On Monday we kicked off a design research project for Studio II. Peter began the brief with a quote:
“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
—H.M. Tomlinson, Out of Soundings
This has stuck with me throughout the week as our team began exploring two public schools for consideration of focus. Portland Public Schools are an obvious choice because I bring unique insights to this domain—I have a couple years experience volunteering at Ockley Green K-8 and NAYA’s after school youth mentorship program. I’m able to contribute lived experience and perspective. I know PPS educators and know many of the challenges they face. I also feel very much indebted to this community, as they opened their doors to me and helped me at a critical stage of my journey into the field of design. It is my sincerest wish and goal to contribute to a more positive future for the children of district.
Having reviewed the briefs for Portland Public and for Santa Clara, I am reminded of the work I did over the previous summer, interning as a communication designer for Dezudio (Ashley and Raelynn’s design studio, here in Pittsburgh). This was a fantastic opportunity to apply recently acquired skills and knowledge from service and communication design coursework to address the challenges of Brooklyn LAB Charter School in the context of COVID-19. Central to this work was understanding the needs of historically marginalized communities which already could be described as “in crisis.” These conditions were amplified by COVID-19, but also presented an opportunity to justify significant overhaul to this institution and their approach to supporting student’s academic needs.
I’m excited to work with our assigned team. Cat, Caro, and Chris were all members of our MA cohort, and we have good rapport from previous projects and our time together in the studio. Additionally, this team comprises of a plurality of individual experiences and perspectives. Cat attended a private school in D.C., Carol is from Taiwan and has no direct or personal experience with public education in the United States. Chris and I both come from hyper-conservative and religious homes, and this impacted the way in which our parents made choices regarding education. For Chris, this meant a combination of home schooling as well as traditional enrollment. For me this meant several gaps and educational deficiencies (e.g., attending a rural school district with trailers in lieu of a school building) and eventually dropping out altogether. I did not finish high school, and instead passed the G.E.D. when I was still seventeen years old. These experiences lend to a strong negativity bias on my part, which I hope will balance out some of the more optimal experiences of my peers—I know all too well what doesn’t work in public education.
For the first week of our Research Methods course, we read excerpts from Alan Cooper and a paper by Branka Krivokapic-Skoko. A few points I found helpful from Cooper:
I agree with many sentiments, but his definitions for design, expertise, stakeholders, and just the entire framing of “users” feels very outdated.
I’m not sure that I agree with him on this statement:
Users of a product should be the main focus of the design effort.
I take issue with this framing because, as Cooper points out, the user is not always the same person as the customer. This is certainly the case in public schools, where students are not paying for a service, but still have specific needs. And are students “users” of a product? This market-based framework seems much more useful in a for-profit context.
When he says that, “it is important to speak to both current and potential users, that is, people who do not currently use the product but who are good candidates for using it in the future because they have needs that can be met with the product and are in the target market for the product” I question why this is the goal. Is it good to grow the market for growth’s sake? What if I’m designing iron lungs and that JERK Salk is trying to push me out of the market?
Product and competitive audits: Also in parallel to stakeholder and SME interviews, it is often quite helpful for the design team to examine any existing version or prototype of the product, as well as its chief competitors.
This one seems pretty obvious, but last semester it was also very important that our research include lots of exploration into the same product/system space. Knowing what is out there helped us to recognize new potentials for existing applications and solutions.
On Wednesday, Stef (our TA for the class) shared her team’s project to give us a better sense of what to expect in terms of process and crafting our deliverables. This was useful for priming ideas about how to approach the somewhat open-ended prompt to create an artifact to represent daily life for PPS in the year 2035. Based on this impression, I began thinking about individual goals for this project and thinking about what I can hope to improve or learn throughout this process:
Remote collaboration
Research-based design
Providing meaningful artifacts for a client
Producing something great for a portfolio
I inserted these items into our team contract. For Monday, we need to complete a first draft territory map for PPS. This process has been a bit slower, and Cat mentioned how much she misses having access to a physical whiteboard. Even though we’ve been working in this “new normal” for nearly a full year, it is impossible to ignore what we have lost by switching to a remote learning context.