This study was conducted for a project in Graduate Design Studio II at Carnegie Mellon University in Spring 2021. This semester long team project is about futuring the vision of K-12 education, and as designers, we are envisioning the future learning experience. I’ll be working on the project with teammates Christopher Costes, Catherine Yochum, and Matt Geiger under the instruction of Peter Scupelli. We will be exploring a wicked problem, synthesizing the research result to bring about a possible future by applying a heuristic design framework.
This week we started with team building and team alignment. We conducted a team contract together to come up with a common agreement before the project started. The questions we’re checking with ourselves are:
- GOALS: What are our team goals for this project? What do we want to accomplish?
- STRENGTHS : What skills can you bring to the team? What skills do you want to develop or refine?
- EXPECTATIONS: What do we expect of one another in regard to attendance at meetings, participation, frequency of communication, the quality of work, etc.?
- POLICIES & PROCEDURES: What rules can we agree on to help us meet our goals and expectations? What platforms will we use to collaborate?
- CONSEQUENCES & CONFLICT: How will we address non-performance in regard to these goals, expectations, policies and procedures? What procedures will we use to update the team contract in unforeseen circumstances?
- Worries
- Percentage time
I’ve known Cat, Chris and Matt for a year, and worked with Chris and Matt last semester. Though familiar with each other, we both bring in the past project experiences and talked about what works and what doesn’t work, which I believe is a great start. I would say being open, honest and transparent would be the key to create a trusted environment. Moreover, establish the remote collaboration workflow, and working tools in the beginning also worth the investment. I’m glad that my teammates are people who treasure vulnerability that I can rely on emotionally. Though still concerned about the unknown exploration of the project, and I believe there will be unexpected challenge along the process. I would try my best to be a flexible contributor to learn and adapt for the growth of the team and myself.
Week 2 Reflection on territory maps
Final Outcome — 02/10
The past two week we’ve been trying to figure out what the prompt requires us to do, and what direction we should choose-Portland or Santa Clara for location. Graduate portrait, educator portrait and system portrait.
Initial decision
Initially, we collectively choose three direction in each portrait based on the key-word we resonate the most — adaptable, inclusive, and responsible. Based on these slices(as highlighted below), we then develop our first iteration of territory map.
We centered the student in our first version of the territory map, with the mental model that the student is the ultimate product of the school system, supported by the educators and the system. The middle ring is the student support, and the outer ring is the student needs. The goal of our design vision sits outside the circle, and by reading the map from the middle to the outer, we can understand how student would be supported to fulfill their need, and ultimately become the reflected, inclusive life-long learner.
After Monday’s feedback session, here are some of the feedback that helps us iterate:
- Pick a slice
Think about how does grad portrait map to educational shift? Work outward from ONE/1–2 part of graduate portrait would be more concrete than picking many of them. We might feel vulnerable to specify — but it provokes a response as opposed to getting it right — intuition about aspect of learning interesting to explore, trying to get feedback from the experts.
2. How will the whole systems support the adults and the learners?
3. Align presentation to the *why* of what we’re doing
We change our area of focus to one concrete decision, which is adaptive, resilient and open to change. As we believe that there’s a lot to explore in a stressful teaching system in public school, and the intervention in the educational portrait could eventually benefit the students, and furthermore, the whole system.
The new map is structured from introducing WHO-the people we’re exploring, WHAT-the preferred situation we’re proposing, and HOW- what do they need to become adaptive, resilient and open to change. We then layer the correspondent WHAT and HOW sections to connect the dot. The layering helps us narrowing down a little bit by mapping out the relationship, but still create a holistic picture of what the entire landscape looks like.
Week 3 Reflection — Exploratory Research
In our Research Methods for Design class, Sophia introduced useful mindsets and tools to conduct secondary research with structural guidance. She suggested we leverage Google Sheets to categorize and summarize the research resource, and spending time, in the beginning, will payout in the end. Our team applied the STEEP+V analysis method to navigate the topic, with each of us responsible for one aspect, and I’m responsible for the environmental part of K-12 in PPS. We applied the method, listed the link, name, steep tag, MLP tag, summary, and notes to gather information.
