Blog Post 3 – Chris Taschner Group 3

There are a number of problems that are associated with energy in our world. Coal-fired power plants are the most prevalent method of generating energy, and the most dirty. They cause far reaching damage to our environment. There are a number of different approaches to reducing that damage. These include changes at the power generation point and also at the consumption point. Energy consumers typically do not consume power in an efficient manner. There are a number of reasons for this. Old technology, lack of knowledge, and lack of motivation are all parts of the problem.

Energy benchmarking attempts to help reduce the amount of coal that is being burned for the generation of electricity by informing electric customers. Customers don’t tend to understand how much they are consuming or what the numbers mean when they do see how much they are consuming. Benchmarking gives customers a reference point in the form of all of the other customers’ numbers. The hope is that this will solve the lack of knowledge and lack of motivation issues.

However, there is a problem with benchmarking in Pittsburgh. As the 2030 initiative attempts to sign up more and more buildings in the Downtown and Oakland districts issues with multi-residential buildings have arisen. In order for a building like an apartment building to sign up for benchmarking every tenant in the building must sign a waiver allowing the benchmarking to take place. This requires going door-to-door to gather signatures, a tedious process that can require significant time. In addition there is often little understanding of how the tenant will benefit and how the building owner will benefit.

This problem space is where our group is attempting to provide a solution. By providing educational materials and a quick stop web app for gathering signatures we hope to help ease the burden of collection. In addition we are providing a number of options for the building owner for how to motivate tenants. This includes requiring the permission at lease signing or renewal, offering discounts on rent for the whole building when everyone signs, and offering cash or prizes when everyone signs up.

There is another big problem that benchmarking does not address. This is the price of energy. Currently energy is far too cheap for it make sense to most people to upgrade their old technology. Unfortunately there currently isn’t a clear path to resolution here. The new energy efficient technology is still too expensive, taxes on energy are massively unpopular, and subsidies are few and far between. This seems to be a problem that is not ready to be solved at this time.

Blog #3 – Ida Shiang CONTEXT FOR SYSTEM FAILURE

The societal problem area my team first began exploring was food insecurity.  we identified food access barriers (geographic, financial, behavioral, low awareness of how to cook, shop, and eat healthy).  Not only were we passionate about expanding food access, but doing it in such a way that empowered individuals and fostered community ties.  That’s fundamentally why i’m interested in food issues–besides the fact that I’m a total oinker and love eating, what drives me to better understand the food system is food’s ability to commune disparate groups of people.

Community gardening is not only a way for local residents to take ownership of their food system but also provides a platform for people to organize and advance positive social change.  That’s why our group chose to go down this avenue of expanding food access. A few things could get in the way–we could focus too broadly on community gardening rather than really tackle specific policy issues,  which could dilute the impact of our idea.

Community gardens and gardeners are also by nature  pretty decentralized and hyper local.  While this is great to build grassroots community, it is a barrier when you are looking to connect people on higher level policy issues or crowd source information about managing a community garden and trouble shooting. The social aspect–finding ways to bring gardeners together, not just on policy or advocacy issues but general gardening advice–has been a challenge.  Our team still questions if it’s even necessary for our site or if these social media interactions should be left to happen on facebook and twitter.

It’s also difficult to determine what part of the community garden continuum we are tackling.  Many of the resources on the site are about starting a community garden, but I think the real problem is how to maintain and expand existing ones.  How to stem gardener/member fatigue, sustain the needed maintenance of a garden when by nature, a garden depends on volunteers and sponsors/grants instead of a steady revenue/profit-generating model, remain real barriers that we don’t have the solutions to.

Blog Entry 3: What’s Really Going On?

My team started out with the intent of alleviating some aspect of the food desert problem in Pittsburgh. We zeroed in on the Garfield neighborhood, identified as a food desert by the Just Harvest organization. As part of our process we interviewed a variety of for-profit food businesses, non-profit organizations and end users. We found that food deserts are complicated places. The situation on the ground just wasn’t as simple as finding a way to bring healthy food to a neighborhood that does not have enough of it. In an urban environment such as Garfield, alleviating food desert status required us to think of multiple dimensions simultaneously – accessibility, affordability, and awareness.

