Week 13: Artifact Generation

We’ve began to generate assets for our final artifacts. This should be an exciting time for us. For the last 13 weeks, we’ve been living and breathing the problem space. The future of Portland Public Schools is not a matter of fate, it is something that will be built — not only designed, but also transformed by external forces and deliberate interventions. This work and our team’s research are only one tiny piece of this larger unfolding process, and we cannot know what impact (if any) will come from what we have done.

On some level, I cannot help but feel a little bit sad as we conclude this work. I have a very real sense of the scope of this issue and understand that fifteen weeks cannot generate anything conclusive. Nevertheless, we must honor this process and the deliverable. There is an underlying contradiction in this work. What this project calls for is “bold humility.” We know that our research is not conclusive, we also know that without bold presentation, we cannot inspire meaningful change or the greater vision by Prospect Studio.

Our primary concept is a news story about PPS holding their first ARC summit, and what it means for the future of Portland schools and teachers. We can use this medium to communicate the most salient details while glossing over the more bureaucratic aspects of our system level thinking. For secondary artifacts, we’re thinking about “swag” that is typical for a professional conference, as well as a custom logo for the ARC council.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to resolve these artifacts to the highest fidelity possible. I know that the success of this project rests somewhat on our ability to persuade others, and we cannot know how this work will be interpreted if the artifacts are not convincing or feel too generic. I’m also worried that we have spent so much time working on the particulars that we haven’t given ourselves room for making these things.

I wish that we had a better sense of what is expected, and how craft will be factored into our grade. This is the first time that I’ve taken a studio class where nothing was made until the last two weeks. I expect that our team will be evaluated on the strength of our research and the clarity of our concepts, but as a studio class, I cannot shake this feeling that we should have been crafting prototypes along the way.

My hope for this week is that the momentum of making and the joy of purely creative pursuits will have a feedback effect to keep us motivated through this final push. I’m excited about the potential for the project even though we are still grappling with an incredibly high degree of uncertainty.

Week 12 Update: Evaluative Research Presentation and Reflection on Reaching The Project's Final Stage

This week our team presented our evaluative research to Prospect Studio (Fiona and other representatives were asynchronous for this session) and our guest, Arnold Wasserman. This presentation is the last before our final deliverable, and represents the conclusion of our research phase. While there are some loose ends for us to address (and further evaluation of our concept has not yet been attempted), we are now in the early stages of artifact synthesis.

The last few weeks have helped our team to understand the importance of user evaluation, what strategies do and do not work well in a remote/online context. In particular, we learned that building a survey is a miniature design project unto itself. The creation of an interactive system, and evaluating the results required significant labor up front and a lot of uncertainty throughout. Nevertheless, I feel that our team was successful in achieving specific goals.

I’m proud to say that we managed to get several different concepts in front of several educators from around the country as well as from within PPS specifically. We successfully navigated and sorted through feedback to gauge overall patterns of responses to several concepts as well as system-level evaluations. We managed to coordinate and divide our labor effectively, and communicated asynchronously as we brought key components together. This process was mirrored in the creation of our latest slide deck for Wednesday.
We received helpful feedback and challenges to our concept following our team’s presentation. As previously has been the case, our team had a good sense of who ought to respond to specific questions, since our divided labor has granted each team member some degree of specialization and familiarity with the topic we’ve been researching. Specifically, Arnold Wasserman was curious about how our artifacts could communicate these concepts in a compelling and persuasive manner. Arnold Wasserman pointed out that school boards and the people elected to them, have a tendency to be self-serving, to the detriment of the districts they represent. He questioned how our concepts would overcome the significant obstacle of implementation, especially given the fact that school boards and public officials hold the levers of power and the teachers are functionally an underclass in the United States.

This is something I’ve been thinking about since the beginning of this project, and I related back to these thoughts in response. My ideas are largely based on the work of Donella Meadows, and her famous essay on leverage points.

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

In particular, look at points three and four: the power to self organize and the goals of the system are key to understanding the forces necessary to reform PPS to more closely resemble the vision from Prospect Studio. I agree with Arnold Wasserman’s observation regard the school boards and policy makers, but I also see a real opportunity with this difficult and problematic group. They hold the levers, so we need only find a way to align their goals with the reforms we envisions for PPS.