It works pretty well since the filter function helps us search the relevant sources within a second. And most important, this is an excellent implementation of group work. I’ve never finished reading all of the reading in all the STEEPS aspects in a week. Dividing down the workload and gathering them together in a team library helps set all of us on the same page with rich content.
This week we also practice the plan on collabU, another interesting module for dealing with group conflict. Surprisingly, the online module did push me to reflect on my attitude in teamwork a lot. With my past working experience as an application consultant, people I collaborated with have a passive attitude toward the project outcome. They are waiting for my solution proposal, and for the engineers I’ve worked with, they’re waiting for the wireframes and flows I’ve created for them to develop the system further. I felt like my collaboration mode is to persuade people to buy in my idea instead of inviting people to contribute to the project. This attitude had me failed the CollabU module practices.
Studio class is the first time for me to work with designers. Moreover, people who are more proactively involved in the contribution of the process. As a get-it-done, get-it-right person, I’m comfortable with the conflict during the process, but I would suffer if the outcome is unpresentable. Teaming up with more people-centered people did help me reflect and practice to be a better listener. It’s tough for me to listen and find a direction that all team members would satisfy. And sometimes, reaching common goals means someone has to compromise; therefore, understanding what people care about the most is essential in the communication process. And to reveal what we care the most with people we are not familiar with requires trust, at least for an introvert like me, sharing this is being vulnerable. My teammates and I have known others quite a bit, so it’s easier for us to speak out about our needs without further judgment. Still, I could imagine collaboration in a corporate situation difficult when different stakeholders with different needs to fulfill. But overall, building a trusting environment is the key to collective success and practicing to be a better listener.
Week 4 Reflection — Interview Protocols
What we’ve done
We finished our research protocols, contacted interviewees, conducted one interview.
What we plan to do
Revisit team contract, continue finish interviews and prepare for the presentation.
Takeaways
We started with secondary research, and brainstormed a lot of questions to ask, but then got stuck when trying to narrow down the questions. What works for us is to revisit the educator portrait we chose, and collaboratively redefine our understanding of the text s— adaptive, resilient, and open to change.
Adaptive {in a student/teaching context}: accommodation of advancing technologies and diverse learning styles
Resilient: self-awareness and care and community of support
Open to Change{interpersonal context}: incorporating new cultural perspectives and skillsets
After this, we re-imaging the additives and barriers of each text. It’s useful to flush out these ideas based on our secondary research. We then list down the questions based on what we like to know from the interviewee with the goals in mind — how to you bring together the additive resources, and how do you overcome the barrier to become adaptive, resilient, and open to change? The goals are like anchor for our research process that helps us navigate the unknown, and I found thinking about the additive and barrier super helpful.
After coming up with our research protocol, we arranged a meeting with Sofia and Hajira to help double check the questions. Their suggestions are about to think about what we will get by asking the question, and try to be more specific but not leading. After tweaking the questions, we decided to iterate our protocol based on the interview result. I found it super helpful to interact with people to learn and grow from the research process, instead of diving into the reading and writing forever. Overall, this might be the best practice of action research, which is also a concept learnt from Research Methods for Design class.
“No research without action, no action without research.” — Kurt Lewin
Week 5
This week we spent most of the time conducting interviews in order to find out the challenges and opportunities PPS educators are most likely to face. Fortunately, we got four interviewees, with each serving a different role in the school system. They are school director, director at engagement in PPS, teacher in PPS, and a language specialist(out sources instructor) in PPS.
Getting people in diverse background allows us to learn one topic from different perspective, so I’m pretty excited to learn from them.
I’m particularly intrigue by some of the aspect that the interviews mentioned:
- School director at the private school:
Her motivation for becoming a director is partly because of her children, and also for self-achievement. It’s a small private school so everyone bond well, and she got more flexibility to define rules to support the students and the teachers. She cares a lot about the relationship with parents as well, with the goal to build a strong community with families and the educators.
She also mentioned some positive feedback when announcing the teachers can have an hour break time at lunch. This struck me the most because I never thought it’s a privilege to have a hour break for lunch, but for the teacher they really devote their entire day at school to take care of every spontaneous stuff. And this also echos back the resilience part at the ARC portrait.
