Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

Synectics & Pughsion™

Synec­tics Class Exer­cise As I’m fin­ish­ing up with an online Finan­cial Man­age­ment class that is all num­bers, I was just think­ing how I’d rather be facil­i­tat­ing cre­ative think­ing right now. Then I start­ed think­ing back about a pre­sen­ta­tion my for­mer class­mate Rebec­ca Mahl and I did on the prob­lem solv­ing method­ol­o­gy synec­tics, as well as […]

Ethnographic Study of Art Supply Buying Habits

Overview The pur­pose of this study was to exam­ine the habits of dorm-dwelling stu­dents in search of art/design sup­plies in order to under­stand how impor­tant loca­tion is in rela­tion to price and oth­er con­trib­u­tors to the idea of val­ue. We explored oppor­tu­ni­ties that one store in Savan­nah may have in over­com­ing the dis­ad­van­tage of prox­im­i­ty […]

Recycling in Savannah

How to Moti­vate Peo­ple to Cre­ate Bet­ter Recy­cling Habits through Aware­ness, Edu­ca­tion and Con­ve­nience Overview For my final project in the Design Man­age­ment pro­gram at SCAD, I want­ed to take a clos­er look at recy­cling in Savan­nah, GA. The pur­pose of my study was to reveal a bet­ter way to encour­age and enable recy­cling for […]

Building a New Brand

Set­ting the Foun­da­tion With my back­ground in Graph­ic Design, I have designed visu­al iden­ti­ties for exist­ing brands, but I’ve nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op the frame­work for a new brand from the ground up. At SCAD, I was able to work with five oth­er stu­dents from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines in a spon­sored col­lab­o­ra­tive design class […]

Texting While Driving Infographics

Idea Visu­al­iza­tion The first phase of this research project involved col­lect­ing var­i­ous sta­tis­tics relat­ed to tex­ting while dri­ving. After rec­og­niz­ing pat­terns in the data, our team clas­si­fied the infor­ma­tion into seman­ti­cal­ly appro­pri­ate visu­al mod­els that show rela­tion­ships with mul­ti­vari­ate data. These visu­al mod­els were pre­sent­ed in a poster.

Knowledge Sharing Network

Cur­rent­ly, Design Man­age­ment is rep­re­sent­ed so incon­sis­tent­ly that there is both an oppor­tu­ni­ty and a need for Design Man­agers to define our field and chart a course for the pro­fes­sion. The devel­op­ment of a cen­tral net­work enti­ty is the per­fect way to allow Design Man­agers to share their knowl­edge, projects and expe­ri­ences. This forum of […]

Facilitating Creative Thinking

Facil­i­tat­ing the Cre­ation and Eval­u­a­tion of Video Projects in Edu­ca­tion Back­ground We live in a media sat­u­rat­ed soci­ety where media affects the way that we inter­act with and under­stand the world around us. While the con­cept of media lit­er­a­cy has been around since the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, its only in the past 10 years that […]

What’s Under the Kitchen Sink?

Overview In the twen­­ty-first cen­tury, orga­nized liv­ing spaces are more preva­lent than ever. Orga­ni­za­tional sys­tems have been designed and redesigned in an attempt to make spaces more accom­mo­dat­ing. The scope for this project was to step back and ana­lyze why cur­rent sys­tems are not work­ing to their full poten­tial and cre­ate a solu­tion that would […]

The Human Factor: Design Thinking

This intro­duc­to­ry class helped me under­stand the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al human fac­tors that need to be con­sid­ered with every design project — from ergonom­ics and usabil­i­ty to light­ing and col­or. Com­ing from a graph­ic design back­ground, the phys­i­cal fac­tors were espe­cial­ly new to me. I learned how to find and use anthro­po­met­ric data as well […]

V720 Midterm Update

V720 Midterm Update from Sarah Tolz­mann on Vimeo. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled How Do We Cre­ate Val­ue for the Design Com­mu­ni­ty? This was a ques­tion I was explor­ing at the start of this project in our Design Inno­va­tion Devel­op­ment and Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies class (aka V720). Our class also looked at […]