If we accept the premise that politicians and school board members care about their own tenure and individual interests, and do so above all other considerations, then what we need to produce are artifacts that provokes the parents and registered voters of that school district. Once an activated and inspired public knows what they desire, they will vote for and ultimately elect representatives who promise to bring that vision to life. We have seen this on matters ranging from civil rights and infrastructure, to economics and war. Politicians will follow public pressure to keep their own seats warm.

Arnold seemed pleased with my answer, and suggested that our topic relates directly to the fate of our nation’s democracy — so, no pressure at all!

This weekend our team held three meetings to jumpstart this process of future artifact synthesis, and we have been more or less fruitful in this endeavor. It’s exciting to be in the final stretch, but our team has been struggling to maintain momentum lately. The demands of presentation weeks, and the rush to complete our research, often requires long hours, multiple zoom meetings outside of class, and many late nights. This has began to produce negative health consequences for our team.

We’ve been intensely looking at teacher burnout, but have also been confronted with the burnout of a pandemic, and the rigorous academics of a graduate program. Illness, headaches, and signs of exhaustion have crept into our team dynamic, and I’m concerned about what this will mean now that we are heading into the final push for this semester. What we really need at this stage is that spark of creativity and divergent thinking. It’s hard to do this level of work while also pushing up against the steady hum of stress and exhaustion.

Brainstorming session, mapping events and trends to eventual implementation of key ARC concepts

I think it was a gigantic error on the part of CMU to breakup our spring break. I understand the rationale, and the concerns around travel, but this alternative strategy of giving students a random Monday or Tuesday off has not provided the benefits of time off to rest. I simply cannot “sleep faster” when given a 24 hour window, and I cannot catch up when one day of classes is omitted from an otherwise packed calendar. I’m burned out. I’ve got this strange ringing in my ear that won’t let up, and I’m having more trouble concentrating than at any other time this year.

Languishing in the fog of constant deadlines, constant tasks, constant meetings, constant emails, Slack messages, updates, etc., etc., have left me depleted. It has also sucked the joy out of doing this work. I hope this terrible mental and physical state doesn’t last, because I don’t see how I can be productive while feeling this way.

Week 10 update: Speed dating and concept evaluation

We had a somewhat irregular week for studio II. After our presentation, our team regrouped and strategized on how we might conduct the next phase of our research. We started out with just two concepts (an ARC educator “hackathon” and a community-promoting “ARC awards” program), and while our team felt confident that these concepts were feasible and desirable to addressing our problem space, we still had a lot of open-ended questions that would require further inquiry. Additionally, we became very concerned with the potential opportunity costs of not exploring more alternatives.

To address this concern, we decided to return to our primary research and synthesize niche problem statements that my provoke additional concepts. This went extremely well, and we now have more than a dozen concepts ready for evaluation. We’re excited to get these ideas in front of educators, but this remains to be a substantial obstacle to our process.

We consulted with Hajira and Sofia about our concerns, and asked how we might convert the highly synchronous activity of “speed dating” to a more online and asynchronous form. They recommended Typefrom and while this option was appealing, it came with a few drawbacks. The ultimate dealbreaker on this platform was the price. It costs $40 to enable the features that actually make the platform more useful than free products such as Google Forms. After some digging, I found a free alternative (they literally marketed themselves as such). Tripetto offers logic and branches that will enable our team to structure paths for our survey to tailor the individual experience. This is pretty huge, considering the scarcity factors our team has struggled with since the beginning of this project.

Despite this progress and excitement for next steps, I’ve personally struggled with motivation this week. I know that a lack of regular sleep and some external stressors are partially to blame, but there are many factors contributing to this. It’s been difficult to process (cognitively and emotionally) what comes next for me.

This week, I received my cap and gown, a diploma frame, and a few other artifacts to commemorate my time at CMU. I’ve been in school since January of 2014, and I feel incredibly lucky and grateful for this opportunity. To date, academics has been my longest career. I have spent more time being a student than my entire Navy enlistment, or my time working at Intel as an engineer. Each chapter came with its own struggles, failures, and success.

Each made an indelible mark on my psyche and personality. I could never imagine in my wildest dreams that my educational path would end here, in Pittsburgh, confined to my shoebox apartment, a deadly virus burning down countless lives while I indulge in high-level theories. I owe so much for this good fortune, and I do not know how I will ever repay the world for what it has given me.