2. Teachers at PPS:
She’s an art teacher, and comparing to the science teachers who are regulated by the student success assessment, she has more flexibility to teach her students life skills and creativities. I would consider the student success assessment as an obstacle, and would like to look up what’s the current metric for PPS teacher. One thing she mentioned that resonate with me a lot is teaching the topic of equity-she doesn’t feel qualify to talk about it as a white teacher. And with more and more racial groups in PPS, the teachers need more supports, or at least need more voices to be heard when it comes to racial justice. I really appreciate that she’s willing to be vulnerable and share with us.
3. Learning expert at PPS:
He’s a learning expert and was hired by PPS to support the teacher with student’s individual needs. His sharing is extremely helpful for us to learn about the stakeholders in PPS. He mentioned that the school actually receive outside founding to pay for his company, which point out a serious problem — the financial resources in public school is scarce. And they rely on outside resource to better support student’s individual needs. He also share his opinion toward being in a teacher at school or a contractor outside of school, and he enjoy being more flexible to care for the student without receiving too much pressure from school admin to fulfill the assessment matrix. Although I’m hesitate about the benefit he brings to the class(I mean, there must be benefit, but he might only tell the positive side of the collaboration) This collaboration with contractor is also new to me because from my previous experience in public school in Taiwan, we never receive this resource for our individual needs. So let along the effectiveness, I really appreciate PPS’s effort to support students.
Week 6
This week, we synthesize what we had in the interview and secondary research for the presentation. We started by re-centered our goal of the research in the beginning, and introducing our research finding and insights from the interview. Initially in our territory map, we separate the adaptive, resilient and open to change in three qualities, and analyze our research finding by the structure.(as shown below)
However, this three-quality structure doesn’t work well because they are actually intertwine, and we should considered them overlapping traits or a single quality called ”A.R.C”. (Adaptive, Resilient, and open to Change)
Moving on with the holistic A.R.C. lens, we found that the critical aspect of A.R.C. is the communication and share value across the school system. With the diverse background of the participants we have, we also try to map out the interaction and relationship of each stakeholders within the school system. And this practice help us narrow down the target user — the administration. The admin plays a critical rule in the school system, they connect to the outside resources, receive policy change, announcing policy within school, and communicate with the family. These activities will indirectly shape a culture within school, and thus impact the teachers to bring about the students outcomes.
With the insight in mind, our next step is to figure out the relationship between the admin and teachers, and how teachers envision their future career. From the interview, we knew that the school system is lack of resource, so I’m particularly interested in how teachers will prioritize what’s important with them, and with that, maybe there’s a way to connect the A.R.C. practice to what they value the most.
We also receive feedback about the map, I revised it by adding district level admins and district level policy makers in the map to show the indirect forces in the school system.
Personally I really enjoy bringing up the insight using the stakeholder mapping method and highlight the activities within each stakeholders. I used to design enterprise software for large corporation, and we would map out the users of the system(ex. marketing department, sales departments…) and point out the data flow between each departments, or the IT systems. So I’d say this is the method for me to make sense of things. Also, I took system thinking class from Sofia last semester and we did similar method to map and highlight positive and negative feedback loop in the system. I’m sometimes hesitant to apply this method because the exchange is not always linear, but this way of making sense of thing did help reflecting the insight from a system level. My attitude is to be open-minded, try communicating with draft and whiteboard and revise it several time, maybe linear process is not always the answer, but keep the form flexible allows more possibility to be in.
Week 7
We started to run workshops with the participants who replied to us. Since the educators are extremely overwhelm by the course work, it’s hard for us to schedule one workshop time with all of them. Therefore, we conducted one on one workshop which is similar to interview. But focusing more on facilitating dialog with metaphorical assets to allow them reflect and think about the future of school system. The goal for our generative research process is to understand the relationship and the priority of the educators, as well as how they envision the future within 10–15 years.
