Phase 3: Generative Research
Team 16: Amrita Khoshoo, Diana Minji Chun, Hannah Koenig, Shambhavi Deshpande
This post chronicles our team’s progress as it happens for the second 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.
Feb 18: Presentation Debrief
Our team met briefly on Tuesday to recap and discuss the presentation and our feedback. We discussed a point we heard from Mariano about the future of work possibly being people not working at all, through the mechanism of universal basic income. We thought this was intriguing as it had potential to make people happier. However, we ultimately felt that people would find ways to be part of something and contribute, even if compensation isn’t part of it.
We felt that our presentation was concise and to the point. We were proud of our synthesis and the many rounds of iteration to get to our insights and principles. We agreed that we could have gone into more detail about who we talked to, and we could have included more diagrams. Our takeaways from the presentation feedback included:
- We are on the right track;
- We should do more research on our territory, including economic theory;
- Our target audience is focused and specific, this is good.
Feb 19: Generative Research Workshop with Liz Sanders
In class on Wednesday, we were lucky to welcome Liz Sanders for a presentation and a workshop on some of her generative research methods that she has developed over the course of her career in industry and academia.
During her presentation, Liz talked us through some frameworks for thinking about co-design and generative research. She also showed us tons of examples of what it looks like in practice. A key concept from her presentation was the cycle of make > tell > enact. In a nutshell, this cycle is about getting a group to make things using materials or prompts that you provide, then telling you about what they are, before enacting them in an embodied or lived scenario. This is our focus for Phase 3.
In the second half of class, we met in our teams to explore materials and discuss ideas for how we might go about conducting generative workshops with our target audiences. Liz distributed a set of methods cards to each team to jumpstart ideas for workshop activities and flows.
We ultimately landed on a flow of activities designed to first get each individual thinking about their past and present work situations through activities like exploring self perception or individual experience mapping, using a pre-made kit of paper shapes, words, and images. Next, we thought we could involve the group in a collective dreaming, visioning, or experience mapping activity to co-create a shared vision for the future. Our feedback from Liz was that the flow from past to present to future, and from individual to collective, was working well, though we should consider the duration of our workshop and pick and choose which activities to complete based on time. We heartily agreed, and distributed to finish final preparations for the Confluence career event on campus on Thursday.
Feb 22: Initial Planning for Phase 3
We met on Saturday afternoon to decompress after Confluence and refocus on our plans for the generative research phase of our project. We brainstormed a to-do list and began tackling each item in turn. First up was preparing for a meeting with two representatives from a union campaign to organize adjunct faculty and graduate students at a nearby university. We made a list of questions for them, including understanding what they might want (or not want) in possibly participating in workshops with us.
Next, we jumped into the details of what our workshops could look like. We turned back to some materials from our Research Methods course to help us think through the purpose and objectives for our workshops. We talked about how to cover projective and constructive activities, and whether it would make more sense to have one workshop with both sets of activities, or one workshop for projective activities and another for constructive. Ultimately, while we might have a preference for the latter, we agreed it would depend on timing and availability of our participants.
We agreed that our projective focus would be on understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations about the past, present, and future of work for our participants. We wondered about their hopes and dreams, as well as fears and concerns. We hope to understand the challenges they are facing at work, as well as the challenges they face in campaigning to organize. With this discussion, we felt we had enough defined to speak knowledgeably about our plans, but still remain flexible to invite our contacts to shape the form of the workshops.
Finally, we mapped out some activities for early next week. Our first thing to tackle will be a project plan for Phase 3, including setting aside time to read and discuss secondary research materials, as well as additional expert interviews as our topic narrows. We also agreed to try to reach out to other segments of our target audience in hopes of additional workshop opportunities. With that, we broke for the rest of the weekend, eager to meet our contacts on Monday afternoon.
Feb 24: Learning about our audiences
Expert interview:
We met the organizing leaders for UPitt’s graduate students and faculty. It was very insightful as an expert interview. We were hoping to get a chance to invite their community members for our participatory design workshops, however, the leaders explained to us that this process might be risky in some ways for the community members.
