelling are pretty universally important. I think it works best for small to medium groups, like I wouldn’t necessarily do this in a 50 person class. It probably also helps when the students know each other. I can also see this being a good thing to try if you have no information about the class and want to do something fun with what might otherwise be a babysitting situation.