Phase 3, continued: Generative Research & Synthesis
Team 16: Amrita Khoshoo, Diana Minji Chun, Hannah Koenig, Shambhavi Deshpande
This post chronicles our team’s progress as it happens for the third phase of our Interaction Design Studio 2 Project, taught by Peter Scupelli in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. You can find the full process publication here.
3/4 Workshop Synthesis
During class on Wednesday, we posted all of the worksheets from the Monday’s workshop up on a whiteboard. We then sat down and shared what we heard from each workshop group.
While everyone shared, some of us jotted down insights on post-it notes, in prep for an affinity mapping exercise.
Big themes that emerged:
- Balancing individual and collaborative work: Workshop participants wanted autonomy and flexibility to do both.
- Growth and development: Participants value having opportunities for continuous growth.
We shared these insights with Peter and Sofia, who reminded us to look at our past insights to help keep the thread between our research consistent. Peter kindly pushed the presentation to the 23rd of March. With this in mind, we planned another workshop for Thursday with design students. We also plan to have a meeting over spring break to do another roung of synthesis.
3/11 Spring Break, Uncertainty, & Synthesis of Workshop II
We met remotely on Wednesday to start synthesizing our last workshop with design students.
Before diving in, we took a few minutes to check-in. It’s spring break, which means we’re all catching up on some much-needed sleep. But coronavirus is escalating globally. The state of our world is very uncertain right now. And we’re all worried. It’s also looking more and more like CMU will move towards remote coursework. This is a necessary preventative measure, but we can’t help but feel worried/sad.
Then, we shared what we heard from our second workshop. We decided to move all synthesis digitally in prep for remote work.
We talked through each activity, noting our different insights and observations. Key themes that emerged:
- The future of our planet: The future of work is connected to the future of our planet. The majority of our participants talked about the need for planet-saving work.
- Robots: This was the first workshop in which robots were mentioned. Robots appeared in both the future of work of dreams and nightmares.
- Balance: how can work be challenging/allow for growth, and also allow for the appropriate amount of downtime? How can there be a balance between work/life?
- Plurality: can the future be a pluriverse? Can multiple worldviews, ideas, concepts, groups coexist in solidarity?
- Praxis: how can education become a combination of theory + practice earlier on?
3/16 Check in with Peter and Team Contract
On Monday, we met virtually to check in with Peter for the first time since Spring Break and virtual classes. It was good to see each other on-screen and talk about how the course will adapt to the new circumstances. We discussed expectations moving forward, including that all research needs to be remotely conducted using the phone or digital tools. We talked about the coronavirus being a potential opportunity for design research, given that people are isolated at home and might be more willing to connect and do something out of the ordinary, like participate in research. We also talked about some ways to prototype our concepts.
Next, we updated our team contract to cover new agreements and expectations for how we will work together virtually and remotely. One thing we covered was how to adjust our meeting times to multiple time zones. We leaned into the pet-friendly agreement, with many animals making appearances in our meetings. While we remain hopeful that we will see each other at some point in the future face-to-face, we felt ready to tackle this week’s activities of synthesis, concept generation, and presentation preparations.
3/17 Synthesis, continued
Our plan for Tuesday’s work session was to complete our generative research synthesis and prepare to transition into concept development. With our data points from discussing workshop artifacts ready to go in Mural, we launched an affinity mapping effort that included individual career journey maps and futures, collective futures, and artifacts from/pathways to those futures. This proceeded much like it would have had we been together in the grad studio on campus. Using Mural allowed everyone to see the connections made between ideas in the same place.
Once we made clusters, we repositioned them on the canvas to better visualize the relationships we saw between ideas.
This prepared us for a discussion of themes we saw and potential areas of opportunity. We captured those areas of opportunity using How Might We (HMW) statements.
Along the way, we kept our sense of humor by exploring the many icons that Mural includes. We found the digital canvas to be fun to use, as it afforded many opportunities to draw and add things like images and emojis. For example, we included screenshots of our research insights and design principles from our Phase 2: Exploratory Research presentation to make sure we were keeping them at the forefront of our thinking as we transitioned to concept development. Once we reached saturation on HMWs for each area of our concept map, we decided to affinity map them into categories to help us evaluate them. The final product resembled bubbles of opportunity, ready to be narrowed down when we next meet.
At the end of the work session, we had identified some questions to discuss as we move forward:
- Should we keep our Pittsburgh focus, given that we are now no longer co-located there and are urged not to leave our homes?
- Should we refine or change our target audience of white-collar workers in Pittsburgh?
3/18 In-Virtual-Class Meeting, Concept Generation
In class on Wednesday, we started by checking in with our classmates and Peter as a group. People’s moods ranged from feeling happy to see each other’s faces over video thumbnail, to being really sad about the likelihood that we wouldn’t be interacting again for the rest of the semester in person. This was especially tough for those of our cohort who are graduating this spring. Some teams are facing difficult time zone configurations and are working out how to adapt. A big question for many of us: should our project change with the new global circumstances brought about by the coronavirus pandemic? After checking in with everyone, we had a brief chat with Peter about our progress. Aadya helpfully shared her presentation from this stage of the project when she was a student in the course last year, which gave us a frame of reference for what to include and at what level of detail.