Highlights from our conversation with the organizing leaders for UPitt’s graduate students and faculty:
Demographics of the organizing committee members:
Graduate students, PhD students, Adjunct faculty, Full-time faculty
About 50 regular members, 200 infrequent members
About 2000 people would be affected by any change
About the process of organizing:
As individuals, employees don’t have leverage, especially with big employers like UPitt or CMU on how terms of contracts are dictated.
Organizing is a never-ending process: Understanding issues, healing some of the past wounds, working through desirable terms on things like promotions.
Some people identify with being a part of the community even if they are not involved all the time.
Challenges faced by employees:
Contract-workers, such as faculty who have semester-to-semester contracts, have concerns about job security.
In some cases, if an employer doesn’t abide by a contract, they might not be legally bound. The union tries to establish legal contracts so that employees are legally bound to them.
Challenges in organizing:
Graduate students have a transient nature and naturally leave the community after completing their degree programs of a few years.
Management has a role in deliberately keeping employees apart from each other, which leads to employees thinking that their issues are individual and specific to them, and organizing events help them realize that they are not alone.
Methods used in organizing:
The best tool is working one-on-one and having a conversation!
For facilitation, the organizing leaders use emails, phone calls, office visits, regulating committee meetings, informal coffee meetings, happy hours, social media.
They create an organizational structure for workers, which is different from the regular structure that is optimized for employers, so that they can be more able to communicate and mobilize or take collective action.
Planning Phase 3
We planned out the entire phase 3 of the project, including when to conduct workshops, remote meetings during spring break, synthesis meetings.
Feb 25: Workshop Participants
Here we thought of different participants who would be helpful for the project and also accessible to us in this whirlwind of a research phase! We thought of people in the CMU community who are in jobs or roles that are similar to white-collar workers in Pittsburgh who have recently unionized. We also reached out to people who have been working with communities.
We reached out to a librarian at CMU, a journalist in Pittsburgh who we had interviewed earlier, a finance and accounting manager at CMU, a national freelancers’ union in the US, an MBA students at CMU, and PhD students in Design at CMU who have been researching communities.
We drafted emails during our meeting in shared google docs, gave feedback to each other, and sent invitations with all fingers crossed!
Feb 26: Workshop Plan
As we began planning details of our upcoming workshop, we asked ourselves:
What would we like to learn?
- What does an aspirational future of work look like?
- What is the future of -work look like in your dreams?
- What does the anti-future of work look like?
- What is the most pressing challenge against a fair and supportive workplace?
- Individually, what is the highest priority for you to find work meaningful
- Collectively, what does decent work for all look like?
Considerations
We thought of activities that involve thinking on different scales:
- Individual to collective
- A day in the life, current job, and the entire career span
- We utilized and adapted these methods from the MakeTools kit by Liz Sanders:
Exploring self-perception
Individual experience mapping
Persona posters
Collective experience mapping
Collective dreaming
Collective visioning
Backcasting
Workshop outline
Our tentative workshop plan looked like this:
- 15 mins Introduction and warm-ups
- Projective phase (expressive exercises for thoughts, feelings, desires)
20 mins making + 10 mins sharing Individual experience mapping
20 mins making + 10 mins sharing Collective visioning - Constructive phase (concept ideation)
20 mins making + 10 mins sharing - Closing remarks
Detailed plan
This was our detailed plan for the first workshop, scheduled on Mon, Mar 2:
We met on the weekend to prepare a detailed script for activities, collate materials, and prepare a slide deck — for our upcoming workshop on Monday with CMU librarians!
We used Figma to iterate upon collage materials together during our meeting.
For the first and second activities, we created collections of about ~150 images with objects, landscapes, fantasies and ~100 words with emotions and work-related things.
We also added some abstract shapes from the ‘MakeTools’ kit by Liz Sanders.
For