This Border Town Design Jam (#bdtj) is a full day event (and a kickoff evening!) designed to playfully engage with ideas, from research to prototyping. Using border towns as a point of entry, we'll approach political geography as a design problem, while creating, making and thinking of novel interfaces and devices Complete info about this event is available on the Border Town website.

The theme of this event will be: "Everyone Must Pass"… The topic and design question will be revealed during our kickoff event, so don't miss it!

Event Details ** This is a full day event and includes a kickoff evening on Friday**

Kickoff
Date: Friday March 2, 2012
Time: 18:00 to 21:00

Jam Day
Date: Saturday March 3, 2012
Time: 10:00 to 18:00 (Public show and tell: 18:00 to 20:00)

Venue: ThingTank Lab, 376 Bathurst Street (just North of Dundas Street West) - view maps

About Design Jams

Design Jams are one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging User Experience challenges. There will be one challenge for all teams, to be announced on the day of the Jam. No need to prepare anything! It’s not a competition and there is no prize to win.

Learn more about Design Jams.

Who should attend Design Jams

Anyone really – Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) & Design Students, Interaction Designers, UX Researchers, Information Architects, UI Designers, Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Hardware Hackers, Policy Nerds, Developers + more… The day aims to improve collaboration skills and help attendees learn and practice various UX techniques including but not limited to Research, Brainstorming, Sketching, Wireframing and Prototyping.

What happens at a Design Jam?

Attendees sign up in advance. Upon arrival they assign themselves to teams based on the skills they could contribute and what they’d like to learn. Teams are then presented a design challenge that they tackle by doing research, sketching, guerrilla testing and other UX techniques. They are encouraged to share their process and ideas halfway through enabling them to get feedback from other teams as well as other mentors in attendance during the day. The weekend concludes with final presentations to the entire group and general public. Outcomes could take the form of sketches, storyboards, a video or even a prototype – whatever communicates the idea best.

About Border Town

In a border town, the abstractions of political geography are thrown into sharp physical relief. Residents of border towns can look right across a river, across a street, through a fence and see their foreign neighbours. The powerful influence of law and culture is made visible when towns across a river from one another develop to completely different levels of prosperity. Questions about security and freedom change when you must pass through a checkpoint, daily, to visit your friends. The importance of national sovereignty feels different when your enemy sits on the other side of a wall.

Using border towns as a point of entry, we'll approach political geography as a design problem. We'll develop speculative proposals to address the interaction of cultural and physical architecture. Our work will explore what a border town could and should be.