Stage 3: Generative Research
Co-design, investigation, and uncovering hidden stereotypes
Team: Corine Britto, Ema Karavdic, Anukriti Kedia, and Josh LeFevre
Generative Research Begins
This week we had Liz Sanders from MakeTools visit our class and discuss her work within the world of co-design and generative research. Her work has been referenced and used by designers around the world. So, it was fun to get her perspective on the role generative research should play and how to achieve the best results when working with diverse populations.
The idea that generative research is key to our understanding the underlying needs of those with whom we work and as a safe space to allow individuals to express their own inner desires, mental models, and ideologies are key aspects to having a successful co-design or generative research session.
When we are thinking about the future of the design we hope for, Liz emphasized the importance to allow individuals to model or talk about the world they know now, then move into uncovering past experiences within their lives that allow participants to ground their thoughts in current states and past evolutions. THEN, you can begin asking them to think about the future using simple models or pieces.
From there we began brainstorming potential generative research methods that could help us uncover the hidden biases and interactions between older adults and younger adults.
Idea 1: Choose your own adventure puppet conversation
This idea would allow us to use known value systems, situations, and locations to prompt users to externalize their thoughts through the puppets and act out various scenarios.
Idea 2: Persona creation
Idea 3: World mapping/modeling
In this situation, we’d give individuals key landmarks in the area and allow them to document their routine recording why they go there, what they do, who they talk to, etc. We believe that this activity would enable us to get a sense of the mobility, interactions, and ideologies around current community infrastructure and social engagement.
- This coming week, we will continue to investigate ways in which to flesh out and test these and other generative models in order to answer the research questions we have.
Competitive Analysis
Before going too far in developing our generative research. We thought that it would be smart to evaluate current solutions that exist and create a competitive landscape.
We discovered the following:
- Most solutions tend to be place-based for both individuals and groups.
- Also that non-place-based and individual solutions that connect people tend to occur via some other medium whether that be digital (video calls) or physical (letters), as a few examples.
- The place-based solutions that impact individuals tend to center around someone’s individual needs or learning.
- While the place-based solutions that focus on groups tend to be more active, participatory, and festival like.
This analysis helped us see where the gaps in participation may lie and will inform both the surveys and generative research activities we will conduct.
Planning the research
On Monday, we had a great meeting with Peter and Bruce to share our competitive analysis and discuss some ideas that we had had for our research going forward. Peter noted the distinct lack of solutions in the group, non-place based section of our analysis and mentioned that there were many existing models in analogous industries that leveraged digital/non-place based solutions to bring communities together, creating scale. We had definitely begun to think about a similar means of creating opportunities for intergenerational interaction.
Next, we talked through an idea we had to create three separate workshops in the next week. The first would be with millennials only, the second with older adults only and the third together. This was inspired by the method that Liz uses when dealing with different groups of demographics. However, once we started talking through the details of preparation, Ema mentioned that this may be too ambitious and leave little room for any other kind of participatory design. She suggested that we, instead, combine the three into one session, using the separate studio rooms to artificially separate people for 45 minutes and then have an hour of time together. Peter and Bruce agreed that given the constraints, this may be the better option. It would also put less pressure on us as a team to have all of the elements ready for Monday, which is when we would need to have the first workshop to feasibly do them all and have time for analysis between each.
After this discussion, we started brainstorming activities that we could prototype to test with the class before holding our workshop. They included asking participants to:
- Map our their weekly routines on a map and explain
- Creating personas for both their demographic and the other demographic
- Cross-generational creation activity
Given that the workshop would only cover around 16 people, we will also be doing a survey to get more scale in responses. We are trying to align some of our questions in the survey with the activities in our workshop that are important to us so that we can get both scale and depth for some aspects. We’re aiming to send this out at the end of the week as research shows that people are more likely to respond to surveys towards the end of the week and over the weekend.
On Wednesday, Josh brought in some prototypes of the activities that we could discuss to then have it ready for Saturday, to test with some of our classmates.
