Watch: Oreo-making Video

Introduction

“Oreo-making Video” is part of the Design Activities resource, which compiles activities that students can use to practice and reflect on design processes.

In “Oreo-making Video”, students will work in teams to view Bon Appetit’s video, “Pastry Chef Attempts To Make Gourmet Oreos”, and track the pastry chef’s design process to gain a better understanding of what design process tracing looks like. 

We invite you to choose a capture method from the Capturing Design Signatures collection. Using a capture method, this activity gives students the opportunity to reflect on what the pastry chef does, and notice how they make choices and move through their design process. 

The following capture methods work well for this activity:

Why do this activity?

The purpose of this activity is to allow students to engage in watching, analyzing, and reflecting on someone else’s design process. Through this activity, students will see the pastry chef's design process, and they may learn how design appears in all aspects of daily life. Additionally, with a capture method, this activity teaches students a form of qualitative coding. 

This activity will help students:

Materials needed

Setting up the activity

  1. Send the link to this oreo-making video to your students.

Doing the activity

  1. Have each team set up the capture method you’ve chosen, as well as a blank note-taking document. 
  2. Have teams watch one minute of the video. (If in-person, you may choose to stream the video yourself for the entire class to see.)
  3. After the minute, go back and watch the same minute again, but this time in 10 second intervals. For each 10 second interval, teams should pause and write down a short description of what happened in those 10 seconds. 
  4. After they finish rewatching that minute interval, teams will label each description with one of the design process stages. (This is also known as qualitative coding.) Teams can then record each 10 second segment using their capture method. 
  5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the entire video; rewatch sections as necessary. 
  6. Have each team view the pastry chef’s design process tracing, and engage in a 5 minute discussion about their process. The following questions may be used: some text
    1. How does the data help you understand the pastry chef’s process? 
    2. From this process, what behaviors helped the pastry chef? What changes might you advise the pastry chef to make? 
    3. What interesting things happened as the pastry chef attempted to problem-solve and try again? 
  7. Have each team share their reflections to the class. 

Student Responses and Takeaways

Student responses
Group 1's notes and labels from minute 1:00 to 3:50 of the video.
Group 4's notes and labels from minute 9:30 to 12:20 of the video
Student takeaways

“The design process doesn’t always have to be internal (Claire asks for a bunch of advice/ideas from coworkers).” — Student 1

What struck you as interesting? “Being able to visualize the design process when coding the gourmet oreo making video with my group and then seeing the different color coding ranges within other groups as well.” — Student 2

Instructor Tips and Advice

Students as ethnographers: Students may be interested to know that this activity is similar to basic ethnography: in watching this pastry chef try to recreate oreos, students learn about their behavior and about design processes.

Try try again: Encourage your students to notice how often the pastry chef makes mistakes and keeps trying to improve their work and generate new ideas. Not only is this an integral part of any design process, but this is also a valuable life lesson. It’s okay to make mistakes—it’s possible to work through them and still come out with a wonderful final product!