Next, we set about narrowing down our concepts. Our goal was to come up with ~3 statements that we felt had the most potential for rapid concept generation. To do so, we went through multiple rounds of voting, facilitated by Mural.
By this point, we had narrowed to five HMW statements and enjoyed a thorough conversation about what each one meant to us, and where each one came from in the context of our research. We also talked about the nuances of language, such as whether we wanted a “violent” or “radical” culture of listening. After a final vote, the three winning HMW statements were chosen.
Next, we discussed our target audience. The purpose of this discussion was not to decide on a specific audience and move forward but to check in on where we thought we might go in the last phase and update it to reflect the current pandemic, potential audiences given our more specific opportunity areas, and who we might want to work with / be able to work with going forward. This was very helpful to think through in advance of concept generation to help prime us for the implications of audiences, like feasibility and context-specific content.
And then, the big event! We decided to set a timer for five minutes and individually come up with as many ideas as we could on a single HMW statement. We repeated this for the second and then the third statement and ended up with a canvas full of ideas ripe for sharing and discussion at the end of our meeting. We were out of time for the day, but so excited to discuss at our next working session.
3/20 Narrowing Concepts
We saw each other’s virtual faces again on Friday as we met to share and narrow down our concepts. We started by talking through everyone’s ideas one by one, annotating with related thoughts and concepts as we went. This took time but was well worth it. It was really fun to see what each of us had come up with and begin to note similarities and build on each other’s concepts.
Next, we pulled out ideas that we were excited about. Anyone could pull any idea, across HMW statements, as a way to see what we were all responding to. We ended up with a cloud of ideas that naturally began to sort themselves into discrete concepts. We gave each of them a provisional name and took a first-round vote facilitated by Mural to narrow them down. After the vote, we had eight solid concepts to work with.
Lastly, we turned to our presentation. We started building out the skeleton outline we discussed with Peter earlier in the week. As we added and shaped our content, we let the light in and embraced the absurdity of the past few weeks. We decided to sign off for the night and reconvene the next day with fresh eyes to evaluate and select a small set of concepts.
3/21 Concept Development and Presentation
On Saturday, we met with fresh eyes to take a crack at further developing our concepts and evaluating them against our design principles. It was a day of critical thinking and much discussion. To begin, we checked in with each other to share reflections on our concepts and frame our questions for discussing each of them in turn. We also discussed the coronavirus crisis, and the difficult decisions being made all over the world between human life and the economy, and short-term versus long-term timeframes, consequences, and relationships. We developed a set of questions to guide our concept discussion for the rest of the meeting.
1. Connection to the brief: Are we designing for decent work for all? (And more broadly, design to improve life?)
2. Our design principles and insights: Which concepts embody our principles?
3. Target audience: Who is it for?
4. Timeline to impact: Should we focus on things that could help now in the current crisis, or should we try to learn from this crisis and strive to build economic or social resilience in the future?
Next, we discussed each of our eight concept directions, one by one, and tried to make them more concrete using the questions we developed. This gave us a much better sense of each concept and how they compared. We talked about ways we might combine various ideas to increase the depth of thinking across the set. In some cases, we talked about existing platforms or solutions that a concept made us think of and took the time to explore them as a way to inform our discussion.
By the time we reached the eighth and final concept direction, we needed to refuel and with some lunch and TikTok video highlights. Recharged, we felt ready to vote in Mural. We gave ourselves three votes each to see where we stood. The results came in: all four of us voted for our ConflictU and Learning 401(k) concepts, with an even split between Path Map + Love Letter and Mock Job Day! This was a positive result, as we felt aligned as a team with just one more decision point in front of us: which concepts should we include in our presentation?
In the end, we decided to focus on building up ConflictU and Learning401(k). We didn’t want to sacrifice depth or attention for breadth or variety and felt that we should only present the concepts that all four of us felt strongly about. We turned back to our presentation slides and focused on filling content gaps and refining the steps in our process. We saved the concepts section of our presentation for our next meeting.
3/22 Preparing for presentations
On Sunday, we met for our final sprint before the Phase 3 presentations. This was a blockbuster meeting, clocking in at 7 hours. This was an improvement on work time from our previous two presentations, where we averaged about 8 hours. We’ll take it! We started by describing and naming each concept. ConflictU became Mosaic.
Mosaic is a digital learning platform to help teams learn and practice soft skills, like managing conflict, networking, and effective collaboration. Our first content series will be about navigating a transition to remote and/or distributed work. We imagine it could also be used by teams who work together in the same location.
How it works: Mosaic has content modules that build on each other, with individual preparation and team activities. There are lots of example teams and scenarios to choose from so that users can select one that best matches their context.
So what?
- Our insights: We learned in Phase 2 that meaning at work comes from each other and being human is the new differentiator in the changing future of work. Improving interactions among teams requires soft skills like effective communication and collaboration.
