seniorStudio

This is a collection of multiple thoughts that may or may not have a relationship to each other:

Class One 8.28.17

Communicate, discuss, and bargain to change a person’s mind. Convincing someone in power to act is enough to make them act, but what does the person in power value?

The term foresight was used during the first class, and many fields apply their disciplines to achieve foresight. Engineers use strength testing to achieve foresight about material lifespan. Athletes use training and drills to achieve foresight about an upcoming event.

Designers are good at coming up with alternative solutions, and those alternatives often are discarded before any metric can be taken. On the other hand, the medium of non-physical, momentary (digital) design can be iterated and and tested near-instantaneously. Once tests are analyzed, the iteration that produced desirable attributes can be broadly implemented. Follow up studies can be done just as quickly; and the design can be changed to also produce a desirable result from other demographics.

I agree with the statement that many problem solvers do not place their problems in the context of an entire system. That lack of context buds many new issues that were previously unthought about. This raises a question, to what extent does that lack of context stem from mis-collaboration (or miscommunication), blatant disregard for the thoughts of other disciplines, or even a potentially unsolvable issue: people cannot mentally consider an entire system when making a decision.

One more thought: it is a contradiction of Transition Design to pause, reflect, take time, and establish context while also trying to quickly “jumpstart this methodology” (paraphrased from the first lecture). How is the theory of Transition Design different from other theories that also say it’s necessary to quickly take an action?

I am excited to continue asking questions for this class.

Class Two 8.30.17

We were introduced to the topics of study for the semester: wicked problems in the scope of Pittsburgh.

We also had a pop quiz of Pittsburgh trivia. The questions revolved around pop culture of Pittsburgh and the wicked problem-based topics we will face in this class. The most surprising realization from the quiz was the amount of times that my group was guessing answers. The guessing came from three areas: 1. knowing nothing about the question, 2. not knowing specifics of the question (despite being very familiar with the subject), and 3…..we assumed the worst answer (without knowing much about the subject).

An intuitive response I have is that lack of affordable housing is a stem of many other wicked problems. My mom always told me a stable household is the key to a successful generation. Whether this is true or not, it is a bias I have.

Class Three 9.6.17

We need to understand the problems around Affordable Housing in a context. This week, each person in my group researched the system around Affordable housing, and wrote digital post-it notes about those issues (shown below).

Early on, I recognized a market issue on the supply side of Affordable housing. There is no Affordable Housing market, only a housing market, which some developers or landlords choose to use their housing units as governmentally recognized “affordable homes.” There is little funding for subsidies to create new affordable homes, and all housing units are held to the same building standards. This dynamic does not incentivize any housing developer to make inexpensive houses.

Additionally, the application process, from a low-income perspective, is convoluted, and has a long waitlist period. This passively discourages users from enrolling in the system.

Class Five 9.13.17

I went into week three with more of an understanding of my groups wicked problem, affordable housing. For Monday, we brainstormed problems and sub-problems that have to do with all citizens of Pittsburgh being able to access a house to call their own. Not everyone can; a lot of people don’t have this necessity.

There are governmental problems that don’t allow ease of access to affordable homes. Governmental issues will be discussed at a later time in this blog.

Many problems feed this larger problem, but basically there is little-to-no incentive for private corporations to build housing for low income families. The main (and only) incentive I’ve found for private companies to build affordable housing is to receive subsidization from the government. One unlisted factor is the feeling of doing good (but let’s ignore that because it means next to nothing in the marketplace). Developers are held to similar standards as they would be for normal construction, but they can only charge so much for a housing unit; so why would anyone build for low-income???

Today in class, we looked at stakeholders in the situation. We learned the the triad technique. Connect three stakeholders, list their interests and their fears, then try to find commonalities or tensions between all three. One professor talked about our method for creating the triad diagrams. The diagrams allowed us to compare traits and feelings held by each group. Our assignment for the weekend is to research the part of one stakeholder and write a skit acting as them.

Class Six 9.18.17

Today each pair presented their skits. A hard 1-minute timer was enforced, which caused me to rush to make some points (topics were left out). We were surprised by a 2-minute improv piece where all stakeholders pushed to explain their views. To me, this was the most important part of the exercise, because it gave me a chance to step back from the planned skit and respond to questions/proposals other stakeholders expressed.

