Midterm Checkpoint – Team 7

Discussion over afterschool program development is fierce at all time. However, there is no significant progress can be widely recognized. For sure, there is no single methodology can be widely adopted either.

Thus, to have a better understanding of the current status, we plan to get in touch with various stakeholders: service provider, local funder, teacher, parent, student, etc. and gather their opinions. By now, we have interviewed with Stephen MacIsaac, the Executive Director of Neighborhood Learning Alliance, Kathryn Vargas, the Manager of Programs for Children and Youth, and Mykal Satterwhite, a high school student work as a teacher in Reading Warriors Program. We also attended State of Afterschool Symposium Event and listened to the latest statistic report of Out-of-School Time, America After 3PM research project.

During the research phase, we remain objective attitude to gather information, yet we analyze those information according to our own judgment. In this session, we summarize all the information we have, including information we gather from online research and literature review phase. We do understand we are still in the primary stage of our research, and we will continue deepening our understanding and revising our opinions as our research going.

Please see more details here:

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Blog #2

Appendix01.AfterSchoolProgramSummary

Appendix02 Interview Summary

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Team 1- Midterm Review

Over the course of the last month, our project has shifted in scope and focus, reflecting the knowledge and experiences we have picked up in class and in our independent research. We initially hoped to design an employment skills program for immigrants, similar in format to Habitat for Humanity, that would allow immigrants to not only obtain skills useful in their job search but also develop a sense of belonging in and ownership of their new communities. Given Pittsburgh’s unique imbalance of immigrant skill levels, we figured this would help attract low to semi skilled immigrants, helping correct this imbalance and boost the local economy while better integrating neighborhoods. This idea was initially inspired by an intersection of three of the 100 Days Policies, surrounding immigrants, historic preservation and fighting general blight/neighborhood revitalization.

 

However, after interviewing representatives of Habitat for Humanity and the Pittsburgh Historic Landmark Foundation, we discovered that Pittsburgh doesn’t have a sector of its construction industry dedicated to historic preservation and in fact, there seems to be a very limited number of contractors and services present in the city to undertake these projects. Moreover, those that do exist, seem to lack a central cohesive infrastructure or policy process that our team could capitalize on for our service design. Thus we eliminated this aspect from our project and then directed our focus more specifically on helping immigrants establish ownership and become more integrated in their new communities and revitalising neighborhoods through an employment skills training program..

 

As our group followed the structure of the class lectures, we ended up developing our project somewhat in reverse. We initially focused very closely on the 100 days policies and trying to maximize the number of problems addressed. It was only in the past two weeks that classes have begun to delve into the importance of stakeholder participation and input in a project. It dawned on our group that we will need to have some close interaction with our target stakeholders (low skilled immigrants) in order to understand their needs, and then use this information to inform our project scope.

 

There are many categories of immigrants (such as asylum seeking refugees, human trafficking survivors, or undocumented vs documented immigrants), all of which have significantly different needs and gaps in service provisions within Pittsburgh. After a team discussion, we decided the subset of immigrants we felt best prepared to help is low skilled immigrants, potentially those newly arrived in America. Betty Cruz, of the Welcoming Pittsburgh initiative, said that language barriers were a significant challenge for our designated immigrant population. Thus we decided to focus on addressing the language needs of this group, instead of tackling the broad category of employment opportunity support.

 

After even further discussion of possible challenges facing this immigrant population, we began to recognize that there are many resources and services already in place for immigrants that struggle to maximize the benefit they intend to produce for this same target group. We then decided the most manageable goal for our project, given the timeline for the semester, would be to find a way to support one of these existing language support resources or services, or improve upon their efficiency, delivery, etc. For example, there are individuals and potentially organizations of translators within Pittsburgh for immigrants. However as this job requires translators to be on call 24/7 (in case of emergencies), and it is often strictly volunteer based, translators can be hard to come by and the few that do work, are overloaded and cannot address the entire needs of the population. Worse yet, when disaster strikes and emergency personnel need to interact with immigrant families, language barriers and a lack of available translators could have fatal consequences. Our team aims to identify one of these services, such as translation, and see if there is a way to support “the supporters” of our immigrant population (possibly through funding, transportation, phone/internet access, etc).

 

Some members of our group are spearheading research into policies governing this specific subset of immigrants and services to see if there are policy implications possible. We are in the process of outlining a new scope and project idea and so we are also in need of connections that will allow us to host some workshops with immigrant families from the local area. Several of our group members have strong ideas for activities that would allow us to extract the information needed for us to progress. Some of the design thinking research methods we intend to use in our participatory workshop with immigrants are cognitive tasks, photo collage,immigrant context rich story and love letter to capture immigrants perceptions and needs. We also intend to design comparative current and future states of immigrant experiences.

 

Additionally some of our group members have been planning an “interview unpacking” workshop day for our team (as we have several other informative interviews coming up in the next week or two) that should help us synthesize the bevy of information we have gathered. This will likely be a weekend day investment of time, as we will have five or six interviews to wade through. However we hope that the “take aways” we develop from this meeting will give us a concrete foundation upon which to build the more complex stages of our project/service and design our stakeholder workshops.

