Co-design

We strongly believe
in the power of a multidisciplinary
co-design approach
for educational media at ETH Zurich.

Teachers and scientists, professors or professionals - they are the experts on certain scientific topics. They have in-depth knowledge about their field of research or teaching.
Every medium has it’s on rules and affordances. Videographers or animation experts, interaction designers or illustrators - the choice of with whom a content expert works with depends on the media format we’re choosing to go for.
In our edumedia team, we always try to implement fundamental learning science practice and media didactics. In most projects, we need a script writer; in another, we might need to include a learning psychologist or a media theory expert.

Ways of working

Our media production is strongly driven by co-design between content experts and experts from the fields of media and education.

The illustration depicts a brainstorming session, in which we define the key message, content design and corresponding different media formats in our co-design set-up of experts.

Working with experts from different areas of expertise is second nature to us. For this exchange to be successful, the concept of co-design is put into practice: co-designing audiovisual media implies an interdisciplinary collaboration between experts from the fields of science, teaching and media/video. It relies on the willingness of all participants to venture into other, foreign knowledge clusters.

Three core areas

Our audiovisual media productions are divided into three main focus areas:

Co-design of media productions & critical media reflections
These projects are designed and implemented directly with ETH departments. Most of the projects are financed by the Innovedum Fund or other third-party funds.
Media competencies
A relevant mission on our part is to train ETH lecturers with future-oriented knowledge about the reception of audiovisual media, to build up media competencies and to practice applied skills. For this purpose, various course formats, mentoring and coaching programs are developed and directly applied by means of case studies in ETH practice.
Lighthouse projects
In the third focus, new cutting-edge media technologies, audiovisual narratives or speculative scenarios are explored through applied settings and media productions, and evaluated for their effectiveness and scalability for teaching at ETH. Here, too, we are very happy to work in direct co-design with the departments of ETH Zurich.

Step-by-step process of an audiovisual media production

In the illustration below, you can see an exemplary step-by-step process on how we co-design audiovisual media with different experts together. Sometimes, the sole steps vary a bit depending on the media format and production style (e.g. short animation, documentary film, case study docu, expert interviews, laboratory shots, concept videos etc.).