Week 10: Generative research 2.0

Published in

Design to Improve Life

6 min readMar 27, 2020

In the face of Pandemic

In this week’s medium post, We will walk you through, what has happened, what has changed, and how do we plan to go about it:

16th/18th March: Corona Virus / Lockdown / Social Distancing

This week started off with a terror of not being able to conduct a workshop which was an integral part of the generative research phase. The way the corona situation was panning out, the possibilities of conducting a physical workshop had become even bleaker. This week was pretty stressful in terms of understanding how are the deliverables are going to be considering all our lectures were happening online. Looking at the current scenario our only challenge was to how to be optimistic about 2020 and make the best use of the situation.

Due to the coronavirus situation, all of us felt really strongly about taking a pivot and not just building a community but also thinking about building a resilient community. How do we build something stronger after going through something like this?

To be able to achieve this it was necessary for us to understand how other people from different communities were dealing with the rise from different aspects, mentally, physically, emotionally. Therefore we plan to conduct a survey that entailed the following questions:

Have you experienced a crisis before?
What do you miss the most right now?
What are you doing currently to fill the gap of what’s missing?
Did you find anything positive through this experience?
What can you contribute to your community?
How does the community support you?

We are really proud of the fact that we managed to gather 142 responses around the globe through our connections. It was interesting to see that there are so many people who are willing to help but are not well connected to people who are seeking help due to various barriers.

Given the current global landscape and considering that we all are in this reality is when we were trying to figure out how can we use all the research we had done and pivot to understand how can design improve life in the face of the crises

Individual workshops

For us to be able to validate our findings we gathered from the survey, we decided to conduct an online workshop and trying to set the logistics for the same. Since all of us were located in different parts of the globe, we felt we could leverage that situation by conducting individual workshops with people we are surrounded by.

Purpose of the workshop: To understand what are the needs and the gaps in different communities in a way that surfaces how individuals are participating in the communities so that we can build resilient communities for the future.

We managed to conduct 4 workshops:

Christianne: Conducted a workshop with her family that was very well embedded in the community of place.

Ranu: Conducted a workshop with her immediate relatives who had moved from India to California a decade ago and are still finding it difficult to connect with their local community.

Bhakti: Conducted a workshop with our peers who are also international students and have a very strong community of practice but are not very well integrated with the community of place.

Amanda: Conducted a virtual workshop with the local residents of Pittsburgh who were trying to find their place in the community.

The process we followed for our Workshop -

Collage making, where we trying to find out what metaphors people were using about what they are feeling about the community in this time of crisis. We handed them a set of preselected random pictures and asked them to make a collage based on the prompt — How do you feel about the community right now?
Give and take, was the second workshop where we wanted to understand the needs and the gaps between people and the community. It was a fairly simple workshop where we had asked them to write down answers for the following questions on different post aids:

What do you offer the community?
What does the community offer to you?

3. Future Newsworthy, was basically about understanding their vision of a community and the potential expectation gap between the community and the people.

4. Offerings & Invitations: Special Kudos to @Sanchez for conducting this and managing to conduct a workshop online!

Amanda used a combination of zoom, keynote, google slides, and a bit of google draw. Participants were able to put direct responses into google slide templates she had set up for them. She also used videos like AOC ‘ A message from the future’ to give participants more context into thinking about the future. She did this because she exudes a lot of what she is trying to say through body language but because she didnt have that affordance, she needed to use other ways of conveying information to get her point across.

Bringing it together

After conducting the survey and the workshops, all of us wrote our individual insights from the activities and we did a session of affinity mapping. We started grouping them under different categories to figure out our major themes and insights that came out of these activities.

Insights

These are the key insights we gathered from our survey & workshop. Interesting to see was that even though our respondents and workshop participants spanned across the globe — their answers & feelings in response to this were similar.

Synthesizing and Refining our How Might We

We narrowed those HMW down to these four that we believe are critical in building resilient communities. How might we enhance social connectedness, How might we ensure effective communication and how might we give communities capacity for self-organizing.

Ideation

Defining the Target Group

Design Principles

Empower local communities to create a peer to peer network
-Networks should be scalable
-Relevant in times of crisis
-Accessible online and offline
Facilitate relationships & build trust
Leverage existing local knowledge/skills/resources
Connect those who aren’t always connected