Weekly Personal Assessment

Weekly Submission Form Link: https://forms.gle/PwfMSrZYMreGmetA7

As a designer and citizen of the world, it is important to reflect on your efforts to embody your personal and aspirational set of values, behaviors, and social norms that will create the environment to do good work - together.

To cultivate this practice, each week you will complete a brief survey that captures your own reflections on your performance and contributions to the course community.

Reflections should include elements related to timeliness, responsibility, conflict resolution, and expectations for work effort. Include these in your writing.

You will receive grade points for the completion of this survey each week. Your evaluation will not be based on how you perceive the performance of yourself, your team, or the course community, but on the depth and insight of your reflection.

Every student in the course community will individually complete this form. This information will not be shared with other students, but is a tool for individuals to prepare for their weekly briefing and for faculty and coaches to have a better sense of course community dynamics. Be honest with yourself.

The link to this form is the same every week, you are responsible for following the link and completing this form.

Due dates:

Submissions are due on 3pm on Thursdays (2hrs before Thursday's class, each week). Use your @berkeley.edu email. If you do not get a receipt, you did not use the correct email address.

Late submissions will not receive full credit, nor will submissions made more than 24 hours before the due date.

Confidentiality Notice: Please be assured that your responses are confidential. They will not be shared with classmates or anyone outside of the faculty. The sole purpose of collecting this information is to cultivate a practice of self-reflection. Your honest and thoughtful responses are greatly appreciated.

Form Link: https://forms.gle/PwfMSrZYMreGmetA7

Weekly Progress Report

In practice both engineers and designers document and track their work, you may have heard this called a “Engineering Notebook”, “Design Sketchbook”, or “Lab Journal”. Naturally, this tradition extends to Technology Design. These documents are used to provide a record of decisions, calculations, designs, ideas, research, and inspiration. They can be used as legal documents for intellectual property protection. They can be used to track changes, modifications, and iterations, so designers can reflect on what works and what doesn’t. And they can help designers understand their thought processes and decision-making paths. In this course, you will develop your own practice of maintaining such a journal. Be thoughtful. Be thorough.

Each week you will submit a Progress Report documenting the work you’ve done that week. Include all relevant materials, this can be your ‘breadcrumb trail’ where you post the resources that led you to your project goals.

The progress reports are also a place where you will document the progression of your work throughout the semester. To that end, make it look good! Each post should be something you’d be proud to show in a job interview (or in an end-of-year academic review).

You will use markdown formatting to format and organize text and incorporate images into a coherent weekly progress report.

This document should be machine-readable, you will use this content to fine-tune a large language model later in the semester. Be verbose. Do not use ChatGPT to write it for you, you can use it to help if necessary.

Each week’s progress report must include:

1. Reflections

• in complete sentences or paragraphs, and perhaps images or videos.
• reflections on what you learned and how you learned it
• an assessment of the state of your work

1. Speculations

• in complete sentences or paragraphs, and perhaps images or videos.
• speculation on future direction for the tools [so much is changing very quickly right now, where do you think this is going? Why do you think this?]
• speculation on future direction for the work
• bonus: thoughtful descriptions of something interesting and relevant you heard about in the news or industry publications. include text, an image, a link, and a reference that you can follow up on later and share with your peers.

1. Images & Video

• images & video should be unified with your presentation (not just a folder of images)
• images & video should be directly relevant to the project (What does each shot show us?)

1. Sketches, Drawings, and Diagrams

• this could include flowcharts, design files, whiteboarding, storyboards, etc
• pencil & paper sketches, drawings, post-its, etc (photographed or scanned and uploaded)

Submission

You will post your weekly progress report to your Github wiki (like a blog post, most recent posts on top)