+Acumen – Leanne Padgett

Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design

You might remember back in October I enrolled in the online course Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design, offered by Acumen and IDEO.org.

Part of the course requirement was to form a group of 4 people who lived locally, and would be available to give their time to completing the course. If we were unable to put together a group on our own, we were given the opportunity to connect with other students of the course online. I contacted my friend, Amelia, who is a terrific freelance graphic and web designer I met at the Vancouver Wordcamp 2014, and asked if she would be interested in forming a group. She immediately responded with a yes! And as a huge bonus, she had two more people in mind who would probably be interested in joining as well. So I was introduced to Susan Seto, an SFU graduate, marketing and business brainiac with a killer work ethic, and Jen Yamasaki, an amazing designer, fine artist and psych major. I was beginning to ask myself how I ever got so lucky to meet all of these amazing women. It all came together to quickly and easily, it was like it was meant to be.

It took us a while to come up with a name for our group, but we settled on Rascal Studio. Here is a photo from our first meeting:

Rascal Studio Group!

And our Rascal Studio logo, designed by Jen Yamasaki!

The course was all about designing for social change. This was our mission statement:

Rascal Studio is made up of four Vancouver-based creative rascals who believe in bringing clever ideas to drive social change in the community and around the globe.

We were presented with the following question:

How might parents in low-income communities ensure children thrive in their first five years?

We worked hard at brainstorming and thinking on this for a week or two, and we went about compiling a set of interview questions. We decided to try and interview as many parents, social workers, local teachers and experts in early childhood development as possible.

What came out of those interviews was really compelling. In almost every one of the interviews two things came up. Whether they were parents or experts, every one of our interviewees felt that the most important elements to ensuring that a young child thrived was emotional connection and nutrition.

After compiling all of our interview responses, we then identified our design challenge:

To increase awareness of best parenting practices amongst low-income communities in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside through engaging workshops and leadership initiatives.

We went back to the ideation / brainstorming phase to try and figure out how we would tackle our design challenge. After many discussions and brainstorming sessions, we decided the best way to approach this challenge would be to start a community group that would provide education, emotional support and guidance to low-income families in the DTES. It would be facilitated and run by fellow DTES residents and would give parents a chance to relax and provide a social atmosphere to connect and talk. Parents would also have the opportunity to listen to guest speakers who would provide information, support, encouragement and teaching materials. Dinner and snacks would be provided (sponsors listed below).

And so, Our Kitchen was born! Here’s the style tile that I created:

These are our proposed sponsors, who would help with supplying food and support:

As many low income people have limited access to computers, we decided to promote the evening with flyers. Amelia designed two flyers, one general promotional flyer to distribute to parents, community leaders, teachers and healthcare workers, and a second flyer designed for sponsor recruitment.

General Flyer:

Sponsor Flyer:

We also came up with a program schedule, made example workshop and take home materials and found a venue, the Vancouver Dodson House.

Well, I am even more excited to share this with you because amongst our peers we were voted number one out of 432 final submissions!!! We just got the news the other day and we are so incredibly happy. We worked really hard on this project and at times felt quite discouraged but we persevered and I am so grateful for that.

If you would like to see our final presentation, here it is!

RascalStudio_Challenge3_FinalPrototype

And my statement of accomplishment!

Cheers!

+Acumen , Human-Centered Design , IDEO

Design Thinking for Social Innovation

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’

– Henry Ford

Last week was the first week of our Human-Centered Design course (provided by ideo.org and +Acumen). We were tasked with finding a group of 4 people, and to come up with a name and a logo for the group. We were so excited when we finally decided upon the name Rascal Studio and wrote a little mission statement, which I think encompasses the fun and playful vibe this group seems to have.

The Rascal Studio mission statement is:

We are Rascal Studio, made up of four Vancouver-based rascals who went rogue. We believe in bringing clever ideas to drive social change in our community and around the globe.

Yes, it rhymes.

I had only met one of my group members before (at Wordcamp Vancouver this summer) and we had kept in touch through Facebook. She is a graphic and web designer named Amelia. When I learned about the course, I got pretty excited and contacted Amelia right away to ask if she wanted to help me form an A-Team of terrific people to complete the course with. She said she had two people in mind for this almost immediately, and she asked them and they both agreed to join us. Obviously I was nervous, never having met the two other people, but I could not be more happy with my fellow group members. Rascal is made up of myself, Amelia, Jen, and Susan.

Here are some pics of our first A-Team meeting for happy hour brainstorming at Rogue Wet Bar:

Just a little about human-centered design, because I wasn’t sure what that meant until last week:

Human-Centered Design is design that is used to create innovative, effective and sustainable solutions for social change. It’s a process that starts with the people you are designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs. As you can imagine, this process relies upon tons of user-testing, and sometimes both the problem and the solutions might change several times throughout the iteration process. It requires a deep knowledge of and empathy for the people you’re designing for, generating tons of ideas, and building and testing a bunch of prototypes. This design process can be applied to products, services, spaces, or systems. It is essential that we gain a deep understanding of the people we will be serving — not only what they need and desire, but what limitations they face, what motivates them, and what’s important to them.

Some examples of Human-Centered Design problems might be:

How might we design a cookstove that reduces the amount of smoke inhaled by a person while cooking?
How might we design new services engaging low-income parents in after-school education for their children?
How might we design hospital waiting rooms to mitigate the transmission of airborne diseases?
How might we redesign the common areas of a community housing structure to engage connecting and cooperation among neighbors?
How might we design a system linking social entrepreneurs from around the world?

One of the limitations or weaknesses that we could see with this design method would be that it probably isn’t very budget-friendly, and also solutions would have to be quite culturally-specific. Where to focus our efforts is an interesting dilemma, and opened up some compelling debate about whether we should focus on local issues or seek out issues in other countries that we feel may be more in need of help. We don’t have to decide right away, as we will be working on smaller assignments first.

For our first workshop, we congregated at a meeting room at the Central Library.

Our little meeting room.

The study group that will take on the world!

Our first mini-assignment was to design a better commute. We went around the table and each shared some nightmare commute stories, and we realized pretty quickly that a lot of our stories involved incidents where our personal safety had been compromised. This led us to brainstorm on what would make a safer transit experience.

The top three needs that we felt would contribute to a better commute were:

Better transit safety & security
More regular busses
Better access to bus wait times (anticipated arrivals)

We came up with an idea for an app that would act as a fare card, and would provide GPS tracking information and specific bus location information, up-to-date bus schedules, street view, and emergency response functionality. In the event of an emergency, the app would notify transit security of your location and respond immediately. We thought it might also be useful to have the app connect to ferry and train schedules and information. There could be a section to add frequently used busses to a “favorites” list, that could notify you when your bus is close.

I had a chance to look at the existing Translink app, Next Bus, which provides bus departure information in real time, and it is quite limited.

We didn’t have time to prototype our app, but it was fun brainstorming ideas for it. I think the process helped us all get fired up about human-centered design, and get us thinking and ready for our next assignment this week!

Graphic Design extraordinaire, Jen!