Moving Forward: A High School Co-Design Workshop
Goals and Overview
For two months, our team has been trying to get into high schools to work with the teens we’re designing for. It turns out that’s really hard. For weeks we worked on getting our background checks, FBI fingerprints, and talking with potential schools. Our efforts to get diversity in Pittsburgh Public Schools were turned away in the shadow of potential teacher strikes.
We turned to our clients’ connections with Elizabeth Forward High School in Elizabeth, PA, about an hour outside Pittsburgh. The town feels pretty far from Pittsburgh, but the school is surprisingly involved with projects from Carnegie Mellon and has forward-thinking tech programs for students. The students are representative of a range of income levels — for many, 4-year and 2-year college is not guaranteed.
For our research, we toyed with the idea of solo and group interviewing, but we decided on co-design workshop activities.
Why Co-Design?
“Co-design” is an umbrella term for processes in which end users create materials or start structured dialogues around their own experiences for the purpose of design and understanding. In many design circles, it involves facilitating workshops so that the participants can design solutions for their own problems. It also includes methods for researchers that use creative or interactive processes to understand peoples’ needs, priorities, and lived experience.
We chose co-design for a few reasons:
- It allowed us to do primary research efficiently. In one day, we could get 55 students’ perspectives. This provided scale and enabled connections with previous in-depth interview data to develop personas.
- Concrete activities gave us hard-to-reach information from teens. Interviewing students is great, but it can be difficult to extract consistent quality responses about hazy subjects such as future plans.
- It pushed our research towards design, from students’ viewpoints. In our second activity, we wanted to see students’ visions of their preferred future.
The team dove into the realm of co-design fairly blindly. Our client showed us a past workshop, we had one lecture on it, and we read some materials from research books and online resources. Not exactly experts.
But we were determined to use our opportunity to learn the most from students. We took inspiration from a variety of sources to craft our own co-design activities.
Co-Design Activity Creation
We had the opportunity to run two 90 minute sessions with about 20–30 students each. We decided to split the sessions into two workshop activities.
Workshop 1: Journey Mapping
Our goal for the first workshop was more research-focused. We wanted to create an activity that would quickly probe the diversity of student’s experiences and future plans. We were looking for patterns in their career thinking and prep behavior, as well as their emotional reactions and internal sentiments.
We asked students to freely fill-in a three-column timeline in reverse chronology: future career plan, present interests and activities related to interests, and their past influences. We then asked them to layer over each time column with sticky-notes that got at their emotional response.
What concerns or questions did they have about their future plans? What was most influential in their pasts that led them to career interests? What did they wish they could be doing right now in the short-term?
Workshop 2: Creating an Ideal Path
Our second workshop was more participatory design-oriented, while also probing what students thought an ideal career-prep path might look like.
It was inspired by the classic co-design activity “Bag of Things” where participants use everyday materials to represent solutions. We gave groups of students a bag full of icons with people, places, activities, and modes of communication. We prompted students to think of a particular student’s problem, like “Sally is interested in medicine but wants to see if that career is a good fit for her”. The students then had to create an ideal path to get to her goal, using icons, arrows, and annotations. Afterwards, students layered over the journey with pink notes recording reasons they used certain icons over others. They starred areas that were difficult or pain points. Finally, they were asked to brainstorm solutions to those issues on green notes.
Our goal here was to see how students think they could go about the career prep process and what methods of exploration they were most apt to turn to. We also wanted to see in their minds what the problems were and develop potential solutions.
Pilot Testing Our Activities
We put our newly forged co-design activities to the test. Several HCI students offered up time to role-play students.
Their enthusiastic role-playing helped us practice dealing with curve-balls from students and discover activity improvements.
We iterated on our activities, combining two worksheets into the final Journey Map, and adding a guided question process to get at sentiments.
The Ideal Path activity gained color coding to sort quickly, and markers were used instead of string to connect elements.
Roadtrip: Elizabeth Forward High School
Going to Elizabeth Forward
We took the team on the road early on a Friday morning to go back to high school! After accidentally going to the middle school, we arrived and quickly set up our activities in their multi-purpose study area flush with teen idol cutouts and anti-drinking memes.
Running the Workshops
Our workshops generally went smoothly. Students had the chance to tell their stories, and some of our most interesting moments were in the conversations between workshops. Students especially had a blast doing the second workshop group activity and presenting to one another. Kelly, the teacher hosting our sessions from the school side, and Mike, who ran the multi-purpose space, were both incredibly gracious and helpful. (Due to permission restrictions, we can’t show photos of students in our workshop.)
Bonus: Interviewing in Context
In our downtime between workshops, the school was gracious enough to let us interview guidance counselors and teachers in context. We heard from stressed guidance counselors in the throes of schedule planning. Our gracious teacher host Kelly also sat down with some group members to talk about her experience teaching the 9th graders’ career exploration class.
The Takeaway
The entire experience was an amazing opportunity to work with students in context. We had been doing a lot of long-distance interviewing, but getting to work with students and talk about their experiences in person was much different. Beyond the particular insights gained from co-design, it made our project all the more real. We were taken back to our high school memories, and the student’s stories and aspirations inspired us to create change.
Up Next: Stay tuned for our analysis process for these co-design activities as well as combining our many other research activities!
