Telling Stories About Millage Rates — Anna Malone, Team 2

A Failure

Yesterday, Ken and I tried to tour Hosanna House, a community center in Wilkinsburg. We went there per Kristin’s suggestion. So far, we have spent lots of time talking to experts on neighborhood revitalization and blight. These experts include CDC members, community building strategists, and gentrifiers. Many of these hard working people know a great deal about what’s happening in Wilkinsburg on the “front streets,” the streets that are the most accessible to visitors from outside the neighborhood or streets that are used as commercial spaces.

However, finding out what’s going on in the neighborhood outside of these areas has proved to be a more difficult task. What are the issues in Wilkinsburg, as residents perceive them? How are these issues being addressed or not addressed, and how can we become involved? Kristin suggested Hosanna House as a fruitful space to visit because information about activities, events, and projects occurring in the “back streets” of the neighborhood is generally advertised and shared there. Perhaps predictability, our first visit to Hosanna House did not go as expected. It didn’t really “go” at all. To enter the building, a membership pin must be entered in a keypad. We could not even get in the building. Therefore, we will need to set up a time to visit next week.

Active Research

Like Ken, I worry that our project does not have enough direction. At the moment, it feels like we are attacking the issue of blight from a variety of angles. These attacks often feel less than strategic, probably because the topic is so huge. We keep doing research, but we also want to start doing something that feels more tangible. Yet, to produce something concrete and physical so quickly requires a great deal of guesswork.

Can we continue our research by making things, physically placing them in the neighborhood, and seeing how people respond? Can iterative prototyping work in this context? Can iterative prototyping be viewed as rapid hypothesis testing, a process that begins blindly but leads us closer and closer to the “right” solution each time we throw the next iteration away? How do we move through this process without negatively impacting anyone, building up an unobtrusive presence in the neighborhood? When we are talking about problems associated with blight in a neighborhood that often seems inaccessible to us, what does participatory design look like? How do we make sure everyone is involved in that design process, not only artists and activists who have recently moved onto the front streets of the neighborhood?

Making Abandoned Buildings Interactive

This weekend, we are using Candy Chang’s portfolio as inspiration. As Robyn mentioned, Chang does a lot of work with abandoned buildings that encourages community members to interact with the structures. These interactions simultaneously bring new value to the buildings and reveal information about the desires, wishes, and needs of community members. Can we find out information about an abandoned building in Wilkinsburg by placing carefully designed stickers on said building? Can these stickers invite responses that help us begin to form a story about the building’s history and the building’s future? For examples, will stickers that leave spaces for responses to the prompts “This building used to be…” and “I wish this building was…” give us useful and inspiring insights about blight? We are going to put up some stickers on Saturday and see what kind of response we get, if any.

Storytelling

As our research has continued, we have begun thinking of storytelling as a design method or tool. For most activists, gentrification is a four-letter word. The five of us ended up working on this project because we wanted to find a way to deal with blight that did not involve gentrification. Only after we began working and Tim asked us “What’s good about gentrification?” did we realize that we had never actually defined or explored the phenomenon. There are positives to gentrification. Gentrification is economic revitalization of a devastated area, a theoretically positive process. Then why does it make us feel icky? During our discussion this week, I think we finally uncovered the element of gentrification that disturbs us, the aspect that we actually want to avoid. Often, when people attempt to revitalize a neighborhood, they forget to ask: “What did you use to be?” This question is incredibly important. A neighborhood that has fallen on hard times does not need to be erased. It does not need to “start over” or be returned to a blank slate. Before that neighborhood declined, it was something else, something that people remember or want to remember. What people are searching for in abandoned, falling down buildings is the secret of what that building used to be and what that building could be again. If we search for future solutions that do not account for the past, those solutions will be soulless. If we incorporate and take inspiration from the past as we design our solutions, those solutions will feel continuous, natural. They will be part of a living history. These are the solutions that people respond to, that community members can gather around.

We have decided to first try an approach that takes these ideas of history and storytelling quite literally. A Pittsburgh blogger named Jonathon Denson has a website called “Discovering Historic Pittsburgh” [http://www.jonathondenson.com/]. On this site, he posts detailed histories of abandoned buildings around the Pittsburgh area, followed by a call for someone to invest in the property. He won an award from the Pittsburgh preservation society for his work, and we are trying to set up a meeting with him to learn about his research methods.

Ultimately, we hope to use this information to write our own building histories for Wilkinsburg properties. We want community members and visitors to tour the neighborhood and interact with these buildings, to learn their histories and become invested in them. Can this personal investment translate into something bigger?

Millage Rates Suck

While we are all feeling inspired and excited about this plan, we also realize that we have another problem to deal with. When property values plummet, property taxes soar. In order to pay for services like trash removal in a neighborhood, the city needs to get that money from somewhere. Therefore, the tax rate on properties will be a higher percentage of the total property value if that property value is low. The millage rates, and thus the property taxes, in Wilkinsburg are very high. This system discourages potential buyers from investing in properties within blighted communities. A restored property in Wilkinsburg will ultimately cost the owner more than a nice property in a neighborhood with higher property values because the expensive house in Wilkinsburg will also still be subject to the higher tax rates. Once we get residents and visitors emotionally invested in abandoned houses in the area, what happens next? Who actually has money to invest in these buildings? How do we work around this policy issue? How might “storytelling” help us here? Definitely applying for tax abatement is one way to deal with the issue. Can we make the application process easier for people? Can we translate documents and requirements from legalese to natural language?