Food For Pittsburgh: Team 6 Midterm Checkpoint

Mid-Term Presentation

Coming together one technique at a time

The thing I appreciate about the design process is its ability to take you down several rabbit holes. You never know what you will uncover in each rabbit hole. Our, rabbit holes, findings resulted in seeing many avenues where we could add value, however our views on how to add value did not always converge. We have used strategies such as voting and thorough explanation of each member’s reasoning for their position on a matter, in order to get to a place of convergence. These are very helpful techniques that allow for an exhaustive ideation process. However, although exhaustive we found that we were still in the same place that we started—ideation.

The introduction to design methods and tools was delightful to have because it provided insight on how to grapple with the challenge of going from the ideation phase to getting started. As a group we tried to find ways to incorporate these methods through cultural probes and interviews. This helped us organize our approach to a certain degree. Although I was still unfamiliar with some of the techniques, I faced the unknown. I kept in mind that the exploration of new techniques could yield positive results for our group, Bank on Greater Pittsburgh and the unbanked and under banked within the city. Our group then began to think less about putting together a pretty project and focused more on making something meaningful.

The lectures from Bruce Hanington and Kristin Hughes were pretty helpful in understanding how to introduce structure into our project. But I must admit it was a bit out there for me to handle at first especially being a Public Policy student where structure is assumed to be linear. This is when I realized my weakness in taking nonlinear approaches. Leaning into that unfamiliar place of nonlinearity—approaching the problem from three to four different angles—has lessened my hesitation. Through Kristin’s lecture I gained a better understanding of how to operate under a one size does not fit all method in order to address the perceptions that may be pervasive in our target audience. In the beginning I was trapped in the mindset that if there is no quantitative data then there isn’t much to substantiate claims. But what Bruce has helped me understand is that images can provide you with more insight than numbers and percentages. Whether it is a photo diary or a visual behavior map, we can learn what the motivators and drivers of people’s decisions are, as well as potential root causes of their problems. When things started to click I realized how these modes of seeing a problem and finding multiple points of entry are essential to the policy landscape. It is through these multilevel and multipurpose approaches that more positive changes can be fostered and perpetuated.

I have seen first hand how the combination of design methods, policy development processes, and market forces can results in meaningful inclusive dialogue, strategy development, and implementation possibilities. These possibilities have substantive abilities to address challenges at the local/regional, and national level. However, there is potential for a combined approach to fall short. The reason being that there are many layers and factors that needs to be taken into account when deciding to make an actionable decision to address challenges, especially those that are complex. Therefore, it would be great to do more rapid prototyping based on decision matrixes.

Shawneil Campbell

Energy Benchmarking: Midterm Checkpoint Synopsis

by Chris Taschner, Liana Kong, Ronald Chang, Stephen Cook

Click here for slides: Energy Benchmarking Midterm

Meetings

Our first meeting was with Anthony Rowe here at CMU’s Sensor Andrew project. We discussed the uses of his sensors, the green energy movement, and what the latest developments are.

• Smaller buildings around 40,000 square feet would benefit most from benchmarking because they likely have no idea how much energy they are using and they might be able to make relatively easy and cheap changes that would impact their bills.
• Energy is too cheap in this country, outweighing the costs of going green.

 

Our next meeting was with Vivian Loftness, a professor at CMU’s School of Architecture. Our discussion mainly involved energy disclosure policies and initiatives across the nation and how they’re implemented, as well as useful resources to refer to.

• Policy changes are more important than tools or products.
• There is a growing debate about what is more effective – reducing site consumption or cleaning up source emissions. Current thinking leans toward source emissions.
• Energy disclosure laws have been enacted in major cities across the nation.
• The “Green Button” makes it easy for utility customers to submit their energy usage statistics in order to take advantage of energy benchmarking sites to monitor and improve their own energy consumption.

 

In our most recent meeting with Isaac Smith from the Green Building Alliance, we discussed the state of energy disclosure in Pittsburgh, Green Building Alliance recent efforts and development in the Pittsburgh 2030 initiative, factors that promote and inhibit participation from building owners, and potential collaboration with utility companies. Privacy and complexity are the chief issues.

• There is already an energy disclosure law underway for next year.
• There is no upside to disclosing energy usage, only serve to hurt them.
• In order to get energy usage data, Green Building Alliance needs the approval from each individual property owner through Duquesne Light, which is infeasible.
• Portfolio Manager is too complicated and it is difficult to gather and input the data that it demands. To do this regularly on a monthly basis is even more of a hassle.
• There are incentive programs to get building owners to reduce their energy consumption through policies such as “Act 129”, which also requires utility companies to reduce energy consumption by 1% annually.
• There are software products available that interfaces with Portfolio Manager and streamlines the process for property owners.

 

Direction

Our latest idea is to create a website that gives building owners the ability to easily find tax credits and other energy rebates based on improvements to their building’s infrastructure. These include everything from credits for each light bulb they change to money for energy efficient boilers. The credits that would be included in this website are things from around the state that are buried in the tax code or in individual energy suppliers’ websites. This website would provide a clearinghouse for this information and would do it in a user friendly manner. It may also provide a convenient way for building owners to opt to disclose their energy usage through their utility company directly to those that request the information such as the Green Building Alliance. Ideally, we would collaborate with Duquesne Light and other utility companies in this endeavor.

