On Learning: Design Brigade Week 6
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson. For more information, visit Design Brigade
Summary of the Guidebook
The guidebook we are putting together is for New Haven cultural institutions to use in order to start building authentic, reciprocal, and sustainable relationships with the New Haven community during the era of COVID-19. It offers examples of projects with various programming ideas, as well as a summary of our community research. Our project models are divided into five sections, depending on the scale of the project: XS, S, M, L, and XL. In each section, we delve into the details regarding the cost and the timeline of the model, as well as delineating how to implement the model in five steps: Listen, Organize, Fabricate, Plan & Execute, and Follow-up (Figure 1). Before diving into these models though, we will open the guidebook with our ideas of justice and equity that have driven the contents of the book and that will be expected of the institutions that utilize the book. This will be followed by a summary of our community engagement work and how it has translated into our designs. Additionally, there will be extensive appendix with links to resources and contact information. Furthermore, we will also include a checklist for the institutions who use this guidebook to self-assess their community engagement with questions such as “Did you hire members from the community in any stages of implementing this model?” Finally, we will also include a section on intentional and proper language for the cultural institutions to use when implementing programs and engaging with the community. With these many different sections and details we hope to include, ultimately the guidebook should serve to help cultural institutions adapt to the constraints of COVID-19 and connect them better to the needs, wants, and existing infrastructures of communities in New Haven.
The book will be distributed mostly online, as an interactive PDF. Some of the pages, however, are meant to be printed; these include the checklists and important resources contact information. Therefore, the guidebook will be formatted to work both as an interactive PDF and a printed book.
Client Presentation Recap
The presentation with our Yale-affiliated clients, the Art Gallery, the Beinecke, and the Center for British Art, was overall very successful and served as a pleasant end to the original six weeks of this project. Most importantly, the meeting with our clients reinforced the work we’ve done thus far and gave us a clear direction for the next four weeks.
We began the presentation by explaining why we chose to make a guidebook, rather than implement specific ideas. We wanted to make it clear that we had heard the clients’ concerns about enacting our ideas on such a short amount of time. Rather than letting the feasibility challenges block our progress, we decided to lay the groundwork for future community outreach efforts with our guidebook. Given that the clients had already seen many of the ideas represented in the guidebook, we made our portion of the presentation as brief as possible to try give more time for discussion. We tried to emphasize any new ideas included in the guidebook (such as the take and make activities and the neighborhood display) as well as changes to the older ideas.
Once we had finished our presentation, the clients responded very enthusiastically to the guidebook; they were very engaged with the idea itslef of a guidebook. At one point, our team’s work was described as “living and breathing the city” because of how thoroughly we had tried to reference New Haven organizations in the guidebook. They all definitely latched on to the idea that this project is as much about New Haven as it is about their respective institution. As we continue, we will try to hold ourselves further to this point and really try to fit this guidebook into the existing physical and social landscape of New Haven. Our clients also had many great suggestions on how the guidebook can be improved and added to. One client suggested including language in the guidebook about anti-racist intentions, while another suggested we add a spreadsheet detailing the nuts and bolts of each model, like total cost and labor hours required. It was very interesting to hear what each client thought would make the guidebook as impactful as possible.
Our clients were instrumental this week by encouraging the progress we’ve made and also identifying concrete areas for improvement.
Roadblocks and Breakthroughs
This week we welcomed two new team members to our On Learning group, Jessica Zhou (M. Arch I ’22) and Anjiang Xu (M. Arch I ‘22). It was definitely a daunting task for the two of them to have to catch up on 5-weeks worth of our group’s research, community outreach, and evolving designs, while simultaneously participating in conversations about our client check-in meeting, but they dove head first into the work and have contributed so much already to our group dynamic. Jessica and Anjiang meticulously dug through our team’s Google Drive, going through all of our meeting minutes and sometimes chaotic brainstorm visuals in order to catch up to the rest of our student team. This process ended up being beneficial for the whole team though, as the two new team members were able to remind us all of important conversations from our community engagement, and revive design ideas that we had previously moved away from. In the fast-paced nature of our Design Brigade project the past few weeks, our original student team inevitably let some of these important points and ideas slip through the cracks of our memory. Thus, having new members really take the time to thoroughly review all the work we have done and interpret it with new minds was an incredibly helpful and necessary point of reflection for the whole time at this point in the Design Brigade. Their fresh eyes on this project were also able to spark new ways of seeing our design problem and inspiring new ideas. We are super lucky to have them on our team and are excited to move forward collectively next week.