Blog #2 by Wenzhu Liu (Team 7)

Our project focus on how to improve the after school program, attract more children and help low income family children to attend the after school program. In the fist phase, we have done the amount of research on papers and online, and choose 3 main ideas on marketing, transportation and community. So during the 20 days after the first submission, we start to interview real managers, teachers and students in the after school program to get more practical  suggestions and data to help us pick up one specific idea and define.

After listening Bruce Hannington’s lecture, the methods in user experience are very useful and give me more clear thoughts on how to conduct our project for the design part. So I have read the research toolbook again and again, and try to finger out which methods are suitable for our project and make a plan about how to use them. There is the detailed plan about the methods I picked up as below.

1. Interview: We have scheduled time next week with Nina Marie Barbuto, who is the adjunct Instructor of school of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She is teaching Saturday Art Connection Classes at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. We would ask her some questions about one of our ideas that encourages students to spend time after school in museums. And we have talked with Stephen MacIsaac in Neighborhood Learning Alliance and Kathryn Vargas in United Way of Allegheny County. When talking with Stephen, he told us about how to encourage high school students to work hard to prepare for their future profession, and he also introduced one program he is doing. In this program, the high school students would be employed and trained by the alliance to teach elementary students reading books. For high school students, they get the experience about teaching, and for young children, they find a way to read the books what they like. So this program is good for both young children and high school teenagers. I think this program inspires us to think more about how to find a good program to help a large range of age students meanwhile and let them engage the program. When talking with Kathryn, she gave us more information about the after school program in the large Pittsburgh area and we would attend the activity the Afterschool Symposiumshe next Tuesday which is introduced by her.  We plan to talk with more students who attend or don’t attend after school program in Pittsburgh.

2. Knowledge Mining: For our project, I think the people who are uniquely qualified to offer insights are Nina Meria Barbuto, Stephen MacIsaac as Executive Director at Neighborhood Learning Alliance,  Wendy Etheridge Smith as Executive Director at Higher Achievement Pittsburgh, Kathryn Vargas as Manager in Programs for Children and Youth at present. And after we talk with them, we would collect more informations about more after school programs and then talk with more people.

3. Guided Storytelling: We plan to listen to teachers, volunteers working at after school program telling what they are doing during work time and what is their unforgettable experience staying with children at after school program. And for the second part, we would ask children to tell us whether they remember the happiest time in the program.

4. Guide Tour: For this method, it is a good way that teachers or volunteers lead us to visit their courses and activities.

5. Beeper Study: To realize it, I want to provide small forms for teachers to record what contents induce children’s interest.

6. Photo Diary: It is a good way to collect data that asking teachers or volunteers in the after school program to take pictures for their activities. For more details, the pictures are required to be special to record specific moment such as the time children use some new tools and they express their curiosity. And during the guide tour, we could also take some pictures under the permission of teachers.

7. Prototype Evaluation: After finishing the lo-fi prototypes, we should come back to the after school programs and conduct experiments with teachers, volunteers, staff and children. Without knowing the concept of our project, we need know what parts of our project confuse them and where we should improve.

8. Think Aloud Protocol: With the lo-fi or hi-fi prototypes, when conducting the user testing, we should give a task to them and when they try to finish it, ask them to say what they are thinking. Especially for children, it is a little difficult to know what they are thinking, so recording the process seems important if we get the permission.

9. Shadowing: After interviewing with enough directors, managers, teachers and students,  we would pick up some specific people as our main target audience and let them show their normal daily activities during after school time. This step is important to collect detailed data in ethnography.

10. Fly on the Wall: Sitting in the after school place, and watching the activities.

11. Video Observation: As mentioned in the method 8, we would record what children do under permission, and for teachers, if necessary, recording a video is essential.

12. Task Analysis: The method is visualizing the process of the after school activities.

13. Draw Your Experience: We have made 2 posters for each participates, one is for adults and one is for children. On the adult’s poster, there is one question “what do you want to do if you can live your childhood once more time”. We provide several hints such as activities, memory, favorites and so on. And for the children’s poster, the question is “draw your favorite place, thing or activity”. We want to children drawing whatever they feel happy and interested.

As a student focus on design part in the team, I would try more on how to promote our project more efficiently, provide a clear system for conducting research on people and visualize the ideas, process and results.

There is another useful toolkit for user research.

http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/

IdaShiang /blog post #2 Group 6

Insight

From this experience I’ve gained a greater understanding of how community action works—about the role of Community Development Corporations and the network of community organizations that collaborate and/or engage residents. I’ve also learned about how interconnected problems are.  Our designated problem is about increasing food access, but the issue transcends other community issues such as how to expand urban farming to create a more resilient/independent regional food system, how to overcome employment barriers for people with limited education or criminal records, education (making health/nutrition/exercise a learning area/unit in school/out of school).

My conversations have taught me how integral gaining buy-in from key community constituents or having community champions are to the success of a project.  Many of our ideas are dependent on having strong community champions overseeing the idea to fruition.  This has been a challenge for the group in narrowing down a solution to move forward on.

Highlights

One great experience in my group’s research process was attending a service at the King of Kings church in Garfield.  We didn’t do any interviews; we just observed.  It was nice to absorb the environment and experience a source of community support and positivity.  I loved the gospel music worship and its raw, unrestrained emotion and movement.  Most of life is measured and restrained so it was nice to witness a completely opposite form of human expression. There’s a push in the church to empower women—they are having a women-led worship weekend.  This might be an opportunity to connect with moms in the community to discuss food issues.

