Designing Systems Process
3/29
Today we were introduced to the new project and assigned groups and topics. Lucy Yifan Yu, Faith Kaufman, and I are designing a system to “create/maintain effective life/work balance.” While this was a goal that each of us had personally expressed, I think its relevant for the entire Carnegie Mellon community.
In my own experience, I’ve often found that I allow work to take up most of my time because it’s easier than worrying about relationships and social life, especially when those aspects of my life aren’t going well. Work is a distraction; it’s something to control, something to perfect. However, constantly working and overexerting myself caused me a great deal of stress and a lack of fulfillment. I realized last semester that I needed those other aspects of my life to be well-rounded and happy. If I cut back on work, my relationships and mental wellbeing would improve. So, I’ve made some changes this semester; I’ve been more successful in balancing work in life, due to the fact that I’m taking fewer courses, allowing myself to be imperfect, and spending lots of time away from campus with people I care about.
I definitely think that more students at CMU need to strike a balance with work and life, too. CMU, like many elite schools, is known for its stress culture — all-nighters become badges of honor, skipping meals because you’re too busy is cool, and kids who go out more than once a week are considered party animals compared to the rest of us (shouldn’t you be at a hackathon?). We all make jokes about the Computer Science kids who never shower, or the kids who are always asleep in lecture because they’ve been up all night. Concerning behaviors become the norm, and if you’re actually taking care of yourself, you’re seen as a slacker in comparison to your peers. It’s a culture where we’re all trying to outdo each other and be the best, but in the end, no one really wins. Sure, your grades may be good, but at what cost? How much has your mental health deteriorated? Your friendships? Your spirituality and creativity?
I had the following realization this year: In high school, you’re told to work hard and get good grades so we can get into college. All the time and energy you sacrificed will be worth it when you get into your dream school. Then you get to college and you have to work hard and get good grades so that you can get a good job. All the time and energy you sacrificed will be worth it when you get hired by your dream company. Then you start your job and you have to work hard and get good performance reviews so that you can make money. All the time and energy you sacrificed will be worth it when you get a promotion… and so on and so on until you die. (dramatic, I know)
My point is, we do all this work to achieve these goals or milestones, but we’re never actually done. So if you sacrifice your life right now for the next stage in your life, you’ll end up missing everything. We have to live in the moment, appreciate where we are, and try not to stress about the future. That’s not to say we shouldn’t work at all, but we shouldn’t work at the expense of living.
Right after this project was assigned, I stumbled across the following article that had been written at CMU several years ago:
It discusses the rampant stress culture at CMU, and the lengths that students go to to hide the fact that they’re struggling. Students don’t know how to ask for help — they feel like they’re alone, because everyone else seems to be doing fine. Without help, tragic events occur like the death of Rohan Vakharia, who left the following suicide note when he jumped down a staircase in Wean Hall:
“If you’re feeling like a jerk
’cause your project just won’t work
go ahead and take the leap
then you’ll finally get some sleep.”
Stress culture is a horribly sad and horribly real thing.
(edit: I wrote this the day before two suicides occurred on campus)
And Counseling and Psychological Services (CaPS) has a reputation for being inept at helping students, offering few availabilities and simplistic advice to students who need more comprehensive care.
Mental health always carries a stigma with it, and it is difficult to reach out and admit you need help. When making appointments is difficult (the CaPS user experience is pretty awful), getting help becomes even harder.
Last semester I did my How People Work research project on improving the user experience for the CaPS appointment-making tool, so I’ve gathered lots of qualitative data about peoples’ experiences with it. With this new project, I’d rather not try to tackle CaPS again because it’s pretty entrenched in the structure of the university and its policies.
Instead, I think it would be good to address stress culture at the source, before students need CaPS. I think we can affect small changes in daily life — encouraging people to take breaks, take showers, and take a breath — that will promote balance at CMU.
4/3
This weekend my group and I met to do some affinity clustering and brainstorming on our topic based on the conversations we had with classmates last week.
Assumptions
We are assuming that stress culture at CMU prevents people from having a healthy work/life balance (because they focus too much on work). That imbalance causes unhappiness. If we can help to alleviate stress culture, students will become happier.
We are also assuming that we can’t and shouldn’t try to change CaPS — Many people feel that CaPS is a problem, and while it definitely can be improved, it is not something we feel like we should tackle. Rather, we want to work on the underlying problem that makes people need CaPS and other support services. By making small changes, we can affect the culture that drives people to unhealthy mental states, causing fewer people to need CaPS.
