Core77 Design Awards 2022

I’m very pleased to see Stuart Candy’s project “Imagination is a Commons” is the winner for Core77’s award for Speculative Design, 2022. Back in March of 2021, I received a somewhat unusual paid request — for studio photography services. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were still out of reach for many, and facilities and institutions remained shuttered, I was suffering from cabin fever isolation and grieving the death of my uncle.

I was finishing up my second Master’s degree, and Pittsburgh had only begun to thaw after a long and difficult winter. Without access to the campus photography studio, Stuart had reached out to his network at Carnegie Mellon, seeking alternatives. As luck would have it, during my undergraduate studies I invested in my own studio photography setup.

My barebones digital photography setup

Scrappy resilience was a constant theme throughout 2020. Students without studio space were constantly finding ways to make do. This was one of those rare moments where few compromises were necessary, and I had everything I needed on hand. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a bag full of artifacts from the future…

T-shirts from a coding festival in the year 2030

Social distancing and staying home (for the better part of a year) had distorted my sense of time. In the first year of the pandemic, there were days and weeks that seemed to vaporize, and weekends that lasted a month. To hold these artifacts, and to focus on them through a viewfinder, I felt as though I had stepped completely outside of time and space. This was a perfect diversion from my mundane existence, and a reminder that this too shall pass.

Thank you, Stuart and Ceda. And congratulations!

Week 2: Portland Public Schools Territory Mapping, Personal Reflection

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

—Nelson Mandela

On Wednesday we presented our territory maps to the class and Fiona—our guest from Prospect Studio. From completing the MA last year, and my work in the Service Design seminar course, I feel somewhat confident in the quality of our combined efforts and the contributions I personally had to offer. We worked through several iterations, and presented our first draft on Monday for Peter’s review. The feedback we received was helpful. In particular, Peter asked that we include systems level goals, specify equity-centered outcomes, and leverage personas and vignettes to aid in narrowing to a single area of focus. We were also encouraged to focus our primary and secondary research on the current state of things at PPS.

First Draft territory map, as it was presented on Monday

Stef recommended that we begin our presentation with an explanation for why we chose PPS and our chosen area of focus. Thinking about how we might explain these choices revealed for our team how these different aspects are connected, and to being recognizing some common threads. On Tuesday our team met for an informal work session. These kinds of meetings have been very helpful in keeping us on track and motivated—especially during this prolonged quarantine, working independently can be a real drag. Working together remotely and having realtime communication with one another has also been useful in ensuring we reach consensus on key decisions.

For example, at the beginning of our meeting on Tuesday, we spent roughly fifteen minutes clarifying our intentions, area of focus, and defining the various terms outlined in the brief: what does it mean for an educator to be “resilient, adaptive, and open to change”? This was important for the next phase of refining our territory map. We converged from exploring three distinct areas in the brief to a single section (educator essentials). We decided on a general format for the territory map (based on examples shared by Hajira’s morning presentation) with “who,” “what,” and “how” as distinct categories, arranged from inside-out. Initially, the concentric arrangement proved limiting. Our team opted to transition to an elliptical arrangement, exploiting the typical 16:9 widescreen format.

While I cannot speak for the entire team, I am most proud of our willingness to embrace ambiguity and to continue working through high degrees of uncertainty, toward something more coherent. I have no doubt that the outcome of our collective efforts were far superior to anything we could have made by working individually. Our collective intelligence was on display Wednesday, and it seemed that Fiona and Peter were pleased with the work.

Ultimately, we produced a fairly comprehensive map; this first deliverable represents many different perspectives, and our combined understanding of the brief. We managed to produce something that is visually appealing, and which communicates our ideas on this topic. There is still quite a bit of work to be done before we can validate these categorical relationships, but our team was very successful at representing the current state of our research, and how our process will unfold over time.

Final draft of our team’s territory map, as presented on Wednesday.

One unsettled question: how can we maximize the impact of our field research and ethnographic approach in the context of a pandemic? We shared a few options, and while we could not settle on an exact methodology just yet, we did agree to pool our resources and purchase some small tokens of gratitude. This was inspired—through personal experience with volunteering, I know that “thank you” goes much further when it includes a tasty treat or tangible artifact to commemorate the experience.