 

Next Steps

Our next step at this point is to reach out to the local energy companies. To this point, the electric company, Duquesne Light, does not seem to have been involved in many policy discussions. Leaving this group out seems to be an oversight at best. They should have some insights into the mechanics of a lot of the policy decisions that are being proposed and will be able to speak to where some quick wins can be achieved in energy conservation.

In addition to speaking with utility companies, we are going to be speaking with Grant Ervin, the mayor’s point person on energy benchmarking and green energy, and Enes Hosgor, founder of EEme, a company that converts big data into actionable insight to mine for residential energy efficiency (EE) sweet spots.

 

Blog Post #2: Jessica Weeden, Team 1

I think designers, or maybe just students in general, are dreamers.

Like every other project I’ve worked on, our team seems to have overshot a bit. We ambitiously framed our problem area as the intersection between historical preservation, immigration, and blight. And were confident such an intersection existed.  We were equally confident that we could find a way to assist in this intersection. In a 4 month period.

As we dig into the area, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this just isn’t possible. Problems are always more complex than they seem on the surface and, really, that’s what makes them worth investigating. My team has been forced to focus, and focus again. Instead of finding this disappointing, I keep hearing comments about how excited one team member or the other is about the direction we’re moving in because the area is so rich and full of potential.

This phase of the project, my team has focused primarily on expert interviews to learn about what is happening in Pittsburgh right now and what is coming down the pipeline. There is a lot of planning, a lot of dreaming, and a lot of talk going on right now. I think design processes will be excellent at helping move things forward. Welcoming Pittsburgh, the initiative started by the mayor’s office to help immigrants in the city and to make Pittsburgh more appealing to potential immigrants, is still in its infancy with the Advisory Council only meeting for the first time next week. Betty Cruz, the head of the initiative already has a lot of great ideas from looking at precedents set by other cities around the US. She helped us identify some of the biggest issues facing immigrants. I think participatory design activities can help the people working on this begin to understand how to address these issues in a localized way. Betty has a great deal of research about precedents from other cities around the US, but they will need to be adapted to Pittsburgh’s unique cultural and geographic climate. I think an interdisciplinary design team is a great way to help an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders develop ideas on how to improve immigrants’ situation.

On a personal level, I am excited to work on a developing some sort of service, as it’s looking like we will. A lot of the design work I’ve done previously has resulted in designing a thing. A service, for me, implies greater human-to-human contact. There’s greater potential for interdisciplinary work. Social innovation doesn’t live in a bubble and a service is forced to work within the world it exists in a way that products aren’t. A service should really be a living thing and this is especially important in social innovation work. Good design always works with user feedback, but a service can be ever evolving when structured correctly and built in an environment welcoming of change. The relationship should also be fostered with policy makers so that the improvements from the service can serve as proof for the need of policy changes which can in turn improve the service, in a potentially never-ending cycle. I look forward to examining more how my team can work with stakeholders to develop something both that serves immigrants and inspires policy makers to improve immigrants lives and the city’s diversity and economy.

Beyond Structures – Rene Cuenca, Team 2

Where has the Project Been?

These past couple of weeks have been really insightful in trying to understand the situation of blight in the city. There is this weird feeling of melancholia and wonder that happens when you walk around a blighted community like Wilkinsburg and see the beautifully historic houses and buildings being left to destiny. This is when I truly understood the issue of blight, not from the research (which left it more inconclusive), nor my own preconceptions. At the beginning of the project my thinking was specifically focused in understanding blight in terms of the actual structures that have come to become unoccupied inefficient parts of the neighborhood. I would think about abandoned houses, broken windows, empty streets. Blight was structural. But as I toured the neighborhood I understood that blight is beyond structure; it is the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living among empty lots, buildings and condemned houses.

There has been a lot of momentum by all types of community organizations and city-wide initiatives to deal with the issue of blight in a creative and effective manner. Of specific concern to Pittsburgh has been turning this vacant lots and brownfield sites into productive parts of the community through greening strategies, community gardening, and the like. In that process the actual houses and abandoned buildings stand off even more. “If I want to own the property next to my house, I don’t want to deal with the building on the site,” a community member mentioned in Wilkinsburg. But those artifacts are key components of the neighborhood identities. Demolishing all abandoned buildings and constructing everything new is as much, if not more, a problem as blight itself. Eleni mentioned the “Broken Window Theory” whereby one broken window will lead to another and another, which is relevant in understanding that the well-being of a community not only depends on the buildings themselves, but also on our idea of safety, appearance, and community. A theory I like to subscribe more in the issue of blight is perhaps a Swamp Theory: How does a community like Wilkinsburg become blighted? As it turns out, the same way a lake or pond can become a swamp. I like to think about the urban fabric as an organism which therefore has an inherent ecology. If you add chemicals to the pond without any safety nets or a correct balance, then it can quickly become a swamp. As the decay increased, all the nutrients fell to the bottom and more harmonious plant life that could bring oxygen back to the water were deprived of oxygen through the decomposition process. They couldn’t reach the light for photosynthesis.