The outcome we get from generative research process really struck me. If exploratory research is to mapping out the horizontal layer of how the school system work, generative research definitely help us dive into the topic deeper. There’s a lot of moments that I almost burst into tears because the teachers are really sharing their authentic feedback, and I can tell the frustration toward the system as well as their passion for their students. I never have a really close relationship with any of my teachers back then, and even if my mother is a teacher in high school, what I hear from her is mostly complaining how they misbehave, and how she feel frustrated when school is being unsupportive. And after this interview I think that deep down, the teachers really cares about the the students. Although their approach to take care of us might not be applicable for the students some times.
The other lesson learn is that metaphor is a powerful tool to invite people to talk and reflect. Comparing to the exploratory interview, the participants in the generative interview share more personal feelings, and the vibes is more relaxing and sincere as well. Although we practice these two metaphorical tools in the class, it’s a complete different experience to actually applied it in the research process, and it’s great that we have the opportunity to witness how useful it is. I’ll definitely try to use it again in the future research, and would be curious how to better synthesize the result.
Week 8
After conducting three workshop interviews and 2 diary studies, we started synthesizing the result together. For the diary studies, we pulled out similar key words and themes and plan to later compare with the synthesized result in the interviews. For the interview, we started by merging three boards together, highlight the common themes and the individual themes.
For relationship mapping, it’s interesting to see similar metaphorical pictures showed up. It’s not my strongest point to synthesize qualitative data, but I developed a strategy when doing this: recenter our goal in this research process, what do we trying to learn from each exercise? What’s the hypothesis we have, or what’s the research question we’re asking in this phase? With this question in mind, pulling out the common themes or data to support it, and briefly explain how we gather these information to better acknowledging the biases in the process.
I also enjoyed the synthesize result we had in priority mapping exercise.
It’s interesting to see the shift of a certain aspect from the present state to the future state. For example, presently the quality of life is important but scarce, but in the future the participant mark it as highest priority and highest availability. This result also echos to the resilience aspect in ARC, and our concept should be always aware of the teacher’s time and mental state to avoid burn out.
One thing concern me a little is the environment and ecology aspect in the prioritization. Seems like people will only consider environment when personal needs are fulfill, and this is considerable. Although environmental issue or global warming is not the top priority in this project, this result does remind me that we should make the connection between environment and ecology benefit with personal needs stronger, to really push environmental friendly to the next level. And this might also be applicable to other aspect of systematic problem as well, because people need to fulfill their basic need so that they have the mental and financial effort to support others. Building a better connection with individual and the system would also be a direction we’re heading when developing concept.
Week 9
This is a week for presentation preparation. We start build our presentation earlier this phase, and it helps us iterate on the outline and the structure of the content to make every slides tided better with one another. Start early with the outline and visual to allow for more iteration is a great strategy for presentation. The iteration process is something like this(please bare with my obsession of process flow)
Outline->fill in the content->first round dry run->adjust outline for logical consistency->second round dry run->adjust content to build up our design decision
This is the third time for us to build a client presentation, fortunately we get a better sense of how to iterate this time. Multiple dry run really help make sense of what we’re conveying, and this also make the logic and wording more consistent. One thing I’m frustrated about in the process is that we didn’t create enough visual assets. And the reason for this is mainly time concern, and more over, if we simplify presentation with visual contents, we always need to explain and re-iterate the graph within the whole team. And the time spent for developing visual assets, and making sure everyone in the team agree with the visual is much more than modifying word. Next time I might try to develop visual even earlier to see if there’s chance to push the presentation further.
After the presentation, the main feedbacks we had are
- Too much information in 10 minutes, too fast
- Based on our principles, they’re unsure whether we’re designing for ARC, or designing for other slice of the portrait
Other feedbacks were gather below:
My reflection is sometimes less is more, but it’s really hard to cut down on what we’ve done. We already cutting down the unnecessary part, and the things we left on the presentation is to explain our rationale more clearly. It’s a bit frustrating for us, but it’s also valuable for us to know that maybe there’s some parts still missing in our process. I’d say that before this presentation, I always treated the presentation opportunities as show and tell, but it’s more about receiving feedback to better understand the context, and align with the strategy of PPS vision. My frustration decrease with this mindset, and I’m glad that our team takes a proactive approach to synthesize the feedback and try to figure out a way to communicate more clear in our concept development process. The feedback helps us anchor our design decision in the concept.
