U-CRAC

In September 2010, for the third consecutive year, Kollision was invited to facilitate a one-week workshop on video sketching in the four-week U-CRAC workshop. U-CRAC stands for User driven Creation Academy and aims to involve businesses and their customer-centric innovation needs in an education-based research process that results in innovative multi-disciplinary processes and design solutions. U-CRAC is a partnership between University College Jutland, Architecture & Design, and Interactive Digital Media & Experience Design, both at the University of Aalborg. In 2010 U-CRAC involved 110 students from the three institutions.

Based on simple and rapid methods of production, the students were invited to ‘stage’ their ideas and activities. The students were not allowed to use other sketching methods such as paper and pencil. This forced participants away from the drawing tables and to work with staging their concepts in a spatial setting using roleplaying to consider the needs of actual users. During the week, participants with a more detailed knowledge of tools such as video editing and 3D-modelling software, were introduced to more advanced techniques such as chroma-keying and camera-matching.

The aim of the weeklong workshop was not a series of beautiful videos, but rather an awareness of the video medium as a sketching tool. The groups submitted videos of varying quality – both in form and content - and were subsequently asked to reflect on the method's ability to help them accomplish particular tasks in a new way. The results of this reflection showed that using video for rapid prototyping is a fast and efficient way of designing and thinking about use-cases.