After discussing the elements and questions that we wanted to ask for each of the activities, we worked backwards to determine how much time we would need for each activity. We realized that we were very tight for time, running at 2.5 hours, which was going to be a difficult ask on a work evening for anyone. As a result, we started to really push ourselves on our reasoning for each activity, what we needed to get out of it and prioritize. We will still need to tweak this but we’re trying to get it to 2 hours with food included so that it’s an easier sell for participants.
On Saturday, we met to go through workshop materials and assess our progress towards the goal of having a workshop on Wednesday. Our materials are coming along well, always having in mind what kind of information we want to get from any activity we do or question we ask. One of the major challenges we have run into was that all of our contacts for older adults are unable to attend the workshop and are unsure of anyone else who could attend. We have been able to get many more leads for millennials. This is almost an illustration of the issue that we are trying to solve with this project, which is interesting unto itself!
Some things we are trying in order to get older adults to the workshop:
- Contacting Osher to see if they are willing to recommend a few people. These people are already familiar with the university
- Reaching out to aged care organizations that have worked with other students in the past. They are familiar with student contact so its not invasive
- Guerilla requests for older adults in neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill and Shadyside
If by Monday we don’t have a few leads for older adults, we will have to try and pivot the format of our workshops. We have two potential options for how we go ahead:
- Continue workshop with only millennials on Wednesday, creating a separate workshop with the older adults. We will need to synthesize the separate workshops rather than having another one where they come together
- Trying to get a few older adults with the millennials on Wednesday to co-create solutions together, no matter the number
We will be looking to get advice on the way forward from Peter and Bruce to see what they think we could do in this situation.
Workshop dry run in class
We spent the class time, doing a dry run in with our classmates to test our workshop materials. Two people from each team shifted to another, to participate with the materials.
We had a few key questions to understand through our workshop:
- What are the mental models of both the age group of themselves and of the other?
- What are their routines and where do they converge?
- What are the stereotypes that separate them and the commonalities which bring them together?
- What kind of shared future do they envision and how can we construct them?
From conversations in Bruce’s class, we realized that the workshop had to be divided into two parts, the projective and the constructive.
In class we were testing out the projective exercises, which comprised of the person creation for the young and old and of the community map. We had initially slated roughly 10 minutes for each of these exercises, while the map was covered in the right time frame, Ema and Tilo took almost 30 minutes to finish the personas. We learnt that we needed to rehash our person excerice in order to make it more intuitive, more visual and easy to complete.
Recruiting Participants
Generative workshops are easier said than done, recruiting individuals for our workshop was a nightmare. We ran into many dead ends and our guerrilla methods had failed over the weekend, especially when it came to recruiting the older adults. Ema and Anukriti called up a whole range of senior centers and nursing homes, while Corine camped outside Osher, hoping to recruit some individuals post a meeting. At the end of Tuesday, we finally had some leads - we were going to visit Vintage a senior center, and Corine successfully found three ladies who potentially agreed to come for the workshop post their Bridge class at the campus! Yay!
Visit to Vintage
Ema and Anukriti, had the opportunity to visit Vintage, a community senior center in East Liberty. The visit to the senior center was particularly interesting since it challenged our own views of aging and what we would assume were activities that these individuals did. We were met by an extremely enthusiastic group of people, who we line danced with as a part of knowing them better. The music was contemporary and their energy was infectious. While we weren't able to convince anyone to come to CMU, but we did have a great time experiencing their environment with them. One of the ladies also suggested that we should probably get the workshop to them, instead of expecting the senior adults to reach CMU. We thought this was valuable advice and we intend on pursuing this further.
Generating Ideas
Our workshop was not going to happen until the weekend (if at all!) and we realized that we might need to do an iteration session by ourselves in order to be prepared for what was coming. On Wednesday evening, we met up and used the framework of Luma’s creative matrix to start iterating ideas. The x-axis represented our design principles and the y-axis represented the different artifacts we could design. This was a great excerices to fuel our minds, and to get us to start thinking of potential ideas. From crazy to practical, from small to large scale, we were able to see seeds of potential ideas sprouting. We then voted on these to pick up some of our top choices and affinity mapped them further. From these, what emerged were a few contextual routes for our solution space.
