Week 17: Houston, We have a lift-off!

Published in

Design to Improve Life

6 min readMay 10, 2020

Feedback with Peter

We had a quick feedback session with Peter. It was nice to go through the flow with Peter and restructure our storytelling.

Video

We had Ranu & Christianne working on the kwilt concept video and Amanda on the home video. Remote After Effects collaboration is tough!

UI Design + Details

While we started shaping the platform, we had set a few principles that would be the guiding light for us. Inclusivity and accessibility were non-negotiable. Since no community is exactly the same we believed it was important to keep it multilingual and make it accessible in terms of the visual design as well as different entry points besides the platform. When the users on board, we create shared understanding through agreements of what kwilt is, what kwilt isn’t, and what is expected of everyone. Our evaluative research made us realize how the definition of hyperlocal is different in urban and suburban contexts, we decided to keep it modular and scalable by providing the user's flexibility and agency to choose the boundary of their neighborhood.

User Profile + Bulletin

We used a resilient community framework as a guiding factor to build out features of our platform. The features are built on the concept of enabling direct action by posting on the bulletin. The major consideration to enable direct action was to keep the UI simple and clean and focus more on the conversations and connections rather than the UI. We utilized the project section to connect people through a shared goal and collective goal setting.

Resources + Crisis Mode

Kwilt enables the community to effectively communicate by lowering the barrier of communication through the shoutouts. We deliberately kept it map based and not endless scrolling which would generally feel like a shout in the void. Kwilt enables the community to self organize especially in times of crisis by utilizing the local knowledge and resources to its advantage.

Project

Presentation finishing touches

Script Work + Storytelling

Setting the Context of Communities of Practice and Place

Through our research we found that each definition has something in common, they either revolve around the core idea of a community of practice which means people gathering because they have similar interests and goals or community of place which means people gathering because they are in close proximity (neighbors).

Defining the Opportunity Area

There’s a gap of communication and initiation that persists between Communities of practice and communities of place. They both don’t know how to start but both definitely have cause to connect to each other and help the community around them.

What’s the Value

These values are also illustrated by our value flow. By connecting community organizations with neighbors, we increase community outreach for the organizations and give resources back to the neighbors. The funding of this project would come from alternative sources such as philanthropy and grants in order to ensure independence from surveillance capitalism. Additionally, we hope that this platform will allow neighbors to reach out beyond their bubble, to connect with the street from there with the neighborhood and finally with the city. Elected officials can join the platform and allocate resources to community-led projects. Because what community project is more powerful than one led by the community itself?

What sets Kwilt apart from Competitors

We believe that what sets kwilt apart from other platforms such as next door is the ethos on which it is built. We were deliberate and thoughtful in every step of our process, to make it an accessible and supportive platform and not an exploitative one. The data from this app will not be sold, there will be no advertising, this app is for the people, not for the money. It is run on trust and good faith because we believe in the power of people to create & connect when given the right tools. And finally, building a community takes time and can not be forced, but it can be facilitated by encouraging face to face connections.

Defining Entry Points

Now to go into more detail of the functionalities of our platform. The design of the platform is so that you don’t necessarily need to download an app to use it, making it accessible to a larger population. We designed multiple entry points such as via SMS text, door hangers that can be printed, and hung on neighbor's doors to create awareness about the project and through email newsletters — which informs community members of project updates.

The Impact we want to make

When we talk about design to improve life, the impact we believe we can make by fostering the relationships is to drive a community from individualism to a sense of belonging through shared goals. Enabling social connectedness by keeping it hyperlocal and Facilitating self-organization, especially in times of crisis through direct action.

Dry Run in the morning

We did 4 rounds of dry runs. Christianne did a test with her mom and I did a test with my partner to see what a 3rd person who hasn’t seen our previous presentation. Since we had some extra time left, Christianne included the entry points slide, and thank god we did!