Regardless, a swamp can still be a very healthy ecosystem. A swamp is actually critically important for providing fresh water. I think the same is true about blighted communities. Blight does not have to be bad. Vacant can be vibrant. Abandoned can be Awesome. There is a lot of opportunity. After a lot of statistical and policy research we have found a lot of complicated legal processes that blighted communities must deal with in top of the daily reminder that their community is blighted. While system-based initiatives can start to give way to long-term solutions and fit in with future redevelopment goals, we are concerned about short-term solutions that can redefine blight and empower communities. Can we change our understanding of blight? Can that start changing the community?

Where can the Project be drawn from?

In so far this project has been really intimidating. The problem is so big that I sometimes feel myself being lost within a greater system. Sometimes I have to just sit there and ponder as my other team members discuss details in order to make sense of what parts of the system to focus on. One major draw back to our creative process, I think, is our timeline. It is hard to be encouraged enough to suggest really out-there ideas and think outside the box when there are very tangible requirements to meet. For this I am drawn back to the writings of Bruce Nussbaum about “serious play” as a paradigm for the design process. This is something that we have lacked as a group, and as a class, I think. We need start thinking beyond the structures here too. We need to start embracing engagement, creativity, and action.

The many design and cultural probes that have been presented in class have been really useful at filling this gap a little, however. The most difficult aspect is conceiving what our project wants to be. Will it be a service like allowing communities to envision what sort spaces abandoned buildings could be? a physical product like a pop-up space? a policy to ease the land acquisition process? or information like showcasing the architectural histories of the blighted property in the neighborhood?

Kriss’ presentation was really helpful, because her ethnographic and community research is relevant to the ideas we want to have implemented with blight and communities. This thought in the design process led me to think about Bryan Bell, the director of Design Corps, and his design methods of tackling a project. His views are backed up by the fact that while architecture affects every aspects of a person’s life and neighborhood, only 2% of home owners and home buyers work directly with an architect to design the place in which they live. But, when thinking about design for human impact his successes come from the mutual respect, mutual benefit, and long-term relationships between designer and client. This became evident when we visited Wilkinsburg and the community members told us that many CMU students with grandiose projects had come and gone in the area, leaving behind no useful solution nor positive social impact. I want or project to be completely immersed in the outreach of community members and how blight is affecting them.

Where is the Project going?

With this in mind, we have drawn inspiration in the work of Candy Chang’s “I Wish This Was” Project, which starts to open up the dialog about what community members want to see in their community. The biggest design method that we could apply to our project is the idea of story telling to start understanding the neighborhood histories. The idea is a sort of Gardening Principle: that which you tend and nurture grows while that which you starve or otherwise abuse either dies or grows out of control to strangle what’s good. It’s not always an intensive focus so much as consistent consciousness, a vigilance that develops into intuition and wisdom about when to summon compassionate patience and when to intervene. In this way, it is time to start weeding out the present to make way to what has been there… and therefore at what could grow from it. Could better shared histories and increased community engagement in the community they live start to move beyond the structures that have made it blighted and start to reconstruct itself?

The trajectory of symbiotic relationships and networks of solutions- Faryal Khalid- Team 1

** This is my first blog post. I somehow hit save and not publish which I just realized today. Sorry!**

Picking a topic of interest was not complicated for me since there were so many areas covered in the 100 days, 100 policy document. Initially I was interested in the more of the tech solutions since I felt I had more experience in that but the topic of immigrants and historic preservation was also pulling me because of its rich qualitative scope. In addition they are fields with very dense policy situations and I wanted to challenge myself on that account. When choosing groups I decided to go with the latter- the more challenging course. Our group had three big buckets that we looked into- blight, historic preservation and lastly, immigrants. Initially I was skeptic that these are very big buckets removed from one another but the lecture on integrative design combining two different fields and having them engage in a symbiotic relationship with one another inspired our team to creatively think about where the overlaps among these fields might occur. The problem matrix was one of the first exercises we did and really helped us in seeing some of those overlaps more concretely. To decide on a course moving forward we decided to split our project un 3 phases- exploratory where we gather information, generative where we create co-design experiences to gain insights and evaluative where we talk about fine tuning the implementation of a solution and that it will entail. We kicked off our research phase by assigning each bucket to one of the team members and looked at not only direct co-relations but also analogous findings and success stories. Through our research we have been able to identify the overall big picture concerns in each domain. Historic preservation is a costly matter and has a very slow return on investment since the building needing historic preservation are usually found in blighted neighborhoods. This made us question what if historic preservation and blight engage in that symbiotic relationship and cure one another? Additionally how we might reduce the daunting price associated with historic preservation if we got the neighborhood involved in construction and restoration like Habitat for Humanity does? Moreover, if people are on these construction sites they’re also learning valuable employable skills and if they are learning them may be it is the immigrants who could really benefit from something like this when they’re trying to look for jobs. Our research has shown that Pittsburgh city wants to attract more blue collar workers and this could also feed into that demand.

This is linked solution is what we want to pursue moving forward and have identified experts such as Habitat for Humanity specializing in building houses for the needy, Vibrant Pittsburgh specializing in immigrant affairs and PHLF specializing in historic preservation, that would be able to shed some more light into the individual workings of each of these through which we’ll be able to see if this network we have proposed even makes sense or not. This project is definitely panning out to be very exciting and I’m really looking forward to how the expert advice shapes our direction further.