Week 10
The two main focus on this week is to develop concept storyboards, and to figure out a way to collect responses. For the ladder one, we’ve decided to reach out to online teachers community and conduct the research asynchronously with survey. Hajira and Sofias suggested us to try an online form tool called Typeform, which allows us to design condition based on the participant’s answers. This thus inspire us to develop our concept with different problem statements that leads to the corresponding concepts.
Bringing this insight to the concept development phase, we finally figure out the goal of the survey, which is to receive feedback from the problem statements as well as the concepts. At first I’m really concerned about the progress this week, I proposed that we should have one problem statement and develop concepts with those problem statement. But the difficulty is that we’re not sure if the problem we’re addressing is the problem for the teacher, since we are not the educators. This idea is pushed back by the teammate. And we spent sometimes re-defining the problem statements as well as the detail of the concepts. The iterative process is to make sure we’re still addressing ARC, but also focus enough to not trying to solve all of the problem in the same time.
My key lesson learn is that, again, I’m really a make-it-done person that’s eager to make sure the project outcome meet the deadline. However, as new input coming up, we sometimes will figure out a better way to do things, and we just need to embrace it.(Like the Typeform suggestion informed our concept development process) The linear thinking mindset has be in my mind since high school but this just doesn’t work in design field, and this course has proven again and again that I should embrace the messiness and keep iterating based on the input from the instructors and the cohorts.
Week 11
To summarize what we did this week, I’d say we spend most of the time develop the concepts while iterating on the flow in the questionnaire. For the design concepts, we narrow down the original three concepts to two concepts, which are a collaborative one and reflective one. When developing the concept, we also spend time making sure it aline with our design principles, and that the goal for the concept is being Adaptive, Resilient and open to Change. As we’re closer to the final step of the research process, it’s critical for the group to keep anchoring ourselves back to the original goals and principles. I found that sometimes when we revisit our design principles and goal, we’ll come up with a different interpretation and definition. And that’s because we are influence by the research along the way.
The other thing I find interesting is that we develop our storyboard and concept while considering the structure of the questionnaire, and what we want to get from the participants. Looking back I’d say this is a great strategy to make sure what we collect would better inform our concept development. This week we focus on introducing the concept as the system first, then get down to the individual part within the system.
Since we’re delivering the survey to the teacher’s online communities, we want to make the language and steps as simple as possible .Initially we want to introduce the participants the problem statement, then show them the concept storyboard. However we remote the problem statement and incorporate the problem in the storyboard, which is more simple, direct and easier to comprehend. This reminded me of Ethnic and Politics in Research by Esther Kang in our research method design class, when she mentioned the importance when co-designing with public sectors that doesn’t have any background knowledge in design. Making sure we’re addressing the question using the common language, or even use their language is so crucial and so easy to be forgot by a designer.
While waiting for the survey result, we’ll continue develop our concepts based on the feedback from Arnold. He strongly recommended us to look into the concept of COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE. I’m really excited to incorporate the concept to complete our concept, since I can see a lot of similarity and overlap in this concept. Another thing I learned from Arnold is to “leverage the existing services or processes” instead of creating a new one. This is really practical and context-aware suggestion, but also can be ignored by a design school student. As a student in our class practice, I feel like a lot of time we want to push our concept further by creating a new thing that’s innovative and creative, but then we’ll receive criticism like being too imaginary and couldn’t apply to the real world. With the feedback from the class, I’m really glad that we have a chance to future with practicality, and this also makes me more connected to the research and the effort we put into our research process.
Week 12
We collected feedback from the survey and synthesized the result for the presentation. The feedbacks from the teacher communities on Reddit's are genuine and straight-forward, and they help clarify a lot of points in our proposed concept. The process reminds me again that “we are learning from the user and designing for the user” instead of “designing by ourselves”. From exploratory research , generative research to evaluative research, we as design researchers are constantly communicating and engaging with the user to immerse ourselves in the context, and this is what makes design research valuable.
We synthesized the survey results by this frameworks, we listed down what’s working, what’s not working and the suggestions. For what’s not working, we’d do further research to understand the why behind the statement. Thankfully, most teachers are kind enough to share their rationale, and these are all helpful for us to move on with our research. (Some are really cruel in a good way though, like the one “Same shit, different day.”)