During our debriefing conversation, classmates began discussing their discomfort with the exercise. I agree to an extent that our skits were silly and did not totally accurately reflect the views of the stakeholders we represented. To me, the exercise represented another way to think about the issues; a time to briefly suspend negative judgement about ourselves to think about the characteristics, stereotypes, or accurate traits we represented. I believe the majority of the class is taking the project seriously, and the mindset of silliness can lead to some types of thinking that cannot be obtained through the lens of seriousness. The experiences during this skit do not mean we must continue to be silly for the rest of the project, but we can step back (as we did today) and realize that silliness.

Haiku about the future community:
Some veggies still grow
Natural genetics change
They are still consumed

Haiku about my future life:
My teenager’s school
explains fiberous knowledge
endorphins will flow

When writing the haikus, I wanted to keep them void of utopia or distopia. Although these stories could exist now (or even in the past), I tried to keep the wording open to allow flexible reasoning for each of the events. For example, “some veggies still grow” has a loose suggestion that there could be other forms of vegetable creation or that only a percentage of current veggies growing now will be growing in the future. Is it a cop out to allow the reader to interpret that much of the meaning of the haiku?

Blur of Thoughts from Previous Post to 10.23.17

(STEEP Forces)
Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, & Political forces are the main set of strings that can be pulled to influence or define any situation.

Understanding the driving forces behind a situation leads to a fuller understanding of the system.

Social forces are the fabric of innovation. It is the pulls and values of all the people in the social system that create the critical mass of ideas and power.

Technology allows for new ideas to be created through the increase of communication, and the ease of doing harder stuff.

Economic drivers allow funding for change, and it is often a barrier for ideas to be implemented. With alternative mindsets, this economic barriers may no longer be an issue.

Environmental factors are often unknown or unthought of in decision making. Governmental regulations are typically the main cause of agencies considering the environment.

Political forces currently make many decisions and regulations based on the politicians’ value systems.

In terms of our project, wicked housing problems in Pittsburgh, enormous social, economic, and political forces pull the system in a wicked direction. It’s sad to see the lack of supply of affordable housing, but massive demand. The economic pressure caused by a lack of supply of affordable housing causes problems for systems within the other forces.

(Alternative Futures, continued)
Any event can be considered as a reorganization (often an exchange) of value.

Although history exists as a one dimensional trail of events, each event that does happen has many alternative outcomes that do not happen. Until the event unfolds, the outcome is not determined. The further in the future an event will potentially occur, more alternative events may take place. Additionally, far future events have a larger spectrum of potential outcomes than near-future events.

The Possible Futures Cone is a model to help visualize paths for events to unfold.

An event’s effect on other systems can be delayed, and the event often does not reveal negative (or positive) value exchanges until after many other value exchanges. Systems (and people within systems) exchange value with one another (see Max-Neef’s Post below).

People are capable of exchanging value among each other or the natural world, and people make value exchanges based on their conception of surrounding systems. If people make exchanges of value based on information that does not reflect the full system (which they do), it can provide a dangerous outcome. At a small scale, this usually does not have massive consequences, but if a large system (with many sub-systems) is affected without a full understanding, the dependent systems can be thrown out of balance. This is a root cause of wicked problems: exchanges of value without a complete understanding of the system. Testing, hypothesizing, and especially interpreting feedback from a system can inform a hypothesis for sustainable futures.

In class, the housing group was assigned to generate alternative futures scenarios for a growth society. The scenario our group decided is a lifestyle where tech companies take responsibility for the environmental and social damage they cause to provide inexpensive housing for the city. The residents, in exchange for living in the houses, would provide the companies with rich data 24/7. The companies are willing to invest so much because the rich data provides a lot of insight they can use to make money in other global markets.

It is difficult to quantize bartered value exchanges, and the majority of value exchanges in experiences are bartered.

(Manfred Max Neef’s Genuine Needs-centered post)

A person’s values can satisfy that person’s needs. Many people have conflicting values. Some of those people are more dominant over other people, and can forcefully-trade values with sub-dominant or subordinate systems.

