Participate: Phase 4

Probe Design and Research (Weeks 6–7)

Design Probe

For our participatory probe design research, our main focus was to find the cultural value that tends to resonate with our target audience. We gathered images that remind people of their own culture (focusing specifically on Korean and Taiwanese culture through this specific probe) and asked female freshman international Asian students from these two countries to think about what each image reminds them a moment from back home through a stack of cards. In addition, we also gathered words that tend to be difficult to translate from the Korean or Chinese language into English in one or two words. At the end of our research probe, we included an additional question asking if they have experienced any “bye-lingual” moments in college. (Bye-lingual is when someone speaks two languages but starts losing vocabulary in both of them)

Our Goal

Through this participatory stage, we hope to discover ways to help international Asian students feel like they are at home in Carnegie Mellon University. Based on this result, we plan on slightly revising/altering these cards and include a set in our tool-kit box that would be handed out to students after orientation week to foster interaction and communication between the sister pairs. For reference, other elements we plan on also including in the tool-kit includes an Asian restaurants + grocery shopping guide book that will help students find or make Asian food that would remind them of home, and a diy bracelet material set with supportive words/short phases in various Asian languages (based on the student’s original country) on charms to encourage students to engage in a bracelet making activity with their sister.

Insights

Through this process, we felt that it was interesting to see how people thought of different memories when viewing the same images. And despite that, the memories were all culturally tied together and definitely contained some overlapped elements and scenarios, but also each being uniquely different. Thus, we felt that including these kinds of visual conversation starters in our tool kit can help sisters build connections with each other. Also, we discovered that language serves as a bridge to culture and identity, and that interesting conversations can be initiated when being reminded of the same shared language.