Research, Reframe, Reverse, Repeat
By Nick Simons (Team: Payal Bhujwala, Brandon Fiksel, Dana Frostig, Molly Schaefer, Nick Simons)
If you’ll recall the last chapter of The Pittsburgh Foundation Capstone team’s journey, we were determined to continue our research in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, through creating customer journey maps for donors and grantees and revising our service blueprint and stakeholder diagram. Since that update, we have completed these models and begun validating them through evaluative walkthroughs with donors and our clients. We are conducting this research, along with all of our design efforts and meetings, using a multitude of video conferencing tools and collaborative design platforms. As you’ll find out in this post, nothing can slow us down!
Among the most enlightening of our video conferences were two internal Pittsburgh Foundation meetings, which we were invited to sit in on. In a sense, our participation in these meetings was a form of contextual inquiry; we observed internal processes within a natural context, striving to be unobtrusive “flies on the wall.” Only after each meeting had ended did we ask questions to clarify our understanding of those internal processes. These contextual inquiry sessions have been invaluable, filling in gaps in our knowledge about The Pittsburgh Foundation and the problem space.
Narrowing our focus
At this point in our project, our research goals have shifted from developing a broad understanding of the problem space toward clarifying specific areas of uncertainty. As we fill in these last few gaps, we have other exciting news: we have also begun narrowing in on a solution!
With our spring presentation fast approaching, we knew it was time to deeply consider potential solutions that had popped up throughout the semester. Before we could begin to narrow our focus, though, we had to complete some more synthesis on all of the research that we had completed since our initial affinity diagram. We extracted key findings and insights from our research and committed them to our Research Mood Board and Parking Lot.
From there, we launched a reframing activity: reverse assumptions. Each team member generated a series of our own assumptions about the problem space, based on our understanding of the current state and the research we have completed. We then reconvened, ready to challenge any and all assumptions about philanthropy, the philanthropic process, and every stakeholder involved. For each reversed assumption, we quickly brainstormed a few possible solutions inspired by the reversal. One example of an Assumption -> Reversal -> Solution can be seen below.
Next, we chose some of our favorite solutions from the newly created idea pool and set off to develop preliminary sketches of how those solutions might manifest. After discussing those sketches within the team and with our faculty advisors, we made revisions, growing closer and closer to a proposed direction that we will be happy to present at the end of this month!
You may remember the conceptual prototype, in the form of storyboards, that we discussed in our last Medium post. Spring break, followed by the COVID-19 outbreak, posed an obstacle to speed dating these storyboards; however, the interim between their creation and testing afforded us the time to revise them with our new sketches in mind. Last weekend, we were able to speed date our ideas with one donor, and we have several more speed dating sessions planned over the course of the next week. We are excited to show our ideas to new people to validate the needs that we have identified and help steer us to the right thing.
Next Steps
Moving forward, our major deliverables for the spring semester — the Researching, Insights, & Reframing Report, our responsive project website, and the slides for our spring presentation — are all due in a matter of weeks. We’ve begun drafts for each of these items. With all of the work that we’ve done this semester, there’s a lot of information to cover! Even though we were understandably disappointed to learn that our spring presentation would have to be delivered over a video conferencing platform, we are nonetheless eager to share everything that we’ve done so far with our peers, faculty members, and clients.
When we started this project, “envisioning the future of responsible philanthropy” seemed like a daunting task for an academic project. After three months of working with The Pittsburgh Foundation, however, it has become apparent how important this goal is. And, despite the hurdle of remote work, that future seems more achievable to us now more than ever!
“Anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” — Fred Rogers