Where Policy Fits In

This project has reinforced how big policy challenges can be.  When we met with Grow Pittsburgh, we learned about the challenges in securing lots for community gardens and the grassroots mobilization taking place to revise policies/encourage development of policies that will help expedite assessment and development of land for community gardens.

What’s Next

My group has done a lot of interviews with community organizations but has not connected yet with many local residents. My group will try to utilize the culture probes to get more insights from research sessions. I think it would be a good idea to use gamification to develop exercises that are short, fun, but informative as well. I was inspired by the small things project from code for America and the fitwits example in class.  I think it’s important to identify something small and implementable and to get our ideas or proposals in front of stakeholders, to have them experience and evaluate our proposed solutions.

Blog Post #2 – Ken Chu/Team 2

We have been working on our projects for about seven weeks at this point.  When I reflect on the speakers and the readings we have had, I find that while we have been exposed to a lot of good information, tools, and techniques to help frame our projects and our processes, I am still experiencing a lack of focus in terms of how to define the path forward.  And it feels a bit like I am falling behind on the timeline of this class.  Part of the problem comes from the magnitude of the issue with which we are dealing.  But also part of the problem comes from the fact that the lack of direction, which I think is a necessary construct in order to encourage creative approaches and the consideration of all possible processes and solutions, fuels our inability to define our path because the options are limitless.  And because we have such a diverse group and are working very hard to engage in a very democratic process, moving forward is further encumbered by a lack of proscriptive behavior from any source.  Furthermore, trying to remain open-minded with an eye towards “out of the box” thinking and creative solutions doesn’t always go hand in hand with a set 16-week schedule.  I think I have been hoping that the research phase will reveal a path – that the problem itself will proscribe our solution – but I find that I am frustrated that this has not been the natural evolution of the project.

I think Mitchell Sipus’s lecture and all the readings around failure have probably been some of the more useful resources for me because I think part of the problem is the whole idea of not being able to succeed.  Clearly, all of us are in this class because we are interested in learning how we can make positive social change.  Because we have a vested personal interest in the success of the project – not in a thorough exploration of the development or process, but in the actual efficacy of the project design generated – I find myself hesitant to define a path that will either be unable to effect the desired outcome or change, or that will be inconsequential and insignificant in light of the challenge.  Mitchell’s lecture was interesting because he was very clear about the whole idea of starting with an idea of what he would do and arriving at a journey that was completely different from his initial intent, although related.  The end result was his engagement in work that was no less important or successful, but was certainly different from where he started.

I find this whole concept of failure to be an interesting space to explore in social innovation because I don’t think that we are socialized to readily engaged activities that have a high likelihood of failure.  It’s the whole idea in economics of the relationship between risk and reward – the greater the risk, the greater the potential return and the lower the risk, the lower potential return.  Applied to this process, this idea would lead one to believe that in order to do something really innovative and to effect real change in people’s live, solutions with the greatest potential for success also hold the greatest risk of failure.  But we fear failure –or low return – and because of this, most of us tend to take smaller risks.  This fear of failure can likely be attributed, at least partly, to how we praise and uphold success and successful models and use them as examples of how things should be.  We want to learn from successful processes because mimicking those processes will likely breed parallel successful outcomes.  But the more we do this, the less innovative we become and the more traditional innovation becomes.  And in fact, innovation is only innovative until it becomes common.  So if we are trying to engender innovation, perhaps we have to first exorcise our fear of failure.

As a theater artist, there are many activities that we engage in that force us to embrace failure.  The process of making theater is extremely collaborative and so we rely on each other to perform unique tasks, but the efficacy of the project as a whole often comes from our ability to arrive at the story telling collectively and as a unified group.  To that end, much of our work is about the oversharing of our ideas in order to garner reaction, to engender reflection, and to shape our collective consciousness in regards to the work.  Early on in the process, our work is often singular, developing our own ideas and thoughts in a vacuum without the rest of the team.  But ultimately, there comes a point where we have to bare the work that we have done on our own for the rest of the group to see, knowing full well that the reaction – whether positive or negative – is what we, as a group, need in order to move the process forward.  Some of it will be garbage and some of it will provide the inspiration that shapes our journey.  But most important in this process is the lack of fear in sharing ideas – in vocalizing what we think and how we feel about the work and about each other’s work.

In theater, in order to allow our minds to find this freedom, we often start our rehearsals or our meetings with games that force us to stop thinking logically.  These activities are designed to make us behave instinctually and to align ourselves with one another.  Often, the activities and games are meaningless and live somewhere in the space of non-sense, but the challenge us to re-frame our reality by asking us to perform un-realistically in an attempt to free ourselves to take all risks necessary to engender a process that is rife with possibilities.  Also, in calibrating ourselves to one another, we find that we can be more responsive and more “in tune” with each other as we proceed through the work.  It’s a truly ephemeral quality, but can be really helpful in creating a collective consciousness about the work.

Perhaps a useful activity for us to have engaged in before we started any of the research would have been a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) session of idea generation.  A time when, prior to looking at barriers or stakeholders, we just shared with one another the most outlandish or unlikely scenarios for possible solutions to the problems.  At times, knowledge is power.  But power can also come from ignorance – ignorance of what cannot be done or what cannot be achieved.  This approach seems antithetical to my desire for greater structure or more clear direction.  But I also think it might have freed us from trying to frame the problem space, the design space, and the solution space in ways that are more logical or using tools that are more familiar to us.

