On Learning: Design Brigade Week 7
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson. For more information, visit Design Brigade
Updates on the Guidebook
As we recapped in last week’s Medium article, we had a meeting with most of our clients at the end of Week 6 and presented to them the idea of the guidebook for the first time. The idea was well received and we got a lot of great feedback on how to take the idea even further. Thus, much of this week has been dedicated to making those revisions to our original draft, writing completely new sections, making our language more uniform, restructuring the layout, and collaboratively designing visual representations within the book. By the end of the week, our Google Drive was filled with so many new documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, and jpgs, reflecting all of the new content we had produced. It was actually surprising for us to take a step back after being so immersed in the finer details of our work, and take a broader look at how much the guidebook had evolved in one week. What was merely a bare-boned, skeleton of a guidebook at the beginning of the week had really grown flesh by the end of it. The full contents of our guidebook can be seen in Figure 1.
One small, but super helpful addition we made to the guidebook this week was finding a way to graphically represent the XS to XL framework of the models. Throughout the “Models” section of the book, these little webs will be at the bottom of the page, quickly highlighting the size of the model.
One larger edit we made this week was standardizing the language for each step (Listen, Organize, Fabricate, Execute, and Follow Up) across each model. For example, within the “Listen” step, whether it’s the XS model or the XL model or any in between, there will always be the instruction to “Conduct interviews with stakeholders (kids/teens, caregivers, and leaders of various New Haven neighborhoods)” and “Hire student intern(s) to assist with the program.” In addition, each model will be followed by a timeline, a checklist, a budget sheet, and a contact list (Figure 3). These additions came from the direct feedback from our clients, who said that these rough estimates would be helpful in pitching these models to their larger institutions and realizing them later down the road.
Finally, separate from our design progress on the guidebook, our team had a meeting with NXTHVN to discuss their interest in actually realizing some of the models this coming Fall in Dixwell. They expressed interest specifically in the Take & Make model, the Picnic model, the Bike Outpost model, and the Truck model. Furthermore, they asked us to think further about how these models might apply to the specific mission, fellows, and apprentices of NXTHVN, as well as to the Dixwell neighborhood. With all of these real-life design conditions to consider, the details of our design models will be further drilled down and examined.
Roadblocks
As the team had some highly productive discussions with the clients as well as amongst ourselves, one of the biggest roadblocks that we encountered was how to incorporate our clients’ suggestions organically into the models that we have already created. There is firstly the big question: what’s the scope of the guidebook? In other words, should the book be potentially applicable for cultural organizations in the country, or should it be New Haven-specific? Some of our advisors were really excited about what we presented and expressed a clear interest in pushing the current models further to benefit more organizations. However, considering our clients’ feedback about pushing the models more grounded in the New Haven context, pinning it down on a local scale sounds like a more achievable goal for the book, meaning that it would be more viable for organizations in New Haven and actually make it a reality.
The team also encountered some issues while examining the ways that we involve community members in the current models. While we consider how each model can have a case study section for our individual clients, we started looking at their existing programs, and realized that our current models have been primarily focused on younger children in the community. Even though our models involve high school students and local artists, their roles are largely helping out with construction and planning instead of being the main target. Reflecting on the ways that other programs that position elderly members and K-12 students in a more significant position, we need to implement the current models in a more creative and inclusive way.
Another issue that we need to address soon is how we can listen to the community members better. As we updated the progress with people that we have previously talked to and discussed the future for the project, lots of them connected us with other organizations that might be helpful with our next steps. However, even though these conversations are going to be really informative, we are not super clear on how to process these feedback well. We have been trying to re-organize our initial research and interviews, and we realized that it is a tremendous amount of information and we have been struggling to present them in the most effective way. It is going to be crucial for us to figure out how to ask the right questions and analyze the results in the right way.
Breakthrough
In addition to our full client meetings in Week 6, we also had a separate meeting with Yale University Art Gallery’s Education Department this week, in which we received positive feedback about the guidebook. Our clients’ feedback helped us consolidate our table of contents as seen in Figure 1 above. After looking at a draft of our guidebook with the XS-XL models, Jennifer from the Yale Center for British Art suggested that we include a checklist in which the institutions can self-assess their current relationship with the community and also the success of the project that they will implement. Another section that we added to our guidebook after receiving client feedback was marketing strategies. Nico suggested that we include how and where the cultural institutions can reach people in New Haven, and other clients have also suggested that we frame this guidebook as an introduction to New Haven for a cultural institution staff who might be new to New Haven. The marketing strategies will now be included in the appendix, along with survey templates and various resources.
Next Steps
In the coming week, we will be working towards the next draft of our guidebook. We’ve set a flexible deadline for ourselves to finish the guidebook by next Monday. Although we’ll still have two weeks left with the Design Brigade at that point, we want to give ourselves plenty of time to start to circulate the guidebook amongst our clients and other institutions in New Haven. We plan to incorporate some of that feedback into another final draft of the guidebook. In order to have a draft by Monday, we’ll need to continue to flesh out the guidebook’s many resource documents and finalize the text we’ve written. We will also have to create some more visualizations of the models in action. We felt that the last version of the guidebook lacked some vignettes of how each model would look in real life. Our earlier version of the guidebook also lacked pages documenting the many people we’ve spoken to and surveyed throughout this process, so we will be sure to include text and visuals about our research in the next draft.
In addition to working on the next draft of the guidebook, we’re hoping to spend the next week specifying what some of the models will look like for NXTHVN. After our meeting with Nico and Terence this week, they provided us with some questions about the specifics of each model. In particular, they were interested in how NXTHVN’s Studio Fellows and high school Apprentices would be involved in the models. We’re going to spend this week tailoring our ideas NXTHVN’s team and mission. As a part of that effort, we’re hoping to meet with the NXTHVN Apprentices sometime next week to understand more their particular interests, skills, and strengths and how they might want to see this project realized.
Finally, we’ll also be continuing to reach out to community members and our professional advisors in Week 8. We have a meeting scheduled next week with Brian Stromquist, one of our advisors. It will be interesting to get Brian’s insight on collaboration and incorporating client feedback into ongoing work. We’re also hoping to have a meeting with Hope Chavez from Long Wharf Theatre in Week 9. We plan to share the guidebook with her and see how we might make it more helpful for art groups like Long Wharf Theatre. In addition to Long Wharf Theatre, we’ve reached out to People Get Ready Books, LEAP, and Music Haven to try and get a sense of how the guidebook might benefit them as well. Essentially, although we are in the later weeks of the Design Brigade, our commitment to collaboration and learning from the New Haven community has not wavered as we polish our guidebook and develop NXTHVN-specific plans.