Constraints
Many people measure happiness by how much they’re achieving their goals. Goals and values are a very personal thing, and can be hard to change. Somehow we need to persuade people to shift their focus away from work and towards life a little more, but that will be difficult to do all at once.
Like I said before, it will be hard to change the formal/administrative support systems like CaPS because they’re already set in place. Instead, we can introduce smaller-scale, student-run support systems.
Audience
Our audience consists of CMU students, especially those under significant stress. We feel that certain majors promote an unhealthy balance of work and life more than others (i.e. some majors overwork themselves more than others), so we’ll be cognizant of that when we choose which areas to employ our message in (i.e. engineers or CS students might need it more than Dietrich students). Still, its a message that pretty much all students can benefit from, regardless of their school or major.
Context
We’d like to achieve some kind of element of surprise with our message — So, for example, if we’re making posters we wouldn’t want to put them where you would usually expect to see a poster. Likewise, we wouldn’t want it to come from an RA who usually distributes this kind of thing. We want to catch people off guard in a pleasant way. We get informed of so many events and clubs and initiatives that its easy to tune all of them out, but we really want our message to resonate with people. We also want it to be sincere and not forced. It shouldn’t seem like its coming from the administration, because many students don’t trust them.
As far as specific places go, we’d probably want to put our design solution in places where people study/work too much. So that would be the libraries, or Gates. It could also just be in random places around campus. We also want it to be online, so we have to brainstorm how to actually get people to go to a site or app.
Medium
We’ve been thinking about posters, definitely, or other less traditional print pieces (like little cards that we would put in books for people to find, or notes that look like they were accidentally dropped on the ground).
We like the idea of interactive activities as well — for example, in Hunt right now there are collaborative coloring pages up on the wall so that people can take a break from studying and destress. We talked about the fact that people don’t really know where they stand compared to others in terms of how stressed they are (because most people put forward their best self and hide the fact that they’re struggling) so we could have some kind of a chalkboard wall where people can honestly write down how they’re doing/feeling and feel less alone. We could do the same kind of thing and ask them questions about what makes them happy, as well.
For the digital component, we’re looking at something like MIT together, which provides support resources for students, including non-emergency resources like just reaching out to other students.
4/5
My group did a lot of thinking and narrowing down in class today, especially after Stacie said our scope was still too large. At this point, our idea was that we wanted to promote balance to CMU students so that they would become happier, with the assumption that they work too much, and think that 1. Working too much is normal 2. Everyone else has everything figured out. We wanted our solution to show them that other people struggle to find a balance too, but once they find it, its possible to be happier. We would do this by showing “student testimonials” or blog profiles that share people’s journeys with balance and happiness. Hopefully seeing these stories, and learning about outlets other than work, would encourage students to work on finding their own balance.
We realized, however, that our scope was still a bit too large. We tried to narrow it down more, and somehow it got even bigger — we wanted to encourage students to do things other than work, and frame that in terms of other passions they have. So, instead of “My heart is in the work,” we wanted students to define for themselves where their heart is, whether its extracurriculars, friendships, spirituality, etc. We realized this might still encourage work, though, because many people are passionate about the work they do, and that isn’t a bad thing. Encouraging people to pursue their passions is still a lot of pressure; we realized that we really just want to focus on really small things that people should do to get away from work, like taking showers or going for walks.
Finally, we reached a scope that we’re happy with: Habits of Happiness.
We want students to practice small habits that will help them achieve better mental and physical health — thus increasing happiness. Work is important and legitimate, and we don’t want to advocate completely dropping responsibilities to pursue fun aspects of life. Rather, we want to introduce small things that people can do to be more mindful, productive, and fulfilled.
A lot of people we interviewed expressed that they’re happiest when they’re reaching their goals, and those goals are often work-related. We think that its okay if work and life aren’t balanced 50/50 — “balance” is different for everyone, and for some people, “balance” involves considerably more work than life. It has less to do with a ratio, and more to do with one’s mindset and quality of being. You can be happy and still have time to work if you shift the way you look at things and take time for your wellbeing.
We also did an exercise today concerning mark-making and emotional tone. We individually came up with adjective to describe the tone of our message, then used drawings and color to visualize those adjectives.