When Bruce Hanington talked about design research methodology and the standard phases, it was linear and logical.  It was useful to see a step-by-step guide for how the work might be approached.  But on the other hand, knowing that there is a method for successful design research also makes me feel that there must be an existing template for successful design innovation and I think that I am searching for the “one” right method.  In hindsight, I think it might have been useful for me to start by being generative – to create many, many theses – before we engaged the research, which then informed the framework for the theses and shaped the exploration for possible innovative solutions.  I don’t think any of us are paralyzed by the fear of not performing well in the class, but I do think that I inherently want a successful project – one that actually effects positive social change.  And I fear that the more information I know and learn about our topic, the less creative I am about possible solutions.  My desire to do something successful is inhibiting my desire to take up a journey that is more innovative, more creative, more “out of the box”, but which is more likely to lead to failure.

Blog Post 2 – Liana Kong Team 3

Yesterday we met with Isaac Smith from the Green Building Alliance, which was very eye-opening in a positive way yet set us back a little. Last week we defined our problem using the worksheet given during one of the classes, which had us clearly outline the issue, whom it affects, social factors, evidence, etc. Low incentive for property owners to disclose energy is difficult, and forming solutions from the raw data generated from this is not much easier. Exposing users to the benefits of energy disclosure is a challenge, particularly in Pittsburgh because of low development rates and discomfort of loss of privacy. We have discovered so far that creating disclosure laws would combat with these challenges. Cities comparable to Pittsburgh such as Minneapolis or Charlotte have enforced energy disclosure laws, but it was more successful due to their rapid development and newer buildings. Because Pittsburgh already has many existing old buildings, it is difficult to implement or market implementing energy efficient power systems to buildings. In an even bigger picture, Duquesne Power & Light use an old system that makes it difficult to benchmark energy.

One effective way to sort out our ideas is to create a future wheel, where the main problem is sourced in the middle, while additional concerns branch off to give light to more elements. This would give us great insight to how certain issues might waterfall or affect other issues and to allow us to keep everything into consideration. This activity could even divert our focus to another issue we might previously oversee. However, this won’t give us much of an answer but more so a direction. It’s been difficult so far to pinpoint where we should focus because it seems that the problems we want to address are either impossible or are currently being worked on extensively.

In terms of participatory research, it would be interesting to give some of our contacts the chance to rearrange an affective UI of Portfolio Manager to see what would be an optimal format for the information needed to access and disclose energy usage. This would give them a chance to collage together something that would be meaningful to them. However, this might give a skewed perspective, and it might be useful to get into contact with property owners who would not want energy disclosure to receive information from the opposing party.

blog 2 sarah team 1

Throughout the course so far, I’ve learned that social innovation is all about designing things that help people make positive changes that are novel, improved, and sustainable. There are no rules or boundaries that define what forces can work together to encompass this type of social change. That is characteristic that makes social innovation so unique and such an infrequent yet valuable occurrence. It is both risky and uncertain, and involves numerous different stakeholders to shape an innovative idea into a tangible reality. Design and policy methods as well as consumer need for change can foster new ways of thinking which have the potential to transform people’s lives in monumental ways. By combing design methods and policy one can create a productive tactic to frame ideas and research within.
An example of this type of collaborative approach is Sanders’ co-design space. Sanders emphasizes that one of the biggest mistakes made in the design processes is that too much time is spent on one idea instead of exploring many possibilities due to lack of comprehensive knowledge. Participatory design is a solution to this problem. Participatory design is a design practice in various co-design activities throughout the design process. This technique makes use of a wide collection of tools by involving stakeholders (employees, partners, customers, users, etc.) to help guarantee that the end result meets their needs and is practical.
Green Building Alliance’s Mike schiller mentioned that green building has a huge health benefit for the public. Namely, reduced energy consumption, lower operating costs, positive marketing and promotion, and increased productivity. One of GBA’s initiatives was to create a framework for a two year long program for school districts to drive changes in energy consumption and green practices. The two year long project framework sought to build a curriculum where teachers promoted effective environmental and sustainability education to their students. Designing better codes, creating incentives for building owners, and monitoring performance and management, just to name a few, is where policy came into play. Results of this innovative idea was increased civic skills among students, improved health, increased environmental awareness, and a solid foundation for future college opportunities and workforce preparedness.
So if there is so much benefit in social innovation, why aren’t people doing it? Why could some of the ideas and experiments listed above fail? First, there are high net operating costs for completely novel projects/products ideas. Innovation is usually also limited to a few resources, and are often doomed to high startup failure rates. Or, perhaps the public lacks the knowledge and/or skills to needed in order for the product to catch on. Take GBA’s green and healthy school academies initiative for example. Why may schools not take on something that has the potential to increase positive student outcomes in the long run? First off, green practices may be too expensive for some school districts to take on, and some educators may lack the knowledge and/or funding for training to make the program effective being that it involves many different issues on a complex yet significant issue.
Going back to participatory design, there are also some challenges and limitations that may cause the co-design approach to fall short. First, it’s a challenge for find the appropriate place for various stakeholders in PD activities. With so many differing repertoires of tools and techniques involved, it can be difficult to organize such a broad skillbase. Participatory approach also prefers the face-to-face approach, which can be difficult to organize and cost-intensive. Also, the occasional need to travel to meet face-to-face may pose limitations of the size and durability of tools and materials.

Blog #2 – Siyun Li (Team 7)

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My blog #2 file: blog #2 Siyunli

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Here are some interesting websites/videos:

1. http://www.vestergaard.com/

2.  TEDx Talks. “5 Keys to Success For Social Entrepreneurs: Lluis Pareras at TEDxBarcelonaChange.” YouTube. YouTube, 29 Apr. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8c5ooHfWs>.