 

After conducting weeks of research, we started to get the sneaking suspicion that lack of accessibility, the key dimension associated with food desert status, was perhaps the least impactful culprit. After all, the neighborhood is just a ten-minute drive from popular grocery stores such as Giant Eagle, Trader Joe’s, and even the “clean food” branded East End Co-Op. For those residents who don’t drive, multiple bus lines run down Penn Avenue at all hours of the day. In fact, Garfield just got its first local grocery chain store on Penn Avenue. Bottom Dollar focuses on beating competitor’s prices but it also offers a wide selection of fresh produce and healthy foods, along with the usual processed, sugary varieties. We hung around Bottom Dollar’s parking lot and spoke with customers. Many of the customers drove to Bottom Dollar from other neighborhood. Most of them described personal grocery carts heavy on meats and processed foods.

 

We were left with tackling affordability and awareness and found that they are inextricably linked. The degree to which you value healthy food is directly linked to how much money you are willing to spend on it. And the problem seems to be that part of the population affected by food desserts does not always value healthy food (due to lack of awareness and entrenched habits) and is not willing to financially prioritize it over other lifestyle alternatives. That is not to say that healthy food is not genuinely expensive to many, but that it’s more complicated than a simple cost equation. Rather, it’s a series of small and big tradeoffs that are highly influenced by the decision maker’s mindset.

 

We decided to focus on community gardens because they tackle all of the dimensions necessary to understanding urban food deserts but also because it is pretty much impossible to grow unhealthy food options in a garden. Every successful garden, especially ones coupled with educational programs targeting affected demographics, opens up an opportunity for members to connect with food, eat healthier and develop healthier habits. Bottom Dollar is not quite doing that yet.

 

Anna Belak

One-sided Consideration Compounds Immigrant Struggles- Tessa Roscoe, Team #1

Although it has taken us a majority of the semester to do so, our group has finally narrowed down our client focus to the Bhutanese immigrant population residing in Carric, Pittsburgh. We’ve discovered that their biggest challenge in acclimating to life in Pittsburgh is navigating to the doctor’s office, given that this population tends to have no English language skills, cars, smartphones, or credit cards. Upon arrival, these immigrants are taken under direction of the Jewish Family & Children’s Service (JFCS) organization, as refugee resettlement is one of their main missions. The JFCS is, for obvious reasons, located in Squirrel Hill, and they have found a residential neighborhood in Carric for Bhutanese immigrant resettlement. Thus when, immigrants arrive, they undergo their orientation practices in Squirrel Hill (such as medical physical exams, tax or employment document completion, etc) before being moved into their new homes in Carric. Thus the cause of the problem our team hopes to address- immigrants must continue to return to Squirrel Hill for all medical or professional services. Navigating from Carric to Squirrel Hill via the public transport system is incredibly taxing and often is prohibitive to immigrants hoping to make it to appointments. Our team has crafted several simple solutions to help the immigrants solve this problem under their own accord, but really this is merely a band-aid on a larger systemic problem. The JFCS is continuing to provide their service in the way that it is most easily deliverable for them, instead of in the way that is most easily accessible by their clients. The ideal solution here would be to get the JFCS to retool their practices to take place in Carric with the services most closely located to the immigrants themselves. However we recognize that this is a change that would require extensive reallocation of staff and funding, as well as potential modifications to existing tax, zoning, or other policies, and would most likely require several months to a year to complete. The longer the perpetuation of this scenario, the longer the problem we address persists. In the meantime, Bhutanese immigrants will still need to get to the doctor’s office, still necessitating our solution.

During our midterm review, Prof Zak raised a good point about technology, in that especially with its rapid development over the next 5-10 years, translation software will most likely solve a lot of the problems that we are attempting to address with language and navigation in our project. However, this fails to take into account the real-world challenges of technology adoption and accuracy of translation with non-romance languages. While certainly translation software has made great strides in recent years, it is still a long way off from being able to accurately translate Class 4 languages and above (per CIA language security classifications). Furthermore, there are over 19 language spoken in Bhutan, reflecting regional and ethnic dialects, making specialized translation even more challenging. Moreover, the Bhutanese language is facing considerable danger of dying out. The technology may not ever be developed for Bhutanese translation as the user market, ever shrinking, may not prove profitable enough to offset the R&D costs. Lastly, we find that the immigrants in most need of our solution are elderly immigrants, who may lack strong hearing, sight or motor skills required to operate a translation device. Thus we feel that while technology may or may not provide better solutions in the future, our client has a distinct need for a solution now, and our simple products should be able to fill this niche role and ease the problems experienced by one of Pittsburgh’s fastest growing populations.

Team #1 Midterm Review Presentation

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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: 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

 

 

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.

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]