Another visit to Vintage
We visited Vintage again, to carry out some exercises with our audience. By this time, we had come to realize that we would need to make our tools simple and more cohesive to get the senior adults to engage with them. We went with a new version of the persona and a new way of mapping their routine based on the AEIO(minus U) framework. We further developed a basic needs and challenge activity, which would require them to map their own needs and challenge and compare it to a younger adult’s, to see main differences but also the commonalities.
Our experience at Vintage was really great and we got to carry out the activity with three amazing ladies. While we had accounted for only 30 minutes, our conversations spilled to almost an hour or longer with them. What we realized was that older adults seek care and connection, stereotypes against the younger generation are also quite prevalent, but at the end of the day, they look forward to engaging in conversations with the younger generation. (We also met Darlene, who showed interest in coming for the workshop!)
The Day of the Workshop
The Day of the workshop finally arrived, and till the last minute, we had little idea of who will actually turn up! But all our efforts turned well, and we were able to gather 8 participants, 4 from the older generation and 4 from the younger.
We slotted the workshop for 1.5 hours, strategically giving a break in the middle instead of in the end. We first made them carry out some exercises individually and then made them pair up with someone from the other generation to carry out the rest of the activity.
Here were our main activities:
- Self Perception exercise
Use the materials in front of you to describe yourself so we can get to know you better
- Identifying needs and challenges
Using the prompts and reflecting on your own life, identify the needs and challenges for yourself and then those of another generation - Identifying common needs and challenges
With your partner from the other generation, first, compare the millennial needs and challenges with the boomers’ perceptions of millennials. Then do the same for the boomers.
3. Constructing a shared future
Using the make tools provided, build a space, service or product that aligns with one of your common needs or challenges
Building on that both physically and psychologically, as they designed a product service that meets needs in a shared future, we saw that most leaned towards creating or referencing physical spaces where each generation can come together.
We also found it particularly interesting to note that most of them were able to identify a range of these common needs and challenges!
But most importantly, what we saw was an enactment of what we imagined our solution to be. The participants were extremely engaged and high-spirited, and some mentioned that all we need is workshops like these to get the two generations talking!
Synthesizing Generative Research
We met on Sunday afternoon synthesize the results of our workshop, creative matrix and survey results. We had gathered our favorite ideas to refine them further. Here is what we found.
From the self perception exercise and survey results, we synthesized the top needs and values from older and younger adults
- Understanding
- Identity
- Freedom
- Affection
- Creation
- Participation
- Sustenance
Health, Family and Friendship are top values for both groups
From the survey we gathered insights on the roots of the empathy gap between generations.Location, lack of personal Autonomy, time constraints and social anxiety are shared barriers to connections for both generations
Other common needs between the generations
- the need to learn new things and keep up with an ever changing world.
- Preparing for transition in order to be able to meet changing physical, mental and financial health needs.
We also discussed the role stereotypes and routine have in maintaining the barriers between the generations. Misaligned routines create lack of intergenerational connection while negative stereotypes reduced the incentive for conversation in the few opportunities that do exist.
We revisited our favorite ideas from the creative matrix exercise and evaluated them against the insights from our research. The following concepts were the most relevant to our insights:
Intergenerational Restaurant Night
Participants get a discount for bringing someone from a different generation. We chose this concept because it leveraged the existing routine of dining out to start conversations that could increase empathy and understanding
Mentoring Platform
This concept is inspired by the shared needs and values of both generations. Both generations need to learn new things and also need companionship. We realized that younger adults sometimes need guidance beyond what they can get from their families. Older adults are untapped sources of wisdom. Sharing their knowledge could add meaning while building friendships. Conversely, young people also have skills that could benefit older adults.
Considering additional Concepts
We realized it was best to develop as many concepts as possible to ensure we could receive the best possible feedback. We developed these additional ideas.
We were all drawn to the idea of a mobile 3rd space. This would take the form of a coffee shop or restaurant on in a truck that would move to spaces with older adults. Our research showed us that mobility was a considerable barrier for some older adults and a mobile space would solve for this problem. The intergeneration aspect was tricker to resolve. Would we be bringing younger people to them? Another interesting angle was to incorporate 412 food rescue’s model of collect food that would be wasted and bringing it to underserved communities. The mobile cafe conserve food that would be wasted while providing opportunities for connection.