My adjectives were the following:
Fun/playful, inspirational, balanced, sincere/trustworthy, down to earth, relatable, and light.
My drawings are mostly in the top-right of the photo. We all took slightly different approaches to this and had some different adjectives — the thing we most disagreed upon was whether we want the message to be calm/relaxing or fun/exciting. We did all use a lot of color, though, so that’s something that we’ll definitely go forward with.
4/8
In class on Thursday we talked a lot about creating a “visual vocabulary.” My class and I sat down and created different color palettes we might like to use, and we started creating some more fun patterns. We’ll use the patterns for the small collectable posters/inspiration cards.
We also figured out what we want our digital component to be — Instead of a blog, we’ll make an Instagram that has “happy challenges” — we’ll post a cute GIF that says “go take a walk!” or “go to a concert!” or “learn to cook something new!” and have people hashtag #habitsofhappy. We’ll go through the hashtags and repost people’s own pictures. It’s quicker and less formal than an actual blog post, which makes sense because all of these things are small actions that don’t really warrant a whole blog post. It also encourages people to participate because each challenge is small and manageable, and its easy to be featured.
4/9
We started prototyping what our inspirational cards could look like. I made these four to test out different patterns and fonts.
4/11
After working on some patterns, we realized we were kind of all over the place. We decided to all sit down with the same medium (watercolor) and color palette to create a consistent visual language.
Our colors were looking a little too pastel/girly, so we tried to up the saturation and make the pinks more red.
4/20
Over the weekend, we prepared a presentation on our concept to the class, and fleshed out our ideas a bit more with mockups. Here’s some of what we worked on:
The contents of our presentation:
stuff to think about from crits —
People are concerned that students won’t know that they should save our cards — how can we convey this? How can we convey that we want people to take them?
People also didn’t really like our spacial idea, because it’s similar to events that already happen on campus, and there doesn’t seem like there’s a huge incentive to go to those events. How can we make our events different? How can we encourage people to go to them?
Examples of events we can have that don’t already exist:
finger painting
kickball
freeze tag
giant collaborative tarp mural
four square
frisbee
pet puppies
yoga
thai chi
free lemonade
ice cream bar
jump rope
giant game of twister
puzzles
giant jenga
friendship bracelet making
karaoke
bubbles
water balloons
tug of war
tie dye
hula hoops
bubble wrap popping
s’mores in the Donner ditch
chalk drawing
“playfair” for upperclassmen
Notes from our meeting today:
Bring back “Find your own balance”
- Make it clear there’s no one way to be happy, its different for individuals
When are people working too hard?
- When mental health starts to deteriorate
- Missing out on important things
- Finding a loss of meaning in the things you do
Stressed out students as audience
- People who are feeling burnt out but realize importance of a good balance
- Want to make a change
It takes 6 weeks to form habit…How can people keep track of this?
- Create way of tracking progress
- Some way of visualization
People want to see “What’s your habit of happy?”
Quality is our way of making them not disposable
- HQ paper
- Gold foil
- Shiny paper — glossy?
- Scattered in classrooms
Make cards more lifestyle based
- Meditate for example.
- Different from events
Events
- Club like Project Smile, but HabitsofHappy being on the receiving end??
- Not as casual
- Giant collab tarp painting
- Iced tea
- ritas
Ours is dif from others bc smaller and more low key
- Allowing for casual participation
- Funded by school? Maybe student activities fee
- Bc cheap
- Activities board?
- RAs
Events on-campus
- Smaller in scale
- Easier for participation
Try both pluto and museo
- See which works more
Validation
- scientific research about the benefits of taking small breaks in terms of health and productivity
New Card Prototypes
Scale and Context Explorations
4/23
In class on Thursday, we realized that we needed to think outside the box a bit more, and brainstorm more laterally. We hadn’t really taken advantage of spacial affordances, and were focusing on our print piece more than the system as a whole.
Our cards had some issues, because the text and patterns were fighting each other for attention. We realized that maybe the rectangular pattern frame might not be the best, so we tried to think of other ways to incorporate patterns (see above). We also thought about how we could make it clear that you’re meant to collect them, by connecting them to make something larger — like pieces of a puzzle.
We also wondered if most people would actually pick something up, save it for later, and then display it… would people carry these cards around with them until they got home? We thought about making a card that’s meant to go in your wallet, or stay in a phone sleeve instead. If it’s stuck on your phone, you’d see the card all the time, and it would be easy to track your progress because most people always have their phones with them.
