Week 4: Exploratory Research

Feb 3: Defining the questions
Quick meeting after our seminar classes and we hashed out the questions and assigned who would be asking questions and who would be taking notes.

Conflict U activity
The “We Want, Prefer, Fear” activity that we had done over the weekend helped us with the conflict U activity.

-Decision: Design Direction/ Focus Area
-Positions:
Ranu: Something that’s implementable in India as well
Christianne: Less talking, more doing
Bhakti: Solutions based on research
Amanda: Direction Action
-Interests:
Ranu: Scalable design direction
Christianne: Want to get hands dirty
Bhakti: DD should be relevant and have a strong foundation (stats to stand by)
Amanda: Actionable and benefits the community

Desk Crit
Key things we discussed with Aadya & Peter.

Feedback:

• Figure out how far has Pittsburgh come to accomplish the UN SDG goal?
• Find an organization that we can talk to. If we are exploring direct action in Pittsburgh, how do we define the terms and also specify what we mean by these terms?
• Find out key insights as to why the SDG goal is relevant to Pittsburgh
• How to partner up with community organizations? What other nonprofits are doing? Looking for partnerships opportunities and strategies
• See what worked what has not worked in Pittsburgh?
• Natalie Jeremijenko, watch the ted talk

Meeting with Chun + Aj from Garfield

Interviewing Chun Pure Zheng, Phd Candidate Transition Design

Interviewing AJ Beisei, Community Engagement Coordinator of Garfield Community Farm

Tuesday, Feb 4

Meeting Chun and AJ helped our wheels to turn. It started our conversation around active citizenship and understand what motivates people to be a part of the community, projects, and organization. We shared our personal experiences around volunteerism to understand motivations and challenges.
We briefly spoke about how the knowledge these communities have, need to be shared and can be made modular.

Wed, Feb 5: Desk Crit

Trying out Three Horizons Futures exercise to understand what future of food would be. We somehow couldn’t finish it and transitioned into talking about our childhood.

Feb 6: Rose Bud Thorn + Affinity

This was introduced in our research methods class and the key insights for us were how Garfield till now was in the phase of learning to walk and establish itself but perhaps now it should also try to look at the future and see how it expand its operations and increase its overall community engagement. Focus on how they can foster a better community bonding and a solid first-time volunteer experience.

During our meeting, we decided to try Team 16’s method of synthesizing of our research since none of us have any experience with this part of the design process, we often try to learn from our peers and try to navigate through the process. We will be moving onto Mural to digitize our Interviews and insights from Secondary Research.

Feb 8: Game Plan + lots of contacting

The last two days felt like we were moving in circles so we decided to stop talking and start doing. We were waiting to hear from the places we contacted ended up contacting more people. It is through base’s site we came across various other organizations that are actively working to create community environments where cycles of social, emotional, educational, and economic disparities are broken in their way.

Audience Groups
We also discussed possible areas of intervention from our initial round of research. We believe that we could target teens (13–16 yo) since they weren’t actively engaged in the community and these were the people who will be a part of the community eventually will be shaping the narrative of the community’s future.

The other audience group we were interested in exploring were the CMU students. We believed that students don’t integrate well with the community. We come here, live here and use the resources of the community but don’ t truly believe that we are a part of this community or belong here. Living here is seen as a pitstop before moving on to bigger cities

Interviewing Matt Prindible
We decided to reach out to people who had different experiences with Garfield. We wanted to understand Garfield through various lenses. Garfield through AJ ( Community Co-ordinator), first-time volunteer experience and a recurring volunteer.

Feb 9:
Interviewing Cathryn Ploehn

In-class Meeting

We had a quick debrief session and took decisions for our step ahead. Created a rough outline for the presentation.

BOY! This week was LONGGGG and tiring but it did feel like we got a lot of things done! Hopefully! ✌️