Decoupling the needs of a person and the means by which that person satisfies each universal need allows a logical touchpoint of two value-based sub-systems. Unless the two systems share an equilibrium of a value within a mutual, mega-system, one system exists as a dominance over the other system. A larger system can promote, support, or destabilize the relationship between two sub-systems. Because it is currently impossible to fully realize an entire system, each sub or mega system will be mainly referred to as a system.

There is an additional statement in Max-Neef’s theory that satisfaction of those needs leads to a equilibrium of value between notes in the system. Often, with an experience, this satisfaction leads to emotions of happiness, productivity, rewarding, and ultimately an increase of value in a specific category. People usually trade their capital in a particular need for satisfaction of another need.

Needs
- subsistence
- protection
- affection
- understanding
- participation
- idleness
- curation
- identity
- freedom

Dominant systems can force the movement of value between system. Naturally, there is some resistance of the value flow. People do activities, consume lived moments. These experiences are the moments of transfer of value.

Wicked problems, like a lack of affordable housing in Pittsburgh, allow a dominant system to force many people to give up their satisfaction of Identity, Protection, Subsistence, and Freedom (as well as many others needs). Each need is affected by a wicked problem, and the subdominant system concedes satisfaction. Among other outcomes, needs can be satisfied, denied, or pseudo-satisfied. The dominant system often coerces other systems to trade a legitimate satisfier for a pseudo-satisfier in the interest of monetary gain or pleasurable experiences.

Class Eleven 10.9.17

(Introduction to Service Design with Molly Steenson)

In class today, Molly gave us a lecture about the levels of design with service design, shared examples with us, and as groups, we exercised our service design skills. It was good to see the how the different systems within service design interact to create a users (and employees) experience. I still view service design through the lens of interaction design because I feel that the interactions of guests within the system needs to be designed (or at least allow for positive serendipity).

For the exercise, our group had to design a music sharing service. The service we designed is a platform for a person to hear the music from strangers around them. The complexities of designing a system to share music involved so many stakeholders and caveats about situations. It was fun to describe these using diagrammatic frameworks.

Class Sixteen & Seventeen 10.23.17 and 10.25.17

Our class started the week by developing interventions for aspects within out wicked problem. During this week, we (more explicitly) discussed our intervention ideas with people in other wicked problem groups. The conversations were not only helpful, but interesting. As the conversations grew, the people who I were talking with began integrating our understandings of the problem spaces. It was interesting that initially our intervention ideas did not align, but through talking, we discovered hidden aspects of the system to intervene and tie all of our understandings together.

Class Eighteen & Nineteen 11.1.17 and 11.3.17

This week, as a group, we set a project focus outcome. Each person in our group is arriving at our problem space from a different perspective,
Air Quality, Food, House, Transportation. In order to have a clear decision on the larger problem’s context, we used the first exercise on Monday to ideate the future and unfolded desires our project will have. Once the framework was determined, and we received feedback from Stuart Candy, we narrowed done our topic to a specific use case (I will talk about that later).

In the world currently, our group sees a broken link between social groups in neighborhoods, and food pantry usage. More specifically, we realized one major problem is a lack of easy transportation from a neighborhood to the food pantry. Because of this (and other systemic factors are not aligned), there is a lot of food and gas waste caused by redistributing food. Our group is viewing the transportation of food as a systemic problem because it affects air quality (based on energy waste) and it affects the IRL (in real life) social network of LIR (low income residents). Ultimately, our intervention will help relieve pressure at the edge of parity and social stigma against saving food. We want to connect low-income neighbors to high income (this could be people or businesses) neighbors, to share food that will go unused.

Every day on my way to crew practice, when I pass through Bloomfield (Pittsburgh’s Little Italy), I see a bus stop advertisement that says “not using a single egg wastes 55 gallons of water.”

I’m excited about my team for this project. I have not worked with any of these members much in my four years here. Last semester, I worked with Ji Tae on a 1-week project, and had a lot of fun discussing ideas with him. My experience in this class is similar.