Merging Ideas for Positive Change

by Ronald Chang

It’s been a month into our Energy Benchmarking project and we are honing in on a project that our group can meaningfully contribute to the effort of reducing energy usage in Pittsburgh without repeating work that has already been done by experts in this field. Innovation in this field is particularly tricky given the amount of people in this field who are passionate about making changes and are very focused on this issue and have approached it in many different ways. Nearly every idea we wanted to pursue, it seemed that they have already been thought of and are either a) in to process of implementing them in the near future, or b) tossed out because of infeasibility. Innovating here, then, would be expediting the process that is already planned down the line or revitalizing an idea that was tossed out before with newer technology that allowed for something that wasn’t possible before. Perhaps by leveraging the very different talents in our own team, we could also something that people already in the industry are lacking, i.e. design, software development, human-computer interaction.As a group, we’ve leaned towards aiding the larger effort of just collecting energy information. From there, people could think of various different ways to compel, incentivize, or mandate energy reduction. But even this first step is very challenging–apathy, costs, process complexity, privacy concerns, and awareness are the largest inhibiting factors. From a design perspective, the user experience of reporting data is complex and beyond the effort that most building owners are willing to expend. From a policy perspective, many building owners are concerned about privacy and wary of government mandates to disclose information. Finally, markets tell us that investments to reduce energy consumption are cost-prohibitive and without the data to show that the investments are worthwhile or that they are behind other similar buildings, it won’t happen. A classic Catch-22.Our meetings, class discussions, and readings helped our group develop many interesting ideas and allowed us to narrow our scope down to a few distinct project ideas (that have evolved after every meeting):

• Michael Schiller discussed reframing the discussion to air quality and getting business owners to invest in retrofitting their buildings to improve the health of tenants. This was also discussed in our discussion with Anthony Rowe regarding the use of sensors to monitor air quality along with other environmental data. In our visit to the CIC, they had also developed the Speck, a cheap way and portable way to monitor the amounts of particles in the air using an infrared sensor. We considered developing a DIY kit for businesses to easily monitor their energy usage and environmental factors that might incentivize them to make changes in energy usage.
• Our meeting with CMU School of Architecture’s Vivian Loftness introduced to us the existence of energy disclosure laws that have been enacted in various cities around the U.S., including New York, Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., and Austin. Searching around the internet, it turns out the possibility of such laws in Pittsburgh has been discussed in this article written by Green Building Alliance vice president Aurora Sharrard: http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/print-edition/2013/05/31/debating-merits-of-energy-disclosure.html?page=all. It seems privacy, building age, lack of commercial property data, and aversity to mandates are the major factors against energy disclosure laws in Pittsburgh. Perhaps voluntary disclosure is the only way to go?
• The discussion about Pittsburgh open data initiatives and Green Building Alliance really demonstrated the importance of data and how even collecting itself is a major step forward. This motivated us to think of ways we could get people to disclose their energy usages, which led to discussions of privacy, user experience, and public awareness. From there, we also toyed around with the idea of using design ethnography to get an idea of the major concerns of building owners and what motivates them to take action. We considered developing a way for utility companies to interface directly with organizations like the Green Building Alliance and government agencies collecting energy data to make the process as painless as possible.
• Improving Portfolio Manager to make it more intuitive and easy to use would be something that our entire group could participate in and produce a deliverable within the next few months. It seems like a real problem and fixing it would reduce the challenges of complexity while improving awareness.
• More recently, concluding our discussions with Isaac Smith from the Green Building Alliance, we’ve considered focusing on available incentive programs and simplifying the process to qualify for property owners. By working with utilities, we think we could make a platform that would summarize all the benefits that propety owners could take advantage of, such as Act 129, to reduce costs while also opting to disclose energy usage. It seems like this is a win-win-win for utility companies, property owners, and the government, since utility companies are required to reduce energy consumption by 1%, property owners can reduce costs, and the Pittsburgh government is one step closer to their 2030 goals.

A problem well defined is a problem half solved… but how?- Faryal Khalid- Team 1

In this phase we have focused heavily on conducting expert interviews. We spoke to Habitat for Humanity, PHLF and other experts in the field since we wanted to find a bridge between historic preservation and teaching employable skills to immigrants. While on paper the link seemed very clear to us since both overlapped in the area construction, the reality was much different. We quickly realized that both by themselves were such rich problems individually that combining them might not be the best idea. As Tim pointed out in class you must go for the low hanging fruit first and then aim for the one up top. A major break through for our group was when we realized that we need to make our problem space more specific if we are going to arrive at some meaningful insights and possible solutions by the end of this class. A problem well defined is a problem half solved. As a group we felt that we wanted to explore possible solutions for the problems immigrants face in job placement but the solution might not necessarily address the demands of historic preservation.