Some insights includes:
- Avoid adding more duties, roles, or work to teachers’ plates or duplicating existing structures.
- Once an exercise like reflection is required, it may become draining or detract from other things
- Logistical concerns and concerns about summer jobs made year-round breaks seem unlikely.
And we decided to move on with:
- The ideas of additional reflection, rest, and collaboration have potential, but we need to address questions around buy-in and concept implementation
- Reflection could be more effective as a communal way of connecting individual and systemic experiences
- Collaborations should put teacher feedback at the forefront, avoid top-down structure, take community capacity for input into account
In the survey, we made collaborative and reflective two different concepts, and our hypothesis is to choose one concept from two of them after the survey result. However, some of the feedbacks suggested that there’s no reflective future without collaboration, and a collaborative future will not be a resilient one if there’s lack of reflective aspect. Therefore we decided to integrate two of the system concept in our final presentation.
Based on the research, we also refine our design principles with the structure of action, method and mindset, and the goal for the design principles is to achieve ARC. The other reason why we’re making this shift is that based on our previous presentation feedback, the empathy and equity parts also touch upon other slice of educators portraits. However, we’re unable to remove the equity and empathy part in the design principles, since they are also an enablement of A.R.C. Therefore we come up with this new framework to allows empathy and equity to be the enablement to achieve ARC.
The feedback we got from Arnold and Peter are:
- Think about how we overcomes the current system and makes the future possible
- Reference the educational system in other countries, also think about how it works or wouldn’t work in P.P.S. context
In order to answers these question, we have to understand the trends that shapes the current P.P.S., and how might these trends shapes the future P.P.S. Therefore, we decided to revisit our STEEP-V analysis result in exploratory research to fill on the detail of our concept.
Honestly, before the feedback from Peter and Arnold, I’m confused about proposing a concept that is “envisioning the future”. I’m used to designing a product and ship it within a year. And sometimes in the class, I feel like designing for future is like designing things without constraint, and it doesn’t make sense for me to design things from the imagination. However, as we coming to the end of the project, I feel like in our research process, we’re portraying a future context within the strategies provided by the Prospect Studio. And with this future context, we’re building design artifacts that reaches the goal. And what we’re missing now is “how can we make this design artifact happen” if starting from now? For example, if we’re proposing a future that the teachers can have 1 month vacation. What would be this future situated, what’s the trend that shapes this future, and how can we push forward this future? Does it require policy change? And how can we inform policy change? Does it include board members’ approval? And how are we gonna make board member approve? I feel like in this stage we’re connecting the dots from the territory map, STEEP analysis, stakeholders map and our design principles to think about the intervention while consider the temporal aspect of things. It’s quite interesting and intimidating, but I’m looking forward to the next iteration.
Week 13
This week, we worked on refining our concept based on the feedbacks received from from Peter and Arnold. Something really made me think about the role of design research is the suggestion that Arnold had for us:
“Imagine the policy change in the future, and think about the future vision and solution that makes the teacher ARC.”
For me, it’s hard to reimagine the future because a lot of things remain unsure. Although we’ve conducted STEEP-V analysis and MLP to learn about the past trend and how it shapes current society, it’s still hard to predict the trend for the future. As a student coming from a science background, it’s intuitive for me to expect things from quantitative data and look at the chart to find the trend. Therefore I struggled to make sense of the future by leveraging the qualitative research method. The research goal and how to un-bias the result are unclear for me. After several rounds of reflection, I think the benefit of futuring in a more qualitative method is:
Future research allows for considering a more cross-disciplinary future and considering social factors. It could also serve as an initiation of required data collection.
This semester, I took a class called Interactive Data Science; while doing the project, I found it’s hard to support some viewpoints with the existing dataset. And there are few initiatives to collect data that matters. We’re in a world flooded with information, but the researchers could use little data to communicate a valid point of view. As a data enthusiast, I wonder how we can call for more data initiatives for the future problem? Maybe the future method’s goal could serve as a means to collect the data to predict the future.
We revise our ideas to be the ARC services, providing time and support for teachers to develop their careers. This idea tied back to our original problem statement, which is teacher burnout.