Another roadblock this week was trying to figure out exactly what this guidebook would look like. While we articulate at the beginning of this article what the guidebook is and what we hope for it to become in the following weeks, it was honestly unclear for us even up until the client meeting at the end of the week. We had to work through many difficult conversations this week over Zoom, struggling to communicate and comprehend each other’s complex and diverse ideas for the guidebook. More than once this week, our internal meetings left us feeling confused, minds murky and brains fried. Such seems to be the nature of remote work in the time of COVID-19. Especially with design work like ours that should be incredibly collaborative and creative, the way remote, online work inherently disembodies us, making us but voices and faces on a screen poses a huge challenge. Our team, as well as the rest of the Design Brigade, is still trying to figure out best practices for confronting this challenge. For this week’s meetings, it was perhaps just really active listening, honesty about confusion and disagreement, and a lot of communication that got us through. While remote work proved especially challenging this week as we tried to bring the guidebook to life from nothingness, each long and difficult Zoom meeting did make the vision for the guidebook a bit more clear every time. And by the end of the week, after working hard and just pushing through day-by-day, we had made a draft of the guidebook that we all ended up being happy with and that the clients responded really well to. We will surely face more challenges like this in the coming weeks and beyond, as COVID continues to impact the nature of work, but now we have this week’s experience to remind us that that we can make it through and still keep design creative and collaborative.
Next steps
After the meeting with our clients this week, the team took some time to review what has been constructive in the guidebook and what we should implement. We are excited about the positive feedback from the clients and advisers, and we would like to bring their suggestions to the next step of re-imagining and restructuring the guidebook.
We first took a step back and reflected on the distribution method of the book. Although the book has been designed to be an online publication up to this point, the team believes that it would be more effective for the book to take on a hybrid style: the book will be reformatted to be appropriate for printing, but it will contain links or QR codes that direct the users to a more complete guide and other online resources. This format ensures that organizations and individuals can print out the pages they need conveniently, and even make their own booklets that just focus on specific projects.
In terms of restructuring the book, the team has been testing out potential ways to increase the readability of the book with the hope to make logic of the book more explicit to the users. Key sections including “undertone (how?)” and “participants (who?)” will need to be consolidated and added to the introductory portion of the guidebook. The book will also explain the relationship and development from “XS” to “XL” projects. We will also incorporate better graphic language and visual identification designs to make the book more coherent as a whole. We are also working on implementing a system of icons and legends for readers to better navigate the book.
To then address the more pragmatic components of the book, we decided to add four “resource sections” to each project: timeline, task checklist, contact list, and budget sheet. Ideally, these components will come together as a “resource sheet” attached to the end of each project. The user can easily print it out and track their progress with this sheet, and constantly refer back to it as they need more guidance. We will work on pinning down the details in the coming weeks.
Our group will put more attention back into community outreach. As our new team members look back at previous interviews and community survey responses, we will think about how to better present this information effectively in the book. We will also reach out more to our community partners for their feedback on our latest progress.
Finally, this week was our last week for a couple of our team members who are moving on for the summer to other personal goals and projects. Those of us staying on would just like to acknowledge the amazing work and effort of those individuals, Cat and Matthew, and wish them luck on all of their upcoming endeavors. We will miss them dearly, and have been so lucky to experience Design Brigade with them thus far!