- Decent work (the brief): Our theory is that better teamwork skills lead to (1) Increased freedom for people to express concerns, organize and participate in decisions that affect them; (2) Security in the workplace; and (3) Personal development and social integration. This would lead to a more decent future of work.
- Relevance today: Given that many organizations are increasingly taking advantage of remote work, combined with the coronavirus pandemic forcing others to go online, we are positioning this platform to help teams navigate this transition in the short term and to help many more teams succeed in the long term.
Learning 401(k) is a savings account for employees to divert a portion of their salary into long-term investments. Employers can match employee contributions. When an employee leaves a job, the account leaves with them.
To introduce Learning 401(k) to the world, we will form an organization to build a service that works with employers to add this new benefit to their existing benefits package and pilot it with employees. If it works, we would add an advocacy arm to work with state and federal governments to develop a policy proposal that would roll out this benefit to the American public.
So what?
- Our insights: Being human is the new differentiator in the changing future of work, and workforce development takes a village, a four-year degree does not equal success. It’s not all about the money. Employers also have a stake in making sure that employees are able to reskill and upskill.
- Decent work (the brief): The social safety net in the US has been chipped away. If we can encourage people to invest in continuous learning like we encourage people to save for retirement, then we will remove a barrier to maintaining a resilient workforce over time. Providing access to a portable learning benefit would make work more decent for all: (1) Increased opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income; (2) Security in the workplace and social protection for families; (3) Better prospects for personal development and social integration; and (4) Equality of opportunity.
- Relevance today: Elevating soft skills and technical literacy are increasingly important in the changing future of work. We hope to support employee autonomy in learning new skills that will make them successful. Imagine if workers today had access to a personal savings account dedicated to continuous learning: it might help, in a small way, those affected by the coronavirus-driven economic meltdown to navigate an uncertain future.
With our concepts fleshed out, we turned to our presentation to make sure that it communicated our ideas with the appropriate detail for the ten-minute window we were given. We wanted to refresh people’s memories about where we landed in Phase 2: Exploratory Research by quickly showing our insights and principles. Then, we focused on telling the story of our generative research workshops and synthesis process so that we could unveil our concepts.
Finally, we practiced our presentation, including the remote control feature in Zoom. There was lots of testing to see what would be visible vs hidden… how to get speaker notes without showing everybody else listening to the presentation? We did a run-through and agreed to polish the notes before tomorrow’s presentation. We are most excited to find out which concept people gravitate towards tomorrow, and why! We feel equally strongly about both of them and look forward to getting feedback to help us move forward.
3/23 Phase 3: Generative Research Presentations
Our run-throughs of virtual presentations the previous day proved to be extremely useful! We were able to present remotely in a seamless manner using the screen-sharing feature of Zoom, relaying the “screen control” to each other through 4 parts of the presentation. We maintained a google doc for speaker notes, keeping its window alongside the Zoom meeting window.
Phase 3 Generative Research Presentation (slide deck):
We requested the Index team to share feedback on which concept we could be taking forward for the next phase of this project. Liza, Arnold, and Peter all thought that Mosaic (a digital learning platform to help teams learn and practice soft skills, like managing conflict, networking, and effective collaboration) was the more interesting concept. They also encouraged the timely nature of certain aspects of our two final concepts.
in blending the two concepts
Lisa from the Index team liked the idea of Mosaic as an opportunity to look at intangible skills and nurture them. She also suggested a possibility of blending it with our other concept, Learning (401)k, by converging the soft skills and the tangible skills in retraining. She mentioned that Denmark has a system similar to the idea of Learning (401)k. People who are associated with trade unions get different benefits including monetary savings, and that the union supports its members for up to 40 percent of their salary in difficult situations such as the ongoing economic meltdown sparked by COVID-19.
Arnold from the Index team also liked the idea of Mosaic and thought that it could be useful in all situations — in the gig economy as well as in established corporations. He touched upon possible long-term consequences of the current pandemic, mentioning that we are seeing it as temporary until the curve flattens until things get back to normal, but this is an enormous inflection point. What’s happening with COVID is a major accelerator for a trend in the work-life that is already underway. Concerning working from home, he pointed out that it means everybody working everywhere all the time now. (This point was also brought out by one of the participants in our first generative research workshop). He described the need for new understanding and new models of relationships among workers, and complimented us for moving into a wicked problem and beginning to understand the shape of a wicked problem, trying to make sense of it.
Peter agreed with Mosaic being more interesting as a concept and found its nature similar to a community between sectors/organizations. He could see the idea of Mosaic as something that could build a social network, which enables people to be a part of a community outside work while they are learning — a community of practice around the skills that are needed to work in the 21st century.
As we are about to move into an evaluative research phase, Peter encouraged us to start with creating storyboards and testing them, by trying to play out concrete scenarios of use, showing them to people, and getting feedback around them.
We are very thankful for the wonderful and timely feedback from everyone. We are excited to build out these concepts and evaluate them with potential users and experts — and learning to navigate through all of this remotely!