We reference the Singapore model and Iowa concept to support teachers in managing their time for career growth.
I’m intrigued by the idea, especially that Singapore is already implementing it. Based on the secondary research result, Singapore has a very centralized system to implement its education policy, which leads to a successful outcome. I believe the cultural aspect also serves as a primary key here: the public servants in Singapore are known for their efficiency and high academic performance. The modular module of considering a teacher’s career path is a valuable framework for future PPS, but implementation relies more on the grand strategy.
This is also another part I’m struggling with when doing design research. I believe there’re multiple layers for the educational system shift. The strategic report provided by the Prospect Studio is a higher layer, including students and educators. And the report we provided is more around the layer of one portrait in the whole system. I wonder if there will be another layer considering the scalability and the implementation of the plan, or maybe this is not part of design research for the future?
Week 14
This week we worked on the final presentation and video. The goal of these artifacts is to convey our concept. Our final concept is a system framework that allows the teacher to develop a career. To avoid emphasizing the technology, we decided to convey our idea through a news venue. We planned to introduce the idea by showcasing the news in 2029, and the teacher will talk about the change made and how the change makes it more adaptive, resilient, and open to change. We will introduce the idea with diagrams and visual elements in the video when introducing the concept.
I’m in charge of the website design; we emphasized the personal progress portal, which we believe can visualize our ARC services. And this also connects well with the ARC services.
Though there are many potentials to leverage future technology to enable ARC services, as I mentioned earlier, our primary focus is on the systemic framework instead of the technology. Therefore we use the simple website to serves as the central hub of ARC resources.
As a tech-savvy designer, this is a very new approach for me. I’m used to thinking about intervention by leveraging the technology and think about how systemic change it’ll bring. I’m used to thinking about intervention from implementation to strategy. This project is the first one that starts from research to design and focuses less on the performance and technical aspects of the artifacts. I couldn’t do it myself without the help of my teammates. Although we struggled along the whole process, this project has pushing me to think differently. And even if I’m really worried about the fidelity of the artifacts and video, and also worry if our clients are satisfied with our ideas or not, I know that I gain a lot from participating in this project. And most of all, be inspired by these new ways of thinking and keep progressing by paying attention to future design methods.
Week 15
We took turn presenting our project, here are some note taken during the class:
TeamX: I like their focus on student resilience, and focusing on the equity lens.The color scheme and UI connect well with the student resilience aspect of the solution.
Feedback for out team: getting support and giving support is a great balance. The video served as an extension piece from 2029–2035 is nice feature, great presentation. One thing is excited is practicality of this solution-the concept of system and knowledge building. It’s not sort of this leap, and this could unlock their(the non-designer, the educators our clients are working with) thinking, and give them something to fill that space.
the system that manage those pieces is a really strong and creative way to think about the district. You didn’t frame it as a learning organization but more about the continuum learning and growth. Mentioning SIA, integrating the contract is really clear. the positive future frame is appreciated. In Portland their relationship with news is toxic, so it’s really strong play to talk about the future.
the People doing data-mining is to make money, but this way of sharing is equitable. “Make knowledge equitable.” What are other stakeholders have a chance to play in the news? This could be another aspect to be seen.
Maybe empathize a little more on the architecture of the proposed solution. How do we orchestrate steep driver to achieve momentum and potentiate the future?
Team Ahaa: emphasizing on creating a feedback culture, and making sure their voice is being heard to build a sense of belonging. What’s the backend piece that allows us to see how the system make change through interaction with the system?
The idea of “school as a central point of the city and can be extended upon.” is a great insight.
The video and the metaphor using dandelion is really spot on.
The Zoomers: the video and UI is clear and clean, and also integrated with their student portrait well. I’m not quite excited about the digital artifact, since the concept of website is already existed. It would be nice to see more description about how this system brings us to the preferred future.
