Week 5: Research Synthesis

Published in

Design to Improve Life

5 min readFeb 17, 2020

10th Feb: Data Collation

This week started off with the looming threat of the draft presentation and peer review, followed by the final presentation for the second stage which is “Exploratory research”. This week we were still looking forward to covering some ground by taking some of the expert/ volunteer interviews and doing some field visits.

We somehow managed to schedule a couple of interviews starting with our fellow classmate, Amrita. She talked about her volunteering experience in terms of motivation, challenges, and expectations that she had while visiting the Garfield community Farm.

Some of the quotes that stood out from the interview -

“The weather limitation sucks, the times are restricted not only for what it produces but also from the community aspect”
“What was interesting was the history, reclaiming and reviving the area”
“Grad school makes you feel isolated; It is nice to hang out with the community.”

After conducting several interviews with different stakeholders (Farm coordinator, volunteers, and expert interviews), we decided to synthesize them by grouping our insights under a broader theme that sort of defined their experience they underwent during the process of either volunteering or stewarding a community garden. The keywords when categorized under motivation, frustration, aha moment, and challenges proved very useful in terms of understanding their underlying needs and goals.

Today, was an unusually satisfying day, due to the fact that we could see what exactly was expected out of the presentation by reviewing Aadya’s presentation. The presentation seemed methodical yet analytical in terms of the flow and the content. It was very clear and concise. We realized there were missing elements, that we would need to rework, in the flow of our presentation, to make it a concrete storyline.

Feedback from Aadya:

Use visuals as much as possible as it will be very useful to think spatially by adding another dimension.
“Research synthesis” is extremely important to get on to the next phase, as it will set the foundation.
Design principles will serve as a good anchor point for the generative phase.
The more you make, the more chances you have to make a refined and more developed solution. Fail fast.
List down the key themes.
Don't get scared, there is no perfect way to conduct research.
Storyline: this was our previous mission and our research informed us to make a pivot

11th Feb: Divide and conquer

As a team, we decided to divide the tasks in order to make the best use of the given amount of time we were left with. Bhakti and I facilitated the interview while Amanda and Christiane were working on gathering insights and discovering themes.

Our interaction with Silvana proved quite fruitful in terms of gathering some valuable insights. She talked about how food is the easiest tool to bring people together and how all of us are social creatures. For instance, when a child is born, the very first connection or social link is with his or her mother through nutrition or the milk. Another interesting piece of advice she handed us was that one way to tackle any issue is by not addressing the topic directly but going around it.

Community gardens should not just be limited to growing but it should be also about cooking and eating together.

12th Feb : Grounded + Peer review

Bhakti came across this really cool non-profit org called GROUNDED. They essentially uses the process of reclaiming vacant and underutilized land as a platform for engagement, education, and building trust among communities.

Some of the key takeaways:

Food brings people together! Take meals to every event
Hire from within the communities! They already have trust built & also an incentive to change.
Community is all about building trust.
Normalizing the mission makes it more accessible.
PAPER ALWAYS WORKS in terms of reaching out to people with intergenerational demographics.