Policy making and implementation is still a new world to me and I still feel a little intimidated when approaching the policies that concern immigrants in the US. When talking to experts from the field I also felt that the people we spoke to were not very keen on discussing policies related to their field. After we decided our new direction we hit a lag since we just didn’t know where to start looking for policies. Since then we have started slowly researching some more and the information found there further pointed out that the topic of immigrants too was still very broad. I find it very interesting that design and policy are intertwined in more ways than meets the eye and this discovering these hidden nuggets of overlap are making my understanding of how policy impacts change more concrete. In design we do a ‘needs and frames’ exercise to see if a target audience we’re looking at has mostly analogous needs or not. (This needs and frames exercise can also be used to create a point of view statement, or solution brainstorming prompts, both of which might be design tools that we can use in this class). If the needs are not analogous then the scope needs to be narrowed down even further. Similarly if the policies encountered by a group are not similar then a similar exercise must be repeated because aiming to change any one policy in itself if a long undertaking and trying to change numerous policies at once is not the way to go about bringing change as is also mentioned in the reading from earlier this semester, ‘Why Good Projects Fail’. There are many different kinds of immigrants and the policy constructs each face are very different. Therefore, we’re now refining that focus even further and want to start focusing on refugees since Pittsburgh has a large Burmese refugee population.

With this new focus the iterative loop of design continues and we’re back into research mode. This worries me a bit since we don’t have that much time left in this semester and our group is really passionate about the topic but it has taken us a while to refine our focus and get through to the experts for interviews. However, a big part of the process of change is comfort with ambiguity and I’m still positive that the insights we discover will be meaningful to ideate on possible solutions of strategies.

Lastly, somewhat removed from our project but my reflection on this process as a whole- since that start of this class I have been struggling with the concept of ‘markets’ since I couldn’t understand what it essentially meant at its core and how it related to the topics we were addressing. I have been in the field of design for many years now but I’ve always worked in either a consultancy or business setting and the business model- how is an idea going to make money was always critical. I took this class because I am very unfamiliar with how the non-profit world works and I had assumed that there is no end money goal here. What is the overarching goal that one must strive for, then? Since joining this class I have gained quite some clarity on this topic and I realize I was very naïve in thiking that. The talk by Mark Schiller, CEO of Green Building Alliance, was very informative in this regard since he had come from a business background but had successfully channeled his knowledge for humanitarian impact. From his talk I learnt that just because a project is meant for wide spread humanitarian impact does not mean that money should not be a consideration. Money is a good incentive for stakeholders to get involved and overall an idea or solution proposed needs to be sellable. As a group we haven’t really tackled where the money for our project would come and I think that is a question to be posed at a later stage when we might be prioritizing an array of solutions for the problem space.

Overall, I really am enjoying how this class is structured. My favorite part is the guest speakers that come in. However, I do wish that we could be given some frameworks on how to break down policy analysis in our problem space just as we’re given frameworks for design thinking.

Blog #2: Diya Deb – Peer Pressure : After School “Not Cool”

The after school program has many stakeholders. From a day to day level like the children, the parents, the after school teachers, the after school workers, the school building, the after school volunteers and even to an extent even the school bus drivers or whoever is involved in their transportation. And from a policy level we have the institutions like the school, the after school care, the public school system, port authority bus transportation system, donators,  and the federal government for the funding.

A recent insight we got from one of our interviews with an after school director is that high school students do not find the concept of after school to be “cool”, a notion that is much influenced by their peers. This negative or “uncool” association can deter the students who might want to reach out for help to these after school centers. Additionally the parents of these students who already take part in after school care programs are not involved with the program which might deter the importance that the child gives to the program. Additionally our interviewee informed us that if they could they would prefer reaching out to the child when they are younger like in elementary school so that the child can be influenced early on to make a better informed future decisions based on awareness and not social pressure or peer pressure.

This intrigued us and we imagined what if we could rebrand and structure the after school care for high school students. Would this possibly influence their adoption rate for the service ?

Through our discussion and the design process during class hours we found that influencing the child early to make better decision would ideally be a more sustainable outcome. Since the child’s change in outlook would influence their peers and the progression of change could reach outwards to a much larger audience. The basis for the change in the child’s outlook could be caused by the child interacting with inspirational adults who may be outside their current social circle. Meeting such adults could influence the child. This exposure could lead to the child to develop a dream or goal towards which they can work towards, which in the end might become their motivation to better perform in school.

To further gain data we as a team are planning on implementing design methods such as  interviews with more stakeholders, meet the parent and child in low income neighborhood playgrounds and after school care program conventions and if we gain permission from these parents to shadow a child from school to their after school care.

Diya Deb (After School Care Pittsburgh)

Blog Post#2- Team 1- Sumiya Tarannum

Our project initially started out at intervening in 3 different disciplines; historic preservation, culture and attracting immigrants to impact the life of immigrants and help them better integrate as responsive citizens. We believed it is possible, we need to talk to stakeholders and identify the common intersecting area of this 3 territories. However, this changed as we kept moving in our journey to explore the opportunities that exists to solve immigrant’s problem. The key insights that were gained and the new creative tools that we intend to use will be narrated below.

We initially assumed that immigrants just need to be trained and have means to earn their livelihood and that is key to their well-being. Furthermore, we also assumed that they will be very happy to have skills in all the areas of preserving a historic building. The questions that we failed to ask are. Have we really investigated the problem enough, do we really know what immigrants want to define their happiness in the city of Pittsburgh. Is this what government really needs to get fixed at this point of time. Moreover, we were well aware there was a political mood to welcome immigrants to Pittsburgh but what were the underlying problems that local government was trying to fix isn’t known to us.