On the Wednesday class, I took a leadership position for the day to help us narrow our broad-scale ideas. I proposed an idea and made us follow through: we collaboratively write a scenario about a low-income resident and a family. The story is set in the near-future. After writing the narrative, we went through each line to generative possible interventions (or to write questions) related to our broad scale image. It was a good feeling to propose a useful idea when my team was stuck.

Also this week, Stuart and I met outside of class to discuss the Futures Cone. During our meeting we talked about various ways to use crosshair cartesian graphs to dissect a complex relationship. He showed me examples of the crosshairs in use with the cone. We also discussed knowledge/information organization.

November 13

Going into the speed-dating style critique, our group had a sort of cohesive pivot (we have not determined a final direction to take our design). Currently our main intervention is centered around collecting raising awareness through bus stops. Interventions will placed near stops that service low-income residents who are traveling to the food bank. The intervention prompt the community members to speak about issues with traveling to the pantries. Our assumption is that residents who are actively in the process of going to the food pantry will have concerns (or praises) on the top of their mind.

Our installation will prompt community members to record a response to a particular question. That data will be processed and outputted in two forms: visualization and library that governmental representatives can access, and some select stories could be chosen to use as a public awareness campaign.

Critiques from other people were focused around the consolidation of interventions, and I agree. Our group is split on intervention, but it doesn’t seem like it is because we want something different. Other critique that was really helpful was thinking about the privacy of the individuals in the community. We hope ultimately, multiple people at the bus stop would start having conversations together, but we dont want the conversations to be negatively impacted by the presence of a group.

As a group, we need to think about a single stakeholder. We also need to think about the economic impact of the proposed intervention, and the hardest: how can we create a positive feedback look for people to engage with this booth. To accomplish this, the users need to feel satisfaction initially after their response, and a couple days or even months, so they can be kept in the loop about how sharing their story will affect others.

November 15

Today was a productive day for clarifying the group’s ideas. First thing during class, we talked with Stacie about our contemporary idea, and she proposed the questions:

• Can we measure effectiveness of community engagement w/intervention?
• Impact on the policymakers?
• What do people need to initially participate?
• Do soundbites differ from current methods of community engagement?
• Are soundbites more effective than current methods?

There were more questions, which I will address below, but I am going to talk about these questions first. Our main goal with this intervention is to capture the aggravations, concerns, and praises of community members while they are in the environment when those thoughts occur.

Lawmakers exhibit arguments within a decision-making board room to other committee members.

The intervention takes the form of a semi-private phone booth that is planted into a public space. People may visit with the phone booth and share their experiences that revolve around a particular question. The phone booth will ring to draw a passer’s attention; if the person does not want to interact with phone call, they may gesturally acknowledge the phone system and the system will understand to discontinue to draw attention. It is important to allow users to opt-out of a marketed intervention. Conversely, we hope to instill a sense of helpfulness through engaging in the intervention.

People have conversations about dislikes and appreciations of their current situation. Soundbites will be a good source of input because much natural language data can be extracted and analyzed. The conversations can be processed, then aggregated statistics in other, more quickly expressed to lawmakers and others in the power to make decisions. Decision makers are able to listen and scan through specific questions for support or to understand impact of decisions. When a bill is first being introduced, questions, prompts, or information about the idea can be posted publicly at these phones.

It is necessary for those discussions, ideas, and debates to be shared.

Between Time

At one point during, the semester, my intervention was an interface for policymakers to organize and sort crowdsourced data. The assumption is that if the voices (and many voices) of citizens could be transported into a decision-making room, the individual and aggregated data could be used to influence policy. This interface allows people to categorize, save, compare, and build arguments for crowdsourced data.

December 2

Right now I am building a shopping basket and checkout counter with punch card display options.

December 8 Final

The final piece I designed for the show was a magnetic survey to understand the buying habits of convenience store patrons. At the end, our team came together to finalize our individual projects as a group. The last week, we had fun discussing the projects and updates with each other, but I was disappointed to only have started making stuff with a few weeks left in the semester. When we started making, my output did not resemble the final piece at all. I wish the group decided on a direction for the project earlier, and we iterated within a specified scope. Instead, we changed our idea up until close to the end. I did not feel that I had time to iterate enough on the final to make it well executed.