Stanford CS 247I: Design for Understanding — A Reflection
Stanford CS 247I: Design for Understanding — A Reflection
I signed up for CS 247I this past quarter with two goals in mind: refine my design process and build something meaningful. Like every other student in the class, I didn’t know what theme we were going to be designing for. When I learned, halfway through the first day, that we were going to be designing and building to help others understand topics in electoral politics, I immediately felt nervous. I paid little attention to U.S. history growing up (it was my absolute least favorite subject) and avoided politics as an adult, out of fear of revealing my ignorance. I felt unqualified to teach others on a topic I knew so little about. Now, 10 weeks later and at the completion of my third project, I couldn’t feel any more different. I feel empowered as a designer to tackle future unknowns and ambiguity; I built multiple impactful projects that I truly believe can help others understand difficult subjects in electoral politics and am proud of; and I voted in this year’s San Francisco elections with earnest personal interest.
I’m a software engineer by trade and always considered myself a design hobbyist because I don’t get to apply formal design processes very often in my dayjob. This class gave me the chance to work with other learners, in a safe and open environment, with lots of channels for feedback. By chance, I landed with a group, for my first two projects, who shared my feelings of detachment from my politics. We intellectually understand the gist of electoral processes but didn’t feel strongly about any one topic, we started by exploring a very broad one: participation in local electoral politics. We meandered through our topic by interviewing people, often talking to people who had much stronger opinions than I did. Through this experience, I had already learned a very important lesson: by turning ignorance into curiosity, I could discover problems that I didn’t know even existed, and feel compelled to solve those problems because of that discovery. Even though I had a lack of interest in politics to start with, the more I engaged with people and the more I learned about how the political system was broken and affected people I knew, the more motivated I became to design a solution.
With my first group, Project 1 and Project 2 also helped me grow technically. Through our struggle to translate our objective of teaching others about how being able to be active in politics is a privilege into a narrative format, I had to think about voice, presentation, and balance. We often got carried away, writing stories for our narrative-driven explorable explainer and accompanying website, forgetting who our specific target users were. Many times, we slid dangerously towards building an explorable explainer and website that was aimed so generally, there was no clear objective or direction. I had to think critically about when we had to focus and iterate and when we should start to brainstorm, applying the double diamond to our group’s work cadence.
My third project with my second group was challenging in a different way. Whereas for my topic in Project 1 and Project 2, I was in our researched population (in the group of people who did not have enough time to engage in politics), for Project 3, we were working with and helping a demographic that I did not belong to. For Project 3, we wanted to inspire people to make policies that don’t disenfranchise marginalized groups of voters (for example, Latinx and POCs). This challenged me to be more empathetic and understanding of issues that I did not have first-hand experience with, which forced me to really do my research and due diligence before jumping into solutions. Furthermore, the deliverable for this project was to be a game, which already imposes the requirement that we make a not-so-fun topic more fun and digestible. From the experience of designing this game (Avian City), I learned that it’s important to always visit and revisit your design thesis, the outcomes that you want what you’re designing to have.
Grading myself on how I did reaching my two goals, I would say I met both goals very well. I refined my design process through practicing primary and secondary research, learning various new ways to brainstorm and model systems, and iterating while keeping focus on objectives and outcomes. I feel like all three projects were meaningful, although I feel especially proud of the results of Avian City because the topic of marginalized voters is underserved and we were able to leave players of the game with a very strong message. I will be continuing to work on Avian City in my free time and hope to make it a printed casual game. Outside of the goals I set for myself going in, I had two other takeaways: I’m super grateful to have worked with an amazing teaching staff and two amazing teams, and I am much more aware about how electoral politics affect everyone and I’m excited to take part in the process myself.