Well, conversations with few stakeholders helped us understand what to include in our scope and what not. Following were few insights; low-skilled workers left Pittsburgh after the steel mill crisis due to lack of opportunities for their skills. Now, even if we invite them back we need to have opportunities created and that was crucial. We still don’t have a comprehensive list of documented or registered immigrants and some efforts need to put into this area. Even the more, the data that already exists does not provide validity if the distribution of the immigrants type is relevant to current time. We have quite a few organizations who are extensively working on training these low-skilled workers and those organizations need to be investigated too.  Another useful insight was Universities have never intervened to help immigrants and this landscape could be explored.

After capturing these facts and insights, we felt that we need to capture the needs of immigrants and nobody talks about what they really want and everyone assumes what they require. I saw “Design Thinking” playing a critical role here where it can provide a creative way of capturing the needs of immigrants and support and complement the quantitative evidence we might have. The design thinking participatory workshops with immigrants might greatly help us to explore this area and provide more “convictional evidence”

We are currently in the process of using cultural probes like photographs and love/hate letter writing and using photo journals to capture their needs. We look forward to meet Vibrant Pittsburgh and help us out on this front to attract participants. On the policy interventions side, we are looking to propose our willingness to work on the welcome Pittsburgh initiative and try to understand what the Mayor’s office is looking to do. Also, we plan to do some existing law and facts analysis to create a baseline for our problem. We plan to use territory maps and build casual loop diagrams.

A Journey to Understand Design Thinking and Application – Beth Team 5

Design, especially as it relates to technology, is a new idea to me. I took art classes in high school and my mom is a seamstress, so I am no stranger to thinking about how things look, but never made the connection to design.

This was my senior year prom dress designed my myself and my mom.

Since I started this class I am realizing that I have done design and design thinking and I didn’t even know it. But I still feel overwhelmed by the idea of design sometimes. What if I do something wrong? On Tuesday (10/14), Professor Bruce Hanington, from the School of Design came to our class and talked about the design process. It was so valuable to me to have words and tools to put into actions. He showed us the process that was like this:

Now it started to make sense to me. But still, looking at some of the beautiful things that designers do, it seemed to me overwhelming to access them. But Bruce broke it down even more and gave some examples within each category. One that resonated with me was exploring through an ethnographic or cultural probe. I was shocked because I had actually done something like this before.

During my time at City Year, where I worked at an urban public high school, as a part of training we did an exercise to illustrate our individual experiences with literature and reading. The title of the project was a reading time line, which resulted in a drawing of our experience with books, reading and literature.

It comes out looking something like this (my actual one had a few more stick figure drawing but this can give you an idea).

This project was meant to show the cultural associations we all have with reading and how we each developed our own path through our individual experiences. This started a group discussion about how our students might feel and act towards reading. It was a cultural probe. Now, looking back I see the value of those drawings as a tool. I could develop something similar for the people we meet exploring Bank On and their experience with financial institutions.

Now that I was thinking design, I started seeing it everywhere. I recently started subscribing to WIRED magazine (it seems almost compulsory as a CMU student). It just happened that the October cover of WIRED was the design issue, but the title of the article is actually Wrong Theory: The Power of Imperfection.

This again made me uncomfortable because I don’t like the idea of doing things “wrong”. In the article, Scott Dadich explains from his perspective how the design cycle works. Surprisingly, it was very similar to what Bruce said in his lecture (maybe this is not so surprising to others, but making the connection was new to me). From Dadich’s perspective the design cycle goes something like this:

“In the early stages, practitioners dedicate themselves to inventing and improving the rules—how to craft the most pleasing chord progression, the perfectly proportioned building, the most precisely rendered amalgamation of rhyme and meter. Over time, those rules become laws, and artists and designers dedicate themselves to excelling within these agreed-upon parameters, creating work of unparalleled refinement and sophistication—the Pantheon, the Sistine Chapel, the Goldberg Variations. But once a certain maturity has been reached, someone comes along who decides to take a different route. Instead of trying to create an ever more polished and perfect artifact, this rebel actively seeks out imperfection—sticking a pole in the middle of his painting, intentionally adding grungy feedback to a guitar solo, deliberately photographing unpleasant subjects. Eventually some of these creative breakthroughs end up becoming the foundation of a new set of aesthetic rules, and the cycle begins again.” (WIRED, Oct 2014, page 129)

Both of these cycles give and important message. It’s ok to do things wrong and in Dadich’s Cycle that’s the point sometimes. From Bruce’s perspective, the evaluation process is a key component and doing things wrong can be good, even though it can be uncomfortable. Reading this article and hearing Bruce talk about the design process was really inspiring to me to get out there and explore the world outside my comfort zone. I also realized that design thinking is something I have actually done before, but didn’t realize it.

Possible Directions – Jay Liu, Team 2

There has been a lot of work done in the space of food insecurity. We were fortunate to locate and converse with many experts and key players, some of them who have been in this space for 30 years. They graciously shared their perspectives and expressed their thoughts on projects that could be done. In this post, I’ll go over just some that stood out to me.