We met again this weekend and debriefed on our experience with the presentation. We continued working in a variety of collaborative digital environments and management tools (Figma, Trello, Miro, Google Docs, Slack), but upon Chris’ recommendation, we have decided to add another tool to the mix: Framer. Our team contract remains intact at this time, but we amended our debriefings to include a “rose, bud, thorn” framing. This made it much easier for the team to share their thoughts and feelings about the work so far. We also added a “shoutout” option for meaningful expressions of gratitude. This worked very well for our first debrief, and will likely be standard going forward.  

The Future of Portland Public Schools — Week 2, Team Update

This week, our team posted a bio on our course homepage. Chris put it best, “we cute as hell, just saying:”

Making the best of remote collaboration

We also drafted a team contract to establish expectations and roles, among these are:

Goals for this project:

• Sharpen our skills for…

• Research-based design

• Remote collaboration

• Providing meaningful artifacts for a client

• Something great for our portfolios

Expectations

• Meetings scheduled to avoid conflict and maximize productivity

• Established deadlines

• Delegation of tasks

• Regular updates and communications for peers

• Time to celebrate accomplishments

Policies:

• Commitment to ongoing research to strengthen and refine ideas, concepts.

• Flexibility and understanding (because there’s still a pandemic and bad things can and will happen)

Consequences and conflict:

• Call people in, not out. If something is not going well, we all have a problem and can work together to solve it.

• Transparency: let’s communicate when there are problems, we all have valuable perspectives and may recognize something that others do not

• When possible, table discussions if we cannot easily make decisions. Decide when/if to address problems as a group or between group members

Custom rules for meetings:

• Rotation of responsibilities so folks don’t burn out on repetitive tasks.

In addition to structuring our collaborative efforts, we also completed a first draft of our research team’s territory map.

First draft version of territory map for PPS, based on the brief provided by Prospect Studio

Our professor, Peter Scupelli provided feedback on our initial presentation draft:

• Need to include systems level goal

• Need to specifically include equity-centered systems and outcomes

• Leverage personas and vignettes to aid in choosing area of focus

• Recommend researching the current state with a focus on equity

To improve the focus and process of our research, we’re also reviewing text from How To Future, a book by Madeline Ashby and Scott Smith. Chapter 3 describes the process for sensing and scanning information, which will be useful for our secondary research and literature review, as well as synthesizing insights from primary research and participant interviews.

Since the scope of this project is fairly broad and also because we are working on it for 15 weeks, we’ve also decided to adopt the project management tool, Trello to aid us in tracking our individual and collective progress, assign/delegate tasks, and note passing key milestones.

Using the feedback we received from our professor and our excellent TA, Sefania La Vattiata, we set more specific goals for completing our territory map.

Summary of Decisions/Surfacing Perceived Alignments:

• Converged from 3 slices to one sections of the outcomes. Current Territory Map should focus exclusively on Educator Essential: Adaptive, resilient and open to change

• To frame our future, we are currently considering the possibilities and methods that adults can learn how to partner with students about what happens after graduation/their long term goals

• New Format for territory map based on Hajira’s work. From the center outward: Who-> What -> How -> Future experiences

• Future experience should be structured within the futures scenario we are currently exploring

• For the future experiences outer most rim, each scenario ideally aligns with an accompany assumption or question about the present. ie Future: VR explorations of proposed new school house Past: How/Can people see these plans today?

To do list for Wednesday’s Presentation:

• Update deck with new (1) focus, (2) research, (3) Territory Map/Reasoning

• Add Section in the deck about for the proposed Future Scenario we are exploring

• Deck should be finished no later than Wednesday at 11am, share any changes

Which area are we truly focussing on? Educator Essentials? Graduate Portrait? We’re a bit hung up on the adaptive, lifelong learning? Our hope is that through this process, it will be easier to narrow our focus to the educator essentials.

UPDATE:

Our team completed their second revision of the territory map for the Educator Essential vision of Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change.