This session carries the course. If the payoff exercise lands, the notebook justifies itself for the rest of term. If it does not, the notebook becomes documentation homework by week six.
Prep: affinity mapping materials, stakeholder ring template printed, notebook rubric visible on the wall, and three fallback examples from your own real projects in case the room's material is too thin to show a difference. Rehearse the payoff.
Tables seeded from the W03 domain sign-up — at least one person per table who has made a journey map or a stakeholder map before.
Give me a persona for a health app user.
Sarah, 34. Busy marketing manager. Values efficiency. Tech-savvy but time-poor. Frustrated by cluttered interfaces.
What's wrong with it? Do not let anyone say “it's generic” and stop there.
Needs no prior training to appreciate, which is exactly why it works in a mixed room — the student who has never made a persona can see this is bad.
Steer toward: it describes a user, and it describes an individual, and it is a composite of nobody. Then the turn: personas are out as a built artifact in this course. They are the most rigorously taught thing in the core, and emerging technology's defining problem is its effect on people who never opted in — who by definition are not users.
Twenty minutes. Five-minute micro-teach first if anyone at your table hasn't done this.
Then the harder pass, and the one that is actually graded: which of these did your research reach, and which are you guessing about?
Micro-teach opens this too. Then build for real, on their own domain.
The second pass is where the learning is. Most rings will be guesses in week four, and that is fine — the skill is knowing which is which and saying so.
Genuinely strong at who am I forgetting. It will push the ring diagram past the obvious transaction faster than a table of four people will.
Generic categories with no local knowledge. “Regulators.”“The community.” It does not know which regulator or whose community, and it will not tell you that it doesn't.
Your research tells you which of these are real here. The model's list is a hypothesis. Yours is evidence. Knowing the difference is the whole job.
This is the same question week twelve asks with nine more weeks of evidence attached: who bears the cost.
Seventy minutes, bought by moving the Research Pack to W05. Use all of it — do not let the ecology run long.
decisions.md. This is your first entry that will have a parent.If the tool, the account or the device doesn't work for you, or you'd rather not use one: take my two prepared outputs, run steps four and five on those, and write the comparison. The comparison is the assessed half either way.
The comparison is evaluative, not constructive. They are not proving they can make an artifact — they are proving they can judge one. That is the scarce skill and it is only runnable with a cohort that has prior training. Say this out loud; it reframes the whole exercise for the strong students.
Say it in advance, not afterwards. Announced first it is a hypothesis being tested; said afterwards it sounds like an excuse for an exercise that failed.
Thin context produces thin gains — which is the thesis stated in reverse, and it is a finding about their research rather than a failure of the method. The students who get this result have learned the most useful thing available today.
If the room's material is genuinely too thin to show anything, this is where the three prepared examples from your own projects come out.
These slides are a fixed 16:9 canvas. In portrait they shrink to an unreadable strip; landscape gives you the whole slide.