We tried to think of lots of different ideas of how we could integrate the events in space, and carry the visual language of the patterns with it. We thought about storing activity supplies in certain locations, like bookshelves or “lending libraries” like those birdhouses with books inside that exist in some cities. We could signify activity spaces with large floor stickers that had our pattern on them. (i.e., you see a large floor sticker in the UC with hula hoops on it — you know that its part of Habits of Happy and you can use them)
Tightening up Visual Language
We decided that one of the problems we were having had to do with our patterns — they were so textured and rich that they distracted from the message. They also weren’t quite the right tone — the cards we made looked like they might be wedding invitations, or something. They needed to be more casual and more gender-neutral. If we simplified the pattern, we would be better able to carry it across different mediums in a consistent way. So, we decided to stick with hexagons only — a strong, balanced shape whose geometry can inform our physical/spatial components.
At this point, we also had the idea of having bowls/placemats with different elements of our system for people to take — the sleeve, the cards, and the activity.
We decided to overlay color on the watercolor pattern I had created to make sure the colors had better consistency and were truer to the ones we wanted. We also created monochrome versions of the pattern for variety.
We started mocking up different ways we could integrate the hexagons into the print and digital pieces. We didn’t really want to do a shape on top of the pattern, because that had seemed to much like the content was being framed when we did that before — we don’t want to to create a very separate background and foreground, but we want the pattern to integrate with the text.
4/26
Cards
I spent a while creating the collectible cards. We decided to make 3 color combinations and invert them for six cards. The color and pattern makes it eye-catching, the catch pops out at you, and the validation supports the whole thing.
Crit from Stacie: the lighter colors weren’t working as well as the darker colors — the red and blue cards stand out because of their contrast and tone, while the cards with yellow, orange, and aqua backgrounds lack that boldness. If these cards were all in greyscale, they wouldn’t be consistent.
We’re going to try to remake the cards using only the darker tones in the background.
Placemats
We printed a close up version of the colorful pattern for the placemats. We really like how the hexagons can be configured in different ways depending on the space that they’re in — they can be in a line on a long table, or in a triangle on a round table. We also like how the colors are looking a lot. We’re planning on putting bowls on the placemats to hold our components, but for now we just have paper plates to visualize it.
Crit from Stacie: the plates might look a little bit like soccer balls? Also the placecards are too expected — we should try to do something more creative that possible integrates the type into the placemats/pattern. We could integrate the bowl more into the system, too. Stacie also noted that our pattern (especially at this scale) is looking a little too digital/inhuman. The color consistency that we tried to go for actually just makes it look less interesting. We thought too much texture would be distracting, but we’ll try to go back to it.
Stickers
Lucy made stickers! We didn’t talk about them much in the crit today, but we’ll probably change them now that we’re changing the pattern.
We also had a class crit today, and got the following feedback from our peers:
Good:
- “Color and system look good.”
- “I see the Instagram really working”
- “Placemats fun and usable”
- “Cards are appropriate, and the actions are good — all things that I need’
- “Visual design is A++”
- “Color palette works and is consistent”
- “I like the way the Instagram is multifunctional”
- “Good consistency”
- “Very consistent color palette”
- “Cute Instagram”
Bad/Things to Work On:
- Spacing on the stickers.
- Make the break activities more appealing. Some people not interested by bubbles, for example.
- Someone suggested have examples or suggestions on the back of cards. For example, “Read a Book” could have listings of book recommendations.
- The justification feels too scientific. For example, they didn’t know why they should care about justification. We should make it less esoteric and even more conversational.
- The Instagram needs to feel more specific to CMU. We can do this through event and time and taking our own photos.
- People were confused about the sleeve. We think that maybe having a sticker or packaging on the sleeve could help them realize they should put it on their phone. Steven talked to me later about the sequencing of “Take a Card” needing to be before “Take a Sleeve.” He also doesn’t like the wording of “sleeve,” finding it not evocative in the way that we want.
- The plates (even though they’re not what we will be using) confused people, making it feel like a buffet. Perhaps not having place cards will help get rid of this unintended meaning, as well.
- Someone noted that the hexagons feel scientific or like floor tiles. We’ll fix the floor tile thing by having more scattered little hexagons. But is the scientific thing bad?
- Make it clearer how to get to the Instagram. Maybe have “follow us on Instagram” somewhere on the cards?
