Phase Three: Generative Research
Weeks 5 through 7
A Workshop with Liz Sanders
After our exploratory research presentation, we entered the generative research phase. We were kicked off by a presentation and a workshop by the famous Liz Sanders who came to our studio, bringing along with her a myriad of generative research tools.
Our team decided to test out an activity for our own generative workshop. We asked Liz for some advice. She recommended to have participants visualize their experience within their community. We decided to become participants ourselves and began visualizing our own personal idea of community.
Interestingly all four of us used very different means of visualizing community. Emma used photographs, Ulu plastic gems, Aadya paper cutouts and tape, and Tilo used figures and cutouts.
This activity surfaced interesting insights. Aadya decided not to visualize her community in Pittsburgh but rather her family’s home in Bangalore, India. Ulu visualized strong connections that lay outside of the physical boundaries of the city. Emma and Tilo decided to stick to the home, neighborhood, city framework.
In this dry-run a couple of questions emerged we needed to consider when building out the workshop activities:
– What do mean by visualizing community?
– Do we constrain it to the home, neighborhood and city level?
– What about digital communities?
– Which tools and assets will we give the participants and how many?
– How long is enough time?
Materials!
We needed to nail down on the types of materials we wanted to include into our workshop activities. After going through all the materials available to us we realized that most of us responded really positively towards these colorful paper cutouts Liz had brought with her. They have just the perfect fidelity to cover a wide range of meanings while not being to specific about race, age, etc. Since we had access to a shape cutting machine in the studio, we decided to break it out, get necessary supplies, and start cutting shapes ourselves.
Inside the grad studio we also have access to several materials ranging from puppets and figures to velcro, primitive building blocks, and Legos.
We also decided to compile a comprehensive list of everyday items, places, and actions and look for representative imagery. Realizing that even abstract concepts can be represented with concrete imagery, we included a wide range of photos. A flying bird can literally mean a bird for someone or it can represent freedom. A soup bowl can represent an everyday meal or the concept of comfort.
Workshop Itinerary
The generative workshop we had in mind would be about 60 to 90 minutes long and feature 3 or 4 activities.
Activity 1
First, we wanted people to share what a day in their life was like. Where would they go? Do they work? Do they have children or parents living with them? What do they do on a normal day? This activity was going to be the icebreaker of our workshop, trying to get participants into the right mindset and allowing us to understand where they were coming from.
Activity 2
Second, we were going to ask our participants to tell us about a time when they were able to overcome a specific communication problem. Were going to frame this activity with three vignettes: at first, and then, in the end)
At first…
What was the issue you ran into?
…and then…
How did you resolve the problem?
…in the end.
How did you feel in the end?
Activity 3
Third, the participants would be asked to visualize their own community using the various materials mentioned above. We would provide a printout for this activity around the home, neighborhood, city framework we discussed earlier with Liz Sanders. We would specifically ask them to think of both positives and negatives that shape their experience of the community.
Activity 4
Lastly, we would direct the participants to create their own preferred future community, challenging them to think of solutions for the negative experiences they’ve had and amplifying positive ones. This would allow us to learn about concrete opportunity areas for our intervention. We also provided them with special magic cards to help them envis
Dry run with non-teammates
Our cohort decided to use our class time to test our workshop ideas. We switched out team members — Emma and Tilo participated in another team’s workshop while Ulu and Aadya tested our activities with Anukriti and Josh from team BLKK 🖤.
During the workshop, it became clear that both participants were more comfortable writing about how they overcame an issue in the past. We had envisioned them using the cutouts and pictures to describe these events but we learned that they were looking for different kinds of materials and imagery than we had provided. Both of them also told us that they were looking for more paper cutouts, especially people in different poses suggesting certain actions. This dry run was a useful test for us because it provided valuable insights about what we needed to improve and to include in our generative toolkit.
Our next steps were to create more diverse cutouts, more imagery and to adjust the template (home, neighborhood, city) we had used. We even thought about leaving it out altogether for our next workshop.
Workshop!
Our goal was to break outside of the CMU bubble that we were most certainly part of and decided to reach out to people we knew from outside of school. Ulu is an avid member of a local Taiko group here in Pittsburgh and she was able to convince three of the members to participate in our workshop! Because our time with them was limited, we decided to focus on those workshop activities that we deemed most important. Armed with our toolkit, we ventured off to conduct our first real life workshop.
Access to Refugees
Going into the generative phase, we had already connected with various organizations around helping refugees in Pittsburgh and abroad. Notably, we interviewed several individuals representing such institutions (e.g. City of Asylum, Jewish Family and Children Services JFCS, Flüchtlingspaten, etc.). Speaking to and working with refugees directly however, proved to be a substantial problem for us. Many of these organizations do not allow individuals like us to engage with refugees easily. Many require extensive background checks, especially when working with refugee children or require a binding commitment on our end which is hard because most of us will be graduating this May. We were however to connect with one notable exception: the Somali Bantu Community Association of Pittsburgh agreed to work with us! Unfortunately, we didn’t hear back from them und were unable to reach them until to the end of this phase. Luckily, we were eventually able to contact Aweys Mwaliya again. He agreed to hold a workshop at some point but couldn’t commit to a time yet. First, he would need to speak with members of the community and align schedules. We learned that many of the members were not fluent in english but Aweys agreed to translate for us during the workshop.
We also followed up on and reached out to other refugee organizations in Pittsburgh and are hoping to hear back from them. Gaining access to refugeed has proven to be a major complication for us — something we did not suspect since we were able to connect with many organizations since this project has started. It has been frustrating!
Our studio mate Chen, who has been working with the refugee outreach group FORGE here at CMU informed us that they would be holding a cultural night on March 1st. Since we were unable to work with them because of commitment issues (see above) we thought that this would be an exciting opportunity to meet with refugees here on campus. After getting the green light from the group, and planning our activities for the cultural night, we were again disappointed when we were told that the gathering was for FORGE members only, no outsiders were going to be allowed.
Guerilla Research
After many disappointing moments trying to reach out to local citizens and refugees we decided to take another approach. While we knew that getting to refugees was hard, it turned out be difficult to recruit Pittsburgh citizens outside of CMU as well — at least for an extensive 90minute workshop. We created a large foam core board that would allow us to walk up to people on the street engaging with them and asking them about their local community.
