Week 8

Designing workshops for persona

This week, we further narrow down our problem space, and designed workshops for building our persona.

Narrowing Down Target Audiences

We asked Hajira and Sofia for help because we felt a little bit stuck in our progress. The problem space was still too broad to generate concepts and even conduct generative research. We were also unsure of how to choose our methods and design workshops. They gave us insightful feedback and we developed our process accordingly:

• The narrower the problem space, the better the design outcome. We could try to specify our target audiences further, which will give us a clearer goal in ideation and generative research.
• We need to be specific on what we want to learn from generative research and what kind of future we want to achieve.

After our conversation with Hajira and Sofia, we discussed who we want to design for. We instantly thought about students who are first-generation immigrants, since immigrant elements appear multiple times in Santa Clara’s vision report. We validate our ideas with solid data on the immigrant population in the school district and decided to focus on students from immigrant families in Santa Clara. We also modified our problem statements, and further narrow them down to the following 2 statements:

How might we help students from immigrant families identify their future goals and create actionable plans to make progress?

How might we encourage collaborative environement in school to help students from immigrant family develop social-emotional skills?

We also thought about the age range of the students we want to design for and decided to narrow it down later based on the age range of the participants we have contact with.

Persona Workshop Preparation

Based on H&S’s advice, we set the following goals for our generative research in learning about immigrant families and students in comparison with American born/rooted students:

• What’s unique about their vision for the future in 2035?
• What are images of the future in their mind? (Assumption: Immigrant families might be more optimistic because they moved to a new environment for a better life.)
• Does their future vision become more optimistic/pessimistic?
• What are specific needs/obstacles for immigrant families (for schools)?
• How do we help immigrant families envision their future in the US?
• How much sense of belonging do they have?
• What are things that parents focus on students?
• How do students from immigrants families view the school environment?
• What are their fears and hopes in 2035?

We decided to conduct workshops for persona and designed the workshop based on the structure provided by Liz Sanders’ lecture in Studio. The following image is the workshop setting after one round of testing.

The workshop contains three parts: “Who you are now” (current persona), “Who you want to be in the future” (future persona), and a collage activity to visualize their thoughts on the future.

In order to make sure the way we set up the workshop is easy to understand, we tested it with a friend and will test another round. We asked our test participant to pretend to be a high school student and walk her through the activities. After the workshop, we asked her for feedback on which part needs more clarification, and made revisions accordingly.

Next Steps

We will test the workshop for another round, and then conduct the workshop with our actual participants. Then, we would like to see how the results from workshops will inform our ideation process.