Photos from Participatory Design Research

These are photos from two of our research activities.  We made posters with open ended statements, with the idea that high school students will fill in the statements with their own thoughts.  We hung these at Andrew Street High School and Braddock Hills high school, and we’ll retrieve them in a week or so.  We anticipate a variety of responses that should help inform our understanding of how high schoolers think about life after high school and how they’ll figure out their future job.

We’re also using a journey mapping activity to engage adults in a conversation about how they landed and settled into their current career.  With a blank board and a set of descriptive stickers to illustrate milestones and influences, we ask directed questions to gain an understanding of how the person got to where they’re at.  We anticipate that these various stories will help demonstrate the difference between where they thought they would end up and where they actually did, and how their career plan changed along the way.

“Beautiful Places make Beautiful Kids”

Blog Submission Design and Policy Course

By: Ana Vazquez-Trejo

 

I heard this quote as I was sitting in Heinz college during a presentation by Bill Strickland,^[1] an influential community leader that happens to have his own Wikipedia page. I sat and wondered is this true? I continued to listen as he talked about the school he built for inner city kids in Pittsburgh. He mentioned that the school he built has not had an incident with kids causing trouble like the school down the street. He displayed some beautiful pictures of the entrance of the school with a fountain, that reminded me of the entrance of a corporation in downtown Houston.

If I think about the places I have studied and worked, I think Bill might actually be true, “Beautiful Places make Beautiful ‘People.’”I think Bill meant “beautiful places” are comfortable, sophisticated, clean, and state of the art facilities. I think that Bill meant “Beautiful Kids” were productive, prudent, conscientious, hard-working people. If you think about institutions like Carnegie Mellon, it has state of the art facilities and the most modern technology access for its students.  According to the CMU fact sheet, “In the past 15 years, CMU faculty, students and alumni have created more than 300 companies and 9,000 jobs.^[2]” CMU is a good example of “Beautiful Places make Beautiful Kids.” However, CMU is such a small community, why can’t others have access to state of the art facilities and learn how to use life- changing technologies? In addition, how do workplaces, study places, or environment influence a person’s creativity?

According to the Houston Chronicle, motivation plays a large role in productivity.^[3] Even more in the Journal of Business, Economics, & Finance, “The quality of environment in workplace may simply determine the level of employee’s motivation, subsequent performance and productivity.^[4]” So as Americans, why are we surprised that the national High School graduation rate is 78.2%.^[5] What about that other 21.8% of students?  How can we regain these High School dropouts? Why did they not graduate? Why can’t we have a 100% graduation rate to complete the most fundamental level of education? I have a theory that it is based on school environment, facilities, and access to technology.

According the national center for education and statistics, “In 1998, the average public school building in the United States was 42 years old.”^[6]  If our kids do not have access to good infrastructure as simple as the classroom they attend, why would they care?

I think that it is a variety of things that influence a single person’s ability to complete different levels of education. One of those things is environment. Placing a person in a healthy, “beautiful,” encouraging environment helps increase a person’s ability to achieve more education. So how can we design a policy that will help America’s kids?

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^[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/events/event-detail/index.aspx?eid=3059

^[2] http://www.cmu.edu/about/cmufactsheet.pdf

^[3] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/motivation-productivity-workplace-10692.html

^[4] http://www.jbef.org/archive/pdf/volume1/4-demet%20leblebici.pdf

^[5] http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/infographics/graduation-rates-stats-infographic.html

^[6] http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/1999048/

Project Update 11/12/13

Since our interview at Charles Morris and our numerous class discussions, our group has decided to focus on the topic of nursing home layout. Nursing home layout is important as it relates to several health and wellness factors that we previously mentioned. For instance, layout relates to dignity because the distance of the nursing station from a resident’s room and the response rate to a bathroom bell area all correlated. Other health issues such as response times to slips and falls or responses times during emergencies are effected by layout. Additionally, physical layout can determine community as it relates to the routes people take and how far their willing to go for activities.

Another concern with layouts is that they do not fit the needs of future generations. For instance, many nursing homes don’t have gyms or pools, yet younger residents are requesting these types of facilities. Including improved recreational facilities that reflect modern lifestyles is important, as many nursing homes are switching from an institution-like set up to prioritizing individual care.

To assess layouts our group is creating kits and questions for individuals to create their ideal layout. The goal is to then identify key layout needs and parameters and possibly create model layouts. We hope to use these kits to return to Charles Morris and receive feedback from other administrators, nurses, and residents. Additionally, we have contacted Fair Winds Manor in Sarver, PA and hope to schedule a visit/interview/kit session with administrators there. We will also be using these kits with individuals: students, professors, middle age-older adults, to get independent feedback and input into the layout of the future. One group we are specifically targeting is the Osher Institute/Lifelong Learners who attend CMU for classes. These individuals are continuing their education later in life.

While kit exercises are going on, we are gathering floor plans and layouts of other local homes. By doing this, we hope to compare the layouts and determine if all of the homes suffer from the same issues of long hallways and decentralized community/event areas.

We would love to hear feedback from the rest of the class regarding other design methods to employ as we move forward.

By Emily Sale

Prison Garden Dream Board- Qianwen, Lowell, Tim

During class on Thursday, we developed a dream board/map of what our ideal prisons would look like based on the various types of gardens we could implement. Each “prison” depicted below shows our future vision for how the garden could be utilized and the way it would cause the prison to operate. This was a fun exercise that allowed us to be completely free and even outlandish in our visions for our project. Imagining the future for the prison garden will help us funnel our scope but still push the envelop of what’s been done before.

 

We also started addressing specific deliverables that will be apart of our project. We have established that our project is the designing of a service/experience so we wanted to come up with a wide range of deliverables that would be utilized within the garden service. We would definitely do more research and narrow this list for the final project but it was helpful just writing whatever came to mind. We also began the rather daunting task of coming up with a name. Garden and plant related terms were the focus but we are totally open to anything. It’s much harder to come up with a name for our project than we thought….