3. (Watch this talk!!!One of the best Ted talks ever)Perf. Pallotta. Dan Pallotta: The Way We Think about Charity Is Dead Wrong. Ted Talk, Feb. 2013. 12 Oct. 2014.<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong?language=en>

4. Mullainathan, Sendhil. “Solving Social Problems with a Nudge.” Ted Talk. Nov. 2009. 12 Oct. 2014.<http://www.ted.com/talks/sendhil_mullainathan?language=en>

Blog Post 2: Reflections on Methods

Design research methods have been very helpful for our team in the explorative phase of our project. We started out by intending to tackle a food related problem in Pittsburgh and through reliance on design research methodology have been able to narrow our scope to a couple of managable problem areas and a target geography. Before arriving at this point, we needed to sort through copious amounts of information and possibilities.

 

Most of the research we’ve done involved in-depth interviews and literature reviews. We personally met with a wide variety of potential partners and stakeholders including community organizations, non-profits, grocery stores, food startups and policy influencers. Based on our exploratory research, we created mappings for our own interests, our stakeholders, potential partners, decision-making factors and potential solutions ideas. And by clustering these into larger categories and themes, we were able to start forming a direction for our project. We also used design research methods such as dot voting go quickly and easily reach consensus on decision and plans as a team.

 

 

What we have yet to do is employ participatory design methods with a target set of users. In particular, we had not had enough contact with our end users – members of the actual community we would like to help. And it is also exceedingly important to carry out participatory design activities with potential partners or influencers since we need champions in the community and someone who will be “carrying on the torch”. Getting people involved in such activities has been a bit more of a challenge since it requires a certain amount of openness and trust from the participants. In a way, participants must already buy-into our team’s ability to make a difference. Otherwise, participating is not fun.

 

I anticipate that design research methods will continue to be important throughout the different stages of the project as we move from the exploratory phase to ideation and prototyping. It also seems to me that the process might get a bit easier with a more targeted or focused project as more relevant stakeholders can be identified and more specific research questions posited. In addition to the ones already mentioned in class, some resources I found helpful to consider for this stage and others include:

 

Service Design Network

Nir Eyal

Cooper

UX for Good

Nielsen Norman Group

Nate Bolt

 

Oh, and it’s been fun!

 

Anna

Team 6

 

 

The Long View

Much data has been collected since last time. We met with the Chairman of Bank on Greater Pittsburgh; spoke with the branch manager and the community development manager of a financial partner; visited two neighborhoods under consideration (Homewood and Hazelwood); and attended an info-session for community college students at the Allegheny campus of Community College of Allegheny County. At this last event, we spoke with the Director of the Office of Student Life, a couple participating banks (Northwest Savings and First Dollar), and a few students. It’s good to be out in the field.

 

Our conversations so far have been unstructured interviews. We come prepared with a few questions and figure out a few more along the way. This provided some meaningful contrast to the “fly on the wall” observation we did today. Katie and I perched ourselves at a table in the back (conveniently, the BGP table) to take a look at who came by, and how the event was set up. The financial literacy event took place in the form of a tabling session. We drew maps of the interactions between people and objects and looked at the flow of the room. I casually talked to the people standing next to me as I grabbed pizza at the refreshment table (research). We kept our eyes open, keeping AEIOU (Bruce Hanington) in the back of our mind.

We noticed a few things: there weren’t many signs inside or outside the building indicating such an event was happening. There were two planned hour-long lectures on savings and education that didn’t happen. (These were likely too long to begin with, and not clearly advertised). A few people stopped at multiple tables, and they tended to be over the age of 35. Most students floated about the room. More seemed to come in for just the pizza, which was located conveniently at the entrance/exit. Some already had bank accounts. In conventional terms, the event was successful: some of the banks enrolled a few new clients on the spot, including some non-banked ones. We asked ourselves, which table would we stop at, if we weren’t familiar with any of the bank names? Is the information on the table something I’d want to look at? There was a lot to look at. I’m thinking “Design for Attention Span,” and I’m thinking about moving the pizza to the other side of the room.

 

We expect the environment to be different at one of the next community college sessions. There won’t be a familiar meeting place on the Homewood campus, like there was here. There may not be a culture of regular programming, like there was here (every Wednesday, something is going on in right there).

 

As we continue our process, I look forward to applying new design research and data collection methods. We’ve identified several different directions we can take our project, based on gaps of all sorts, including communication, knowledge, and performance. We pooled all these needs together, and grouped them by type and time required. A number of potential deliverables resulted: a formal report, a monitoring and evaluation methodology, tangible resources (conformed to different users’ needs, e.g. BGP itself, financial partners, community partners, and end users). These will all benefit from the methods.

Certain methods (from IDEO Method Cards, etc) seem more appropriate for different stages of the process than others. We used character profiles last week to separate out different, relevant sub-populations, and then we contrasted their needs. An affinity diagram will be helpful in the next couple of weeks to synthesize our findings for the creation of an interface, system, or process. Once we have something tangible created, a cognitive task analysis and an error analysis are good usability tests. An activity analysis is helpful at this stage to detail the experience of walking into a bank, or interacting with a financial partner (say, at a tabling session, like today).

