loft — MATT EASTERDAY

The Loft: A digital studio for civic innovation networks

How might we best teach civic innovators? To learn civic innovation, learners must practice solving real-world problems in their community. But with traditional classroom approaches it is difficult to orchestrate civic innovation teams, which working on different problems, at different speeds, using different skills over extended time-frames. As a result, instructors either: spend inordinate amount of time supporting projects; provide little support, letting novices flounder; have to acquire extra teaching resources such as a co-instructor at great expense; or use less effective, lectured-based pedagogies.

The Loft (www.loft.io) is a digital studio for orchestrating project-based learning cycle, especially in civic innovation networks. It scaffolds a project-driven learning cycle in which teams of civic innovators: set goals, develop their problem-solving abilities; plan their approach; facilitate team progress, and receive feedback from peers. The Loft helps network leaders and classroom teachers orchestrate real-world, project-based, civic innovation learning.

Featured

Loft: Canvas

The design canvas helps teams set the goals for their project and choose appropriate milestones.

Loft: Process guide

The process guide teaches complex problem-solving processes such as the human-centered design process used by Design for America students.

Loft: Workbench

Teams use collaborative project management tools to plan their approach.

Loft: Cheers & Help

The Loft helps facilitate team progress by surfacing project struggles and inviting peers and coaches to provide encouragement and help.

Loft: Critique

The Loft face-to-face, computer-supported group critique tools scaffolds feedback so that a group of novices can provide feedback as good as a single expert.

Loft: Authoring

The wiki-like collaborative editing system and automatic collection and critiquing of work allows editors to crowdsource content creation and curation.

Research:

Building help-seeking support tools for novice designers (Rees Lewis, Harburg, Gerber, & Easterday, 2015)
Computer-supported novice group critique (Easterday, Rees Lewis, Fitzpatrick, & Gerber, 2014)
Formative feedback in Digital Studios (Easterday, Rees Lewis, & Gerber, 2013)
Understanding group critique (in preparation)
Critiki: A scaffolded approach to gathering design feedback from crowds of nonexperts (Greenberg, Gerber & Easterday, 2015)