It’s not so much that I am procrastinating — I put in a lot of hours this week, especially for this project — it’s that I’m paralyzed, afraid that what we are doing is missing something vitally important yet still unnamed. I also know that 15 weeks is hardly enough time to understand potential futures and their relationships to the current state. 

It’s all crushing me down. I feel the weight of an obligation to deliver good work, yet terribly uncertain about this process. I’ve never done such intensive research before, and while I believe these theories and frameworks I’m soaking in (Worldview filters; Voroscone; Archplot structures; CLA;  Empathy mapping; Participatory, Generative, Co-design, etc.) are helpful and necessary to our work, it’s difficult to know if the way our team applies these unfamiliar methods will yield truly impactful results.

I know that this is a learning experience, first and foremost it is an invitation to fail brilliantly as we discover new ways of making, but without any prior experience with this stage, it’s so difficult to keep my chin up and to believe in my own creativity and ability.

Week 9 Update: Presenting Generative Research Findings

Fiona Hovenden (of Prospect Studio) was back in class with us this week. Monday through Wednesday blurred together as our team worked around the clock to bring our findings into coherence. Through this process, we found that it was easier than past presentations for us to produce clear and concise summaries of our work. This outcome stems from two key advantages:

• Our team continues to get better at coordination and understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This has accelerated our communication and the delegation of tasks.

• As we continue living and breathing in this problem space, we have gained deep familiarity with core concepts and structures. This has allowed us to develop a kind of fluency in addressing Portland Public Schools as a topic.

There is still a lot that we do not know, but this is something which we must (as a matter of need) become comfortable accepting as a default state. There are limits to what we can and cannot know over a fifteen week period, with limited access to our stakeholders.

Nevertheless, we are slowly inching toward viable concepts.

These concepts are derived from last week’s workshops and diary studies. There was a lot of doubt and uncertainty going into our work last week, as we started with a zero participants. By Tuesday, all of this changed, and we found ourselves scrambling to coordinate with five different participants. Additionally, we coordinated with our counterparts (“Team Ahaa”) and I even took part in one of their workshops—after nearly 11 years of living in Portland, I had some qualified opinions to share.

This accelerated and compressed path from research to presentation ensured that we quickly moved from documentation to synthesis. Our team only had ten minutes to present all of this, and this constraint was helpful motivation to distill everything we learned over the last two weeks. So, what did we learn?

At a high level, generative research helped us to understand how educators see their relationship with various stakeholders. We gained more intimate, personal, and “day in the life of” perspectives from educators. We also got surprising feedback regarding their perception of possible futures. In general, there is not much hope for things improving substantially in the next ten years, but there is still a very real sense of urgency to make things better. This paradox has been with us since our first round of interviews but remains unresolved.

The most salient insights for our team were around issues of resilience and community: 

• Educators feel supported when colleagues show up and help proactively

• Informal but reliable networks among educators support their resilience

• Lack of resources and top-down surprises make teachers feel unsupported

• Quality of life and mental health resources are poorly leveraged

“Empathy” and “Community” are other target areas in the Educator Essentials ring.

In our team’s presentation debrief, we had a lengthy discussion about this overlap, and our concerns about spreading ourselves too thin or not staying on target. This is an ongoing conversation and part of our general concerns for this project. We considered whether or not ARC is a “keystone” goal— resting on requisite conditions, and also essential to achieving other areas. This enmeshment is not entirely incompatible with the brief and Prospect Studio’s understanding of the problem space, but we must carry the burden of interpretation.

As we continue developing and evaluating concepts and potential interventions, we hope to achieve more focus on ARC, and to draw clear distinctions between outcomes and means to outcomes—e.g., is empathy an outcome of ARC, or is it a means to achieve ARC? This isn’t yet well defined, but I have faith in our team’s ability to resolve it.

Coming away from our Wednesday presentation, I can say that this task was both a relief and a source of pride. It was a huge relief to affirm key findings from Prospect Studio’s work, and also a moment of pride to have found these insights through workshops and protocols developed in house. This validated our research methods and demonstrated our core competency. Our protocols and assets were effective and entirely reproducible.

