Prototyping for Sustainable Social Impact

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Last semester at CCA, we began emphasizing the importance of empathy in our design process. Empathy is a user-centric attitude. When we create a space that allows the emergence of new ideas by co-creation with the community we are serving, we are being empathic in our work. Prototyping is just that.

Our journey as YouthLab started eight months ago. Our community partner had a vision to create a summer program for underserved youth in San Francisco. We saw that vision and imagined great success!

And then our vision changed.

It changed as we progressed with research and engaged more and more with key community stakeholders. I’ll be honest, at first, I questioned whether or not it was a good idea to pivot our direction. But what I came to realize is that our vision was continuing to expand and get more focused on the needs of the community we are serving. It is so easy to get stuck on one idea, especially if you have worked on it for so long. The key is to embrace the engagement and attitude that allows for ideas and visions to shift based on feedback, and even sometimes our own observations.

YouthLab’s vision emerged from the community:

“The ‘North Star’ of this initiative is capacity building by sharing transferable skills that the youth can leverage in order to become creators of their own future. We want to build, test, and iterate on a framework of design thinking workshops co-created with youth and teachers, to empower them to address their needs and build community resilience.” — YouthLab

Writing an impact grant proposal had our team on the edge. We believed that making a timeline with a budget, and having concrete ideas of what our workshops would be like, would not have been true to our initiative, which really emphasized co-creation. However the process was valuable in that it helped the team really pin down our goals and process. I think writing a proposal for the following year would have been more valuable, where we could go up on stage and reveal our prototypes and the iteration that would have taken place based on the feedback from those workshops.

As a team, we decided (informally), to keep the following in mind as we move forward:

Be positive:

Accept judgment in a positive way by being aware of what our assumptions we might have towards the community we are serving. It’s easy to feel like we are part of the community since we have been building relationships with them for the past few months. However, that probably is not the case for many of the youth or even educators we are working with. Accepting that, and accepting feedback is critical. That is the only way to move our concept forward.

Work rough:

Just enough detail to get the experience of a concept through to the audience. In our case, they are design thinking workshops, so with our expertise and constant exposure to design thinking, we believe we are able to go to one of the art organizations with a theme and co-create what the workshop will look like with the youth and educators themselves. Having it polished might actually intimidate the youth into thinking they have no place to input their thoughts.

Work rapid:

We constantly find ourselves stuck in a planning stage, where there is an emphasis on quality over quantity. Yes, that should be our end-goal, but in order for that to happen, we must test and re-iterate to continuously improve our framework. There are different phases of prototyping to keep in mind: Exploratory and Evaluative.

• Exploratory is mainly focused on inspiring the initiative, and thinking of what could be, not what should be or will be.
• Evaluative is focused on evolving or validating a concept.

I would personally take the word exploratory out, maybe replace it with another word, not sure what yet. But for me, the whole concept of prototyping is continuous exploration and experimentation. It is something to react to at different stages of the process. So knowing what phase we are at helps determine the method we would be using to experience our concept quickly and iteratively.

Work right:

Stay focused on the goal. Having the co-creation attitude in mind as we continue working on our initiative is critical. In one semester, we have moved from a process-oriented prototype mindset to a goal-oriented one. For us to see our initiative succeed, we have to ask the right questions. So, keeping our goals and questions in mind, we will refer to the previous points mentioned.

Keeping our vision in mind but being open to engaging and learning is core to our initiative’s values. This happens through prototyping, which is its own type of storytelling. In fact, a great opportunity to work directly with educators and the youth presented itself yesterday and we are very excited! We are excited about the interactions that our prototypes will invite and the conversations they will create. I can’t tell you what we’ll be doing, because that will be co-created with the youth and educators themselves!

Stay tuned.