| What is a portfolio? |
A portfolio is a representative or selective collection of
one's work.
- Design professionals (e.g., architects, industrial designers,
artists) often create professional portfolios, and use these to
illustrate their work to potential employers or clients. A portfolio is a living
resume. They are an expected part of how professionals in many disciplines
portray their achievements . A good professional design portfolio will
contain visual samplings that collectively suggest the scope, breadth,
depth and quality of the professional's design proficiency. It summarizes
the professional's abilities, strengths and styles.
- Some educational programs also have students create learning
portfolios, where students document their work (sometimes over years).
These portfolios are used by instructors to evaluate students, and by
students to help them reflect on what they have learnt over that time.
- Unlike sketchbooks, portfolios are neat, orderly and professional in
appearance. You critically select and craft what goes into it. Because
this is a design-oriented portfolio, its contents should be highly visual.
Each visual summary should tell its own story with only modest labeling
and textual descriptions.
|
| Your portfolio |
You will create your own learning and professional portfolio
- You will create your own learning portfolio to show your projects. You
will document your developing abilities as an interaction designer by
creating visual summaries of how you solved your exercises and assignments.
As the course progresses, you will see what you have accomplished to date.
- Near the end of the course, you can will use this learning portfolio to
seed a demonstration professional portfolio. You can add to your
professional portfolio samplings of any other relevant work you have done.
- After the course, you can maintain and modify this portfolio into
something that will help you present yourself to future employers.
|
| Learning objectives |
Your portfolio will help you learn the following.
- You will develop skills creating visual summaries of individual
designs by using screen snapshots, story boards, videos, and other techniques.
- You will demonstrate in these summaries how you have used particular
interaction techniques.
- You will learn how to effectively archive your code and supporting
documents so you can easily install and demonstrate your system on any
handy machine.
- You will develop your skills in creating both a professional-looking
learning and professional portfolio
- You will use the portfolio as a personal reference summarizing your
course accomplishments.
|
| Be organized |
A professional portfolio can be packaged in many ways.
- Keeping all summaries organized but separate will allow you to
selectively rearrange your portfolio to fit your need (e.g., for a job
interview).
- The simplest
form sees it as separate summaries collected in some kind of binder e.g., an accordion
file or an artist's portfolio case. I recommend you buy an accordion file to
hold and protect these.
- You can also paste summaries into a large high-quality
(but very good looking, maybe even hand made) scrapbook/ yet this may make it difficult for you to rearrange
items later on.
|
| Styles |
For each assignment, you will create both an electronic web summary
(including code archive). You will also be asked to augment your summaries with other types of visual
summaries, selected from the list below.
- Paper. Each visual summary (screen snapshots, storyboards, etc) are
pasted onto a high-quality mat or backing (e.g. poster cardboard). Poster
sizes of at least 16"x20" will give you enough space to
create an effective visual summary. Alternatively, you may want to
create it as a flip-book of screen-shots showing how the interaction flows.
- Packaging. The visual summary is created as packaging, e.g., a
paper box that would contain your software and other materials.
- Web. Many Web designers often create web-based portfolios of their work:
these often include thumbnails of screens and accompanying descriptions.
Clicking on the thumbnail often brings the viewer to the web site itself (or a
full sized version of the page). While you can have web pages that do this, you
must print them out and include them as a paper version in your physical
portfolio.
- Video. Creating a video of you(but maybr system is a very effective way of
showing your work. Digital video is even better, because you can play it
back on any computer. I have a camera that can do this, and may be able to
get you some screen capture software that does this as well. If you do
decide to try video, you will still need a paper or electronic summary to introduce what
is in it.
- Interactive multimedia. You can also create a project summary using
a multimedia presentation tool e.g., Powerpoint or Flash.
- Running software. Of course, you will be asked to include the system itself so
that it demonstrates itself. The problem that I have found, however, is that
it becomes less and less likely that your system will run as time goes on
due to changes in operating systems and expectations of installed software.
Thus you should see this as a way to supplement rather than replace one of
the above methods.
|
| Portfolio grading |
Every project requires a learning
portfolio entry. You will also create a professional portfolio at the end of
the course. Portfolios and contents should impress me with both your vision
and how well you have mastered the technical aspects of interaction design.
Other grading aspects include:
- completeness
- quality (how well the portfolio captures your work and the
techniques we have asked you to include in it);
- professional appearance (including overall organization).
- effectiveness of your code archive.
|
Your Portfolio