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.
Design and Policy 