Those outside resources. One thing we keep talking about is how to extend the shelf life of our deliverables. We learned that funding ends Q1 or Q2 next year, so we’re thinking about suggestions we can provide to the Urban League that they can continue in the absence of funding. While I do not expect to find any silver bullets, I think it’ll be helpful to review some principles of psychology, adult education, and instructional design. Laura Meixell, the young Analytics and Strategy Manager for the City of Pittsburgh, continues to be a source of inspiration here. Be willing to teach yourself what you don’t know, be an advocate for positive change, be useful.

 

Oh, and my team is awesome.

— Jennifer, Team 5

Blog Entry 2: Reflections on the course and energy benchmarking

For myself, the exposure to multiple different speakers working in multiple different fields has by far been the greatest benefit to the course so far. Seeing the working methods of each speaker, and how they were able to utilize their various skills, such as design, to create social change has influenced my approach with my team. In my personal life, regardless of the task, I find the greatest struggle to be just getting started and establishing direction (whether or not it is correct). Seeing the processes of others and how they got started has helped tremendously. Michael Schiller’s presentation was especially helpful, considering he directly works in the space of the policy subject my group has decided to focus on, energy benchmarking.

Some of the greatest learning opportunities I’ve experienced over the few weeks have been through researching this topic. By actually getting out and talking to various individuals who have either been actively researching the space, or directly working in it for an extended amount of time, I’ve learned quite a bit about the subject. Unfortunately, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know about energy bench marking. For every question that is answered, five more are created. Through the individuals myself and my group have met with, I’ve learned a number of key items which must remembered as my group works within the space. Just a few of those takeaways include:

• Energy is cheap in the US. It’s tough to create an immediate financial incentive for individuals to make wholesale changes to their buildings due to this.
• Site vs. Source: There are two ways to measure energy usage. Site refers to the energy usage directly at the building site, and source refers to the amount of energy that is supplied by the power company to the site. Source usage is the current trend.
• Disclosure Laws are starting to show up in other cities, where certain sized buildings are required to disclose their energy usage. Pittsburgh has a number of unique factors present that is slowing this process locally, though talks are currently in place between the Green Building Alliance and the Mayor’s office as to how they may be enacted.
• Privacy issues may be a key factor when it comes to the sharing of energy usage.
• The Pittsburgh area utilities currently don’t have a easy, simple method to disclose energy usage on a per building basis.
• 2030 districts are in place locally, which have promised to cut energy usage by 50% by 2030.
• The software that the majority of buildings utilize is provided by the EPA (Portfolio Manager) and compares usage to a baseline of data from 2003.

While the concept of decreasing energy usage is a popular initiative, I’ve found that actually acting upon it a different case entirely. I’ve found limited concrete incentives to decrease power usage, due to the the lead time it takes to see monetary results. Good publicity and great feelings can only go far in enacting change without these monetary incentives. It seems like most of the success that can be currently found is due to policy initiatives requiring cuts and disclosure. Other industries and partners then have the option to jump in to the space and create products that assist in making those cuts easy to enact. Since these sort of policy changes don’t come to pass in a single semester’s time, I’m currently struggling with how a handful of dedicated individuals can make any sort of impact within such a massive space like energy benchmarking.
Stephen Cook

Group 3 – Energy Benchmarking

Creating Positive Change – Katie Ramp (Team 5)

A lot of concepts we’ve been discussing in class are finally starting to come together for me. The more these methods are described in various contexts, the easier it is for me to relate to them and figure out how I might go about using them in the future. It takes more than one session or book, that’s for sure. On the design side of things, I found both Bruce Hannington’s lecture on design probes and Kristin Hughes’ case study on the Fitwits project quite inspiring. In terms of policy and entrepreneurialism, I really enjoyed the guest lectures by Laura Meixell, Analytics and Strategy Manager for Mayor Peduto, and Mitchell Sipus, an expert on social research.

I want to share and reflect on some key insights from each of these talks. I think one of the common threads is that one size (method) does not fit all, which is equally empowering and intimidating! Especially when dealing with people, i.e. social impact issues, you have to figure things out on the fly and constantly readjust your perspective. It’s really hard to break pre-conceived notions of a population or problem, but reframing the opportunity and potential solutions is so valuable. There’s a cycle of research and evaluation to action or applying a design method and back to research and further ideation. Mitchell discussed his work that has taken him to Mogadishu, Kabul, and various refugee camps; he has discovered numerous ways to ingratiate and integrate himself with local populations to map out proxy variables and potential conflict solutions. I really admire his career path in starting his own company instead of taking the traditional NGO approach (so much so that it probably deserves a separate post!). His discussion of maps led me to research Pittsburgh maps for my team project on financial literacy and decreasing the unbanked rate in the city. I found http://pittsburghmaps.wordpress.com and highly recommend people take a look just for fun. What can I say; I’m a map geek.

Laura Meixell’s career philosophy has been “to make myself useful no matter what.” This is definitely something I’m trying to keep in mind while undertaking this Design & Policy project. There can be a tricky balance between wanting to apply these fancy-sounding design methods to a problem and simply going where you are most needed at that moment. For my project, we have a ton of ideas for deliverables at the end of the semester and are working to create that balance. Ideally (and with more time), we would design and implement a system for creating an environment of fiscal responsibility within Pittsburgh and Allegheny County as a whole. In reality, Bank On Greater Pittsburgh’s funding will run out next year and they need to show impact to apply for more grants.