- We need to convey that the location of the events is always changing. We can do this through tagging locations on the Event photos on the Instagram.
4/27
I created a new pattern to work with that had better colors, more consistent sizing, and more hexagons to work with. We’re going to use this one and keep the texture to keep it human.
Another benefit of this pattern is that we can use the edges of the shape for the hexagon clusters instead of cutting out hexagons digitally like we had done before. This will retain the imperfect edges and make it look more manmade.
I made these new cards which are pretty similar to the old ones, except the background colors have similar values. I’m also using the new textures.
Lucy made some backs for the cards (her color mode was off, so the colors look a little funky). We got feedback that suggestions would make people want to keep the cards more, so we think this is a good way to help people with their habits.
Bowl/Placemat progress
Faith started prototyping bowls that we could make that would integrate our visual language. The jagged one would be like the edges of our hexagon shapes. We decided it seemed a little scary, though, (would you want to put your hand in that?) so the cleaner version is probably a better bet.
We updated the placemat with the new pattern and tried text integration. we’re not sure how visible it’ll be with the bowl on top, though.
Instagram Progress
We thought it would be cool if the pattern spills out of the grid onto different patterns!
4/28
Critique from today:
- colored bowl? maybe add a white tablecloth?
- colored squares not working on the Instagram. “It feels cheap” :( NEED to fix this
- add organic feel/hexagons to squares on the Instagram
- hexagon also pulling it away. Take out the plain white hexagon from the Instagram.
- images don’t integrate on the Instagram
- Cards look better with the white background.
- integrate multi-colored hexagons into everything else — makes everything feel more organic.
- Colored cards not as fun — maybe add multicolored clusters?
- graphic element has richness and multiple colors. make sure this feels the same way throughout the system.
The main things we need to work on — trying multicolored patterns in the cards, integrating the bowl and placemat and improving the instagram.
Andrew gave us an interesting idea to actually combine the bowl with the placemat, like in this drawing. That way, everything feels connected and intentional.
4/30
Time to build the bowl!
I feel like these kind of look like fancy dog bowls, but I’m sure it’ll come together once we overlay the pattern and fill the bowls with out system components.
Cards
We decided to switch around tasks to get fresh eyes on things, so Lucy took over the cards from me. We changed the colored backs to white to improve legibility, and then used the multicolored pattern instead of spot color. They look cute!
Lucy also started mocking up new stickers to go on the activity goodies we got (crayons, kit kats, bubbles, and silly putty)
5/1
Faith did a lot of work on the instagram — we wanted to make the appearance of the challenge post more similar to the cards by integrating the hexagon pattern on them and keeping the same text styles.
After some printing issues, I was able to finish the bowls. Each side had to be individually printed and cut, so putting it together and aligning the hexagons was tricky. We also printed cards and stickers — It’s coming together!
I also made the plastic sleeves for the cards. Faith made an explanation card to put in it so people will know what to do with it.
We have all of our components ready!! Time to document —
System Poster
Final Show/Reflection
Today was the final show! I think we all felt really proud of how it came together — we worked really hard this weekend, and managed to pull off everything we had planned. I was really happy to see how cohesive and polished it looked altogether — I think our colors really pop, our poster looks clean, and the hexagons tie everything really well. It was fun to see people interacting with our system and taking candy bars or blowing bubbles.
Stacie hadn’t seen a lot of the changes that we made until today, and she wasn’t sure how well the colors and bowls were working — she thought it might be a little overwhelming, and that the bowls distracted from their contents. I can totally see that, and the bowls are kind of strange objects when you take them out of the system, but I think the color is necessary to make the whole thing stand out to people. Perhaps the colors could have been a bit less primary to be less childish, but I think they pop out in bland studying environments, which is what we wanted. Some people compared our visual language to Google, which I’m going to take as a compliment. I wonder if these bowls were necessary, and if it would have been more successful if we had stuck with our original plain bowls on placemats — it would have been less unique, but probably less distracting.
I am really happy with the cards, the sleeves, and the instagram. I think the elements of our system lead to each nicely, and it was really satisfying to see that flesh out, because I was a little skeptical that we could connect everything.
Overall, I think this was a great project and I learned a lot about systems thinking, visual consistency, and color. It was really fun working with Faith and Lucy, and I think we all learned how to better balance work and life by getting in the habit of happy!