In terms of project management, we also took time to reflect on what was and was not working with our process and team contract. We do this every week as part of our “Rose, Bud, Thorn, and Shoutout” check-in exercise. We still felt more rushed than we’d preferred, and thought about ways to better support each other. We decided to designate “backup roles” to augment the facilitator and note-taker tasks. We hope that this will keep everyone equally engaged, while still offering flexibility and variety throughout the process. There are diminishing returns to these types of reforms, as we are already more than half way through the project. Nevertheless, every improvement counts. 

Week 8 Update: Generative Research and Future Visions of Portland Public Schools

We began this week with a guest lecture from Adam Cowart, a PhD candidate in the transition design program. He introduced us to the concept of CLA (Causal Layered Analysis). We used this framework to better understand the landscape of our problem space at Portland Public Schools. Adam described different facets of the problem space through the lens of “litany filters.” To recognize what futures are feasible, we need to understand the triad of history, present, and future, and what elements in our landscape pull, push, or weigh down progress.

We took some time in class to reframe our insights through this framework, and began synthesis of potential elements to build a bridge toward the future vision created by Prospect Studio. This process began slowly, but after some heavy lifting we began filling out the diagram with great enthusiasm! It was refreshing to revisit our secondary research (which was already categorized under a STEEP-V framework). It was revealing to see visually how much further we have advanced our understanding of this problem space since literature review and background reading.

Outside of class, our team was busier than ever — working to adapt and overcome the obstacles we’ve encountered in our generative research phase has not been easy. I’ve struggled to support these efforts. The external factors of my personal and professional life have been an ongoing source of strain. I feel so much gratitude to the support and encouragement I’ve received from this team, and this week I felt a great deal of pressure to reciprocate.

Sample of generative research protocols

This effort to pay back the generosity I received (when I needed it most) began with a complete/comprehensive draft of our protocols for generative research, and the specifications for our workshop. Working with Carol, we delivered this to the team ahead of schedule. It was necessary for us to draft new protocols and workshop exercises to include a broader audience, outside of Portland Public Schools. We found that last week was somewhat of a dead end for seeking participation from our intended stakeholders (administrators and educators at PPS).

For our workshop, we wanted to know how different stakeholders perceive their relationships with counterparts, learn what different stakeholders prioritize and why, gain deeper understanding of how educators think about the future of public education, and to explore and define preferred futures.

We conducted three separate workshop sessions with educators outside of PPS. This included neighboring districts of PPS (Gresham-Barlow), as well as out-of-state educators. This approach allowed us to glean insights regarding that which is common in the US public school system, and that which is more specific to Portland. While this adaptation is not without its risks to skewed data, it is far more preferable that to remain without any additional insights beyond our primary research activities.

Screenshots of workshop activity

This was my first experience with executing participatory design with stakeholders and it has been such a rollercoaster of emotions. Since Carol and I worked on the protocol together, it was only logical that we also create the visual and interactive components for the workshop. We iterated on our initial concept by practicing with our own team, with each member taking a turn roleplaying as a participant. This helped us to work out the kinks and refine details before putting anything in the hands of our participants.

The first workshop with a real participant was very revealing. Having access to their thought process in real time, their visual associations, priorities, and ideas about the future were peeled back in layers, digging deeper into their lived experiences than we ever got through primary research and conversational interviews. Even the generation of simple sketches gave us glimpses into their inner worlds. I now question how important it was to conduct traditional interviews in the first place. Workshops are just so much more dynamic and active than interviews, and I consistently came away feeling more connected to the participants and their experiences.

This weekend was highly reflective. With new insights in hand, we spent over five hours evaluating what we discovered. There was so much for us to consider and it was only once we had the chance to pick it all apart together as a team that we could begin to make sense of it all. Many of our initial assumptions were blown out of the water. Our newfound perspective gave us a real sense of how important relationships are in the field of teaching. We also learned that technology is probably the least important factor for educators — with the exception of a desire for students to have high-speed internet at home, there was little to no interest in improving access to technology generally.

I’m still getting used to applying so many different approaches and methods so quickly.  I feel like I’m only occasionally operating with a sense of clarity. There has been prolonged fuzziness that’s difficult to describe or ignore. It seems as though new insights provoke deeper questioning, while offering little in the way of certainty. I think this is just the experience of progressively revealing collective and individual ignorance. Before learning enough to act decisively, we must first gaze into the vast abyss of what we still do not know.

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.