Reflection
A. What I learned from the design research
a. framing a problem at a systemic lens
Before this class, my understanding of the problem statement is more static and singular. I didn’t consider the temporal layer of the problem, and the layer allowed me to feel how the problem is shaped and what it could become. I learned to think about the past, present, and future of the problem states and look at the system’s components and how we can leverage those single components to form a systemic change. I learned that there’s no one solution to solve one problem; the world is like an ecosystem. We proposed a solution, it’ll intervene in the current system, and the system will then reach its new balance.
b. Design process can be the outcome of the design research
Before the class, I thought of design research to come up with insight and solutions. But now, I think of it not only to come up with intervention but can also impact the participants during the process. The process and the final solution(concept) are both the outcome of the design research.
I have this thought because, through generative research, more than one participant told us that our workshop is a great way to help them reflect and think about their problem. I believe that both the participants and the researchers became different after the research process. I wonder if a workshop with participants in different backgrounds will bring more insight to both the participants and the researchers. I’m excited to find a way to practice this in the future.
B. What I learned from teamwork
a. We spend a lot of time alining our initial purpose and understanding of the problem space, which worked for us.
I found that during the whole process, we kept re-position ourselves by revisiting the design principles or the definition of ARC. At first, I’m reluctant to do so because I believed we should focus on coming up with the outcome for the presentation. And realigning what we already created is a waste of time. However, looking back to our process, I’d say this is a great design decision. Anchoring ourselves helped to clarify our research goal with the input from the research insights. Most importantly, it helped to connect our design concept with the original principles.
b. Shared responsibility and shared understanding are essential and should make to the team contract.
We took turns to facilitate and note-taking every week. We found the downside of this is that the previous alignment might not be carried on to the next week when switching the facilitator’s role. This is caused by different leadership styles and also the different visions for the outcome. For example, some facilitators might think it’s more important to develop a research method this week, but some might think we should focus more on mapping out the systemic trend. Having a single leadership role throughout the entire project could be more efficient, but I still think we should choose the difficult path, which is to taking turn facilitating. The misalignment can always be solved by communication, it is going to take more time for us to reach the goal, but we’ll be there if everyone is proactively communicating. I enjoy a less top-down team structure. The ideal team dynamic is that everyone takes responsibility to contribute and be transparent to each other and carry on the project. Overall, our team pulls it through eventually. But this ideal structure relies on everyone being willing to contribute and pick up the work left out.
c. Acknowledge my communication style and work more on listening and supporting the team members
My way of thinking is goal-oriented. I like to set a goal for each stage and achieve it. This “get-it-done” spirit might somewhat make the team members stressed out. Dealing with remote research is already hard. Without being in physical space, it’s hard to perceive feedback from the human body and facial gestures, making communication much harder. I learned that I need to listen more and empathize with each others’ situation and find a way to work through this.
3. How it integrated into my practice
a. trying to apply the systemic thinking concept to digital product design
I still find it hard to conduct design research from a higher system level since I’m so used to designing tangible artifacts. To leverage my understanding of creating tangible artifacts, I’d like to keep informed of the systemic change when designing products. And most importantly, conduct research that considers these.
b. what would it be like to work with non-designers?
Doing design research as students, we have more flexibility to push humanity further. However, in reality, but there are many constraints and push back to consider. How does designer leverage their understanding to understand the limitation and work within the restriction to make the change happen? I think these are the critical skills that set professional designers and new grads apart. To understand the constraint in the context, it’s essential to put aside the designer’s ego, listen and collaborate with domain experts, and open up a dialog to understand their needs and fears. And to make change happen, proposing the design concept that can bring together multiple stakeholders to work together is also something that I’m intrigued about. I’m obsessed with visualizing the presentation with diagrams and flows, but sometimes I also question whether this is as effective as those without a design background. My communication methods are limited to my high education and design background, and I should be more open-minded to all kinds of media and language. My strategy for this is to understand who the audiences are and tailor the content to the language that makes them cares. The news venue for our project is an excellent example to communicate with the general public.
Follow up questions for me to keep moving forward:
Are we doing enough field study? What is enough?
After the final presentation, I’m concerned about the outcome of the four teams. Why did we come up with a similar result? Why did we all propose something around reflective, goal-setting, or clear communication? Is it because the strategies from the Prospect Studio frame us?
Are we doing enough research? Should we propose a more context-specific intervention? Is it because resilience and communication are what everyone needs? I wish to know more about what counts as a practical design research result and how we can scope what a designer can do/can’t do.