I loved Ms. Meixell’s enthusiasm for data, transparency, and technological advances within government organizations. I hope to get involved with a Code for America volunteer brigade once I’ve settled in to life after grad school. But on the flip side of that, I’m enjoying this class because it demonstrates that not all problems will be solved via technology; policy and social research design are also valuable. As an HCI student, I’m a bit unusual in that I am neither an early adopter of new technology nor an advocate for creating an app for everything. I think it’s so cool how much information you can glean from simple, hands-on activities as demonstrated through the Fitwits process. Hackathons are all the rage these days, but as Prof. Zak mentioned in class, students participating in social impact hackathons can be especially out of touch. For a prompt relating to decreasing the pressure on homeless shelters during the winter months, not a single team he judged talked to a homeless person.

My group is trying to take this advice to heart and we are reaching out to those who are unbanked. Just today we went to a workshop put on by Bank on Greater Pittsburgh at the Allegheny Community College. These students may be able to start an account, but not willing or vice versa. We are trying to dive into finding more of the unbanked population, why they might use alternative financial institutions (http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2008/04/16-low-income-blank), or why they might not trust traditional banking. We started simply by driving around various neighborhoods and observing where alternative financial institutions are located. (Note to self: take more pictures!) But we were nervous to talk to people about such a sensitive topic as money. In the lectures since that day, I’ve been inspired to try some techniques that Bruce and Kristin have described. I think “Tell me a story when…” will be useful in gleaning information about someone’s past experience at a bank, both good and bad. I think especially in reaching out to the community college students, a hands-on activity or scenario game about making a budget could be fun to try.

My team has made a lot of progress in the past three weeks, particularly in terms of making the right contacts. Dr. Howard Slaughter, Jr. is a CMU alum who is heading up the Bank On Greater Pittsburgh initiative and he is willing to help in any way possible. He has done a tremendous job so far in creating that “network of champions,” particularly in recruiting local banks to help reach underserved populations. But he seems to value the potential impact we, as an objective third party, could have on the organization.

Is blight bad?

Blog entry 2

By Robyn Lambert (team 2)

It caught me off guard the other day when one of my teammates asked in one of our meetings “why is blight bad? Are we just assuming this is a problem? Or does it have negative impacts?” As a group, we had never talked about this in depth before. We had all defined that blight was bad. But we had never articulated it. I feel like as humans we often do that, we acknowledge a problem and never actually think deeply about it. As a group, having conversations like this has inspired us to start looking at blight in a different way.

Is blight bad? Yes. It there is correlation between crime rates and blight; it causes health issues in the community; and costs the city 20 million dollars a year. However, abandoned buildings are beautiful and all of them have a story. Kristin brought this up to our group and it really inspired us to think about blight differently. Why do we love the look of these old buildings? Is it the story behind them? Is there beauty of the forgotten or nostalgia? Is it potential? A blighted community is also a community that is primed for growth and change. I find some beauty in that. I have been thinking a lot lately about how when we first started approaching this project we were thinking there is some build solution to blight; I had problems believing and imagining that solution. I think that a solution is awareness of blight. The word “blight” is not one known or even talked about by the average person, how many people are aware this is a problem? Most college students I have discussed this with, don’t know what the word blight means. Many people know what gentrification is, why is that? I think the solution to blight may be telling the story of blight and communities affected by it. Tim had asked us on one of our first sessions, why is gentrification bad? Can it be good? I think as a group we have started to take that approach and run with it, we are looking at reframing and redefining what is blight.

As a design student, I have learned and practiced many research techniques. So far as a class we have received a lot of resources and lectures to help us better understand design processes. From personal experience, I have found that that most effective ways to research a problem is a more fluid process. At times I feel that more traditional techniques are hard for me to approach because at times they feel forced and contrived. In Kristin’s talk she mentioned how when she came to the School of Design they were impressed by the research methods she had developed. But for Kristin these seemed like natural and logical ways of looking at collecting interesting information. I think that like design (and I may be swayed because I am a designer) that research can be intuitive and use intuition to drive it.

Despite the amount of research we have been shown, I think the methods I connect with most are in fact the work of Candy Chang. Candy Chang is an artist who creates installations in public spaces. But these works of art provoke civic engagement and emotional introspection. They ask community members to use their voice. One project that is very inspiring is the ‘I wish this was’ project. She distributed stickers in a vacant space, and allowed community members to write on these stickers what they wish the space could be.

To help give us a jumping off point, our group has decided to try a method that is similar to that of Candy Changs. We have decided to create stickers of our own and distribute them in communities we have been looking at; hill district and Wilkinsburg. These stickers will read, “I wish I knew about this building” and will be posted around some interesting blighted buildings in the ares. From here I expect our group to make a calendar and plan about what other research methods we would like to approach.

Blog Post 2 – Max Brown Team 6

While working on this next phase of the project, I felt that my training as a designer was invaluable to our process. In the past few weeks we have focused on our research and gathering as much information about food in Pittsburgh as possible. Only recently, we have worked toward the goal to define and solve a specific problem. We didn’t want to define a problem before we did proper research as we knew that if we worked that way we might have too start over if our research pointed us in one way that we had not foreseen.

I see this process as a funnel getting more and more specific as we go through it and allowing our information to lead our design. When working towards a solution, we started with discussing our research and listing all the problems and key players in the food space. This allowed us to narrow down our research into the relevant pieces and allowed us to remove the extraneous portions. Additionally after narrowing down our research we listed possible solutions for those problems keeping in mind the key players. We then clustered the key players, problems and solutions to see firstly where the most problems are but also where the most interesting connections occurred.

The class sessions with the various guest speakers were good for me to understand the context of some of the initiatives in Pittsburgh but also what kind of resources are out there for policy and design to work collaboratively. Moving forward, I am most excited for the next phase of the class where we will get really into the making of our project and I really hope that we will have enough time to implement and test our solution.