Ken Regal from Just Harvest was among the experts interviewed, who has been in this space for 30 years, even before the term of “food desert” was coined. Interestingly, as we started out our conversation he mentioned that this was a perfect time for solutions to be researched and designed, which strongly resembled what Tim had taught us on how initiatives depend on having the circumstances be just right in order to really take off. Ken also expressed that there are many players who don’t understand each other’s roles, as if there were not enough coordination among the different players involved. He also mentioned a lack of awareness between the suppliers and the demand in the economy of healthy food. For example, convenience store owners may not be aware of any demand for healthy groceries. At the same time, those who may be looking for healthy groceries may not know where to find it.

Marisa Manheim of Grow Pittsburgh mentioned how there is significant barrier for people who want to reclaim land to use it for gardening. It appears that much of the data on whether a piece of land is already available for gardening, but just not in a consumable form (as seems to be typical of much government-sourced information, unfortunately). That adds to the already formidable barrier for people who want to start their own gardens, as people generally do not know where to begin.

Tierney Manning was very gracious in sharing her research with us on food desert classification. The article serves as an extensive primer on what has been considered within the scope of food deserts in Pittsburgh.

Blog Post 2 – Chris Taschner – Team 3

So far our team has met with a few people regarding green buildings and energy benchmarking. Out of these meetings we have gained a lot of insight into the problem space. So far we have been able to talk with a few people with different perspectives on the issue. These people have included Anthony Rowe who heads the Sensor Andrew project; Vivian Loftness in the architecture department; and Michael Schiller and Isaac Smith of the Green Building Alliance.

Anthony Rowe has a unique perspective on energy benchmarking. He designs and builds different types of sensors in part to provide data about building usage. One of the purposes of these sensors is to provide researchers with information about the efficiency of a building. Anthony has been working on the periphery of energy benchmarking for years and has provided Vivian Loftness with sensor technology for her work as well as studying the problem on his own.

Before talking with Anthony I had the presupposition that improving the efficiency of a building would lower the buildings energy bill enough to justify the improvement cost. Anthony let us know that this is incorrect. Energy is far too cheap and the improvements needed to make a building tend to be far too expensive for money to be a motivator for change. This insight significantly changes the way we approach this problem.

Another thing that Anthony told us was that the typical large building has a building manager whose full time job is to know everything they can about the building. These large buildings typically have a very good understanding of their energy consumption and will get little benefit from benchmarking. Moreover fitting these buildings with energy efficient improvements will be considerably costly. Smaller buildings, around 40000 square feet, are much better candidates for benchmarking. They don’t typically have a building manager, and the upgrades tend to be in the more manageable cost range.

Anthony pointed us toward Vivian Loftness as someone to talk to about this problem. Vivian researches green building in the architecture department here at CMU. She is the former head of the architecture department and has spent 30 years focused on environmental design and sustainability.

Talking with Vivian provided a lot of insights into this problem space. We found out that there is a debate within this space about the value of making energy consumers green verses the value of reducing the emissions at the energy source. Vivian informed us that the current thinking is that improving the emissions at the source might make more of an impact than reducing energy consumption at the sites. This is potentially a big shift in how we approach the problem. Vivian did down play the source verses site debate and emphasized the value of improvements at both the source and the site.

Another thing that Vivian told us was that a number of cities have recently enacted a lot of green building policies. These included disclosure laws in some cities. This gives our team a few good models to examine. Disclosure laws are controversial, but are also a solution to the problem of motivating people to upgrade their buildings.

Vivian also told us about the Green Button. The green button is an initiative led by energy.gov that provides easy access to energy usage information to utility customers. The green button is added to electric utilities’ websites and allows the customer to download a file containing their usage data that can than be used in energy management and conservation tools. This particular tool is not available in Pittsburgh, but would be an easy and cheap thing that utility customers could do to get an idea of their energy consumption.

This is the right time for this problem to be tackled in Pittsburgh. The technology is here to support energy benchmarking and green building. The city, county, and (soon) state governments support this initiative. Gathering the data about our energy consumption makes sense right now. Beyond gathering data, however, is not as feasible right now. The market is working against a real substantial push to curb energy consumption. Right now energy is too cheap and there isn’t another substantial motivator for change.

All of this information made our group rethink our direction. With these new insights we felt it might make more sense to go in a policy-focused direction rather than a product-focused direction. Determining the best direction has been a challenge. We used the problem definition sheet during the workshop class to help layout our problem area. We also have begun to look at the different cities that have moved in this direction before Pittsburgh. We have a very good understanding of the problem at this point; the challenge is to determine how to find the solution.

The design methods explored so far may yet reveal motivators for change. Surveys have been discussed, but who does it make sense to survey? Building owners are not motivated right now to spend a lot of money on upgrades to their buildings. A survey might give us insight into what might motivate them. Surveys, on the other hand, have the problem of not always being returned. Another option might be to find and interview four or five building managers. This might give us insight we haven’t yet gotten. The problem with this is the coordination and time it takes to complete.

Overall, the design methods discussed so far in class are providing us with insight and ideas for moving forward. In addition to what we’ve discussed in class we have found a number of resources for our particular problem. These include:

http://www.imt.org/

https://www.energystar.gov/buildings/facility-owners-and-managers/existing-buildings/use-portfolio-manager%29

http://energy.gov/data/green-button

https://www.go-gba.org/