Challenge  I study Human Computer Interaction Design in a Technical High  school. We got a praxis project to design a classroom operating  system for universities (it comes to lighting, dimming possibilities,  ventilation, devices management and so on). The problem was that  the lecturers loose a lot of working time for configuration of room  conditions, affecting the quality of teaching and learning. There  were 5 students in our team and we should visit the maximum  number of university classrooms within a limited period of time for  the purpose of gathering information about the current situation and  requirements of stakeholders of the project. After all interviews we  should make a kind of prototype of this classroom operating system.      Selection  Visualisation is “the mother of all design tools”, because it’s used in  every stage of the design thinking process. On the first stage of our  project we planed some interviews with lecturers from different  universities. Sometimes three persons of our team took part on an  interview, sometimes one, but everybody should gain insight into the  lecturers problems for the future work. So there was a purpose to  share information about visited rooms, devises of these rooms,  behavior of lecturers with other team members.     Application.   Photography, Video, Drawing. Visualization helped us here: we  made a lot of photos, videos and drew room plans to discus it with  our colleagues by next meetings. “Photography is a very rich way  for us to understand that world, and not just the people themselves,  but the context in which they live. Innovation is really centered on  having a rich understanding of those contexts. So things like  photography and sketching can be a very important way of capturing  that kind of information”, - says Leidy Riley in our lecture.    Sketching. Prototyping  and testing. On the second stage came a  more creative work – designing and namely prototyping of a new  more effective classroom operating system. And here we needed the  visualization tool exactly to “unlock different parts of our brains -  parts of our creativity, that we might not normally be using in the  course of conversation”. So we used our tables and color cards to  make diagrams, our whiteboards to sketch our ideas and finally

paper, cardboard, pencils and shears to produce a simplest prototype.  Than we went with these handicrafts to our lecturers to test them and  to improve for the next iteration.    Insight & Approach  What I have learned from conducting this project is that photos,  videos, drawings and sketches are the best tool to share your  experience and insights with your team and with stakeholders, even  remotely.   Videos of interviews help extremely to understand the behaviour of  the people in the surveyed conditions and to see details, that the  people themselves do not realise and cannot articulate or express.   And the more times we review it, the more details float to the  surface.     For the prototyping stage is the visualization the indispensable tool  to generate ideas and realize them in practice. The sketches give the  different groups of stakeholders a point for discussion that allows the  project team to make another step to the best solution of the  problem.     What I would add to our project process for the next time is a  graphic of the process itself, that displays phases, status of  execution, next steps. That helps the whole team to keep in touch  with the current developments.