Engineer/Immigrant Immigration: Tessa Roscoe Team 1

Our team has focused on developing a service that trains immigrants in general construction skills through a weekend education program. Our hopes are that this will provide immigrants with usable skills allowing them access to a new employment sector, and also give them a means to being successfully integrated into their new communities and establish a sense of ownership in the neighborhoods where they live, work and train.

However, while our team has been focusing directly on the challenge of integrating immigrants into new communities, I feel our group has worked indirectly to integrate me into the “design thinking” world. My teammates have been very supportive and informative, (especially when I ask questions like, “What is that?” or “Why are we doing it this way?”), and I am learning a lot just from following in their lead in our project management and design thinking. I hope to learn more about policy research and evaluation in the coming weeks from my other group members!

Interestingly, I have found a lot of similarities between approaches to design, idea generation and project management between design and engineering, and it seems both groups have very similar end goals as well- to innovate a solution using their expertise that solves a problem for their client. But the vocabulary and lens of examination differs. For example, I have found the phasing concept of “exploratory, generative and evaluative” to be very useful in structuring our team research process, and bears striking similarities to a concept I am more familiar with, stage-gating.  Both of these systems break projects down into task modules and a combination of benchmarks and checkpoints to help gauge progress and likely hood for success. However, within stage-gating, typically the technology and innovation itself drives progress, monitored and facilitated by the engineering and marketing departments in tandem. However the “EGE” process I’ve learned in this course focuses much more on external feedback, namely from users and stakeholders, throughout all levels and stages of the development process.

I think stage-gating could benefit a lot from bringing in stakeholder evaluations at each gate, which are usually not brought in until the last phases of commercialization. Typically this is because the innovation or solution at hand involves some degree of technical uncertainty and the technology has to brought to full fruition before applications and real value can begin to be crafted out of it. However, I would imagine this would be a useful feedback loop to have even in these early stages of R&D as it would tell technologists what technologies to focus on and which technologies potentially are a waste of time or are not desired by consumers. Moreover, some consumers or stakeholders who are more technically educated or analytically minded may be able to provide valuable insight into capabilities, applications and new avenues for development that may lead to greater value generation later on.

Learning about Abandoned Buildings

by Eleni Katrini [team 02]

 

[seen in Wilkinsburg Borough]

Thoughts on the Project | After talking to a couple of local people who work in the area of blight and vacant, we have identified that there is currently significant work being done around vacant properties, with little focus on abandoned, blighted building structures. However, abandoned buildings in a bad condition can significantly affect a neighborhood’s well being, even more than vacant properties do.  Based on the broken-window theory, if one window of a building is broken and is left unrepaired for a long period of time, then all the windows of the area will eventually be broken.[1] One broken window basically shows that the neighborhood is tolerant to neglect and very few residents care, so basically that drives people to neglect the neighborhood even more, not use the streets as much as they would and finally create an environment that is more tolerant not only to neglect but crime too. The broken-window theory is based on a self-reinforcing event that leads declining in population neighborhoods to become higher crime hubs in the city.

[seen in Hill District]

There seems to be a rich selection of resources and toolkits on how to approach the issue of both vacant lots and abandoned
properties that can be defined as blight. There is policy in place both for blight prevention, as well as acquisition, reuse and redevelopment. However, these incentives are complicated and are mostly addressed to the people who have either the capital or time to invest. It seems to me, at least with as much as I have read up till now, that those policies and incentives are not addressing the people who have been more affected by the decline of their neighborhood, the community itself. There seems to be some kind of disconnect between the higher level policies and the community on the ground. I believe that there is an emerging need to educate and inform the residents themselves and also create some kind of program that will give value to these abandoned buildings, without necessarily “redeveloping” them.

[seen in Wilkinsburg Borough]

For example, in Philadelphia, they are working on a research program of remediating the facades of abandoned buildings and see what the benefits to the neighborhood have been by such practices.[2] In Pittsburgh there is a URA program for Façade Improvement. The question is how could be used in a viable way for abandoned properties and who pays for it? Also a very important factor to be considered is how such practices can be tied with community programs that highlight the value of those buildings; an abandoned building tour, a storytelling installation describing the building’s rich history etc.

The Museum of London used a simple application called the “Streets of London now…and then” to showcase using old photos how the streets of London used to be, as they did not have money to set up a special space to showcase their old photographs.[3] Could we use augmented reality like this through the use of smart phones to showcase the value and history of abandoned buildings? Could that become a generator of care and human investment in the community, instead of neglect? What would be the things that people would like to know about abandoned buildings?

[seen in Bedford Dwellings]

Thoughts on the Course | I believe that Bruce’s lecture yesterday was really helpful in exploring all together the methods and was that someone can engage and interact with people and get feedback. Even though information about such practices is available out there, it was packaged very well together. Having a more amateur approach in design methods, seeing it presented in a cohesive way was great and something I was missing up till this point in the course. Also Kristin’s presentation about fitwits was helpful to give an idea of how a project starts and builds on over time. What I would like to see is examples of projects that started like this and managed in some way to eventually change policy.

 

 

[1] “Broken Windows” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
[http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_atlantic_monthly-broken_windows.pdf]

[2] Urban Health Lab Research Projects
[http://www.urbanhealthlab.org/projects.html]

[3] Streets of London now… and then
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2567739/Streetmuseum-app-creates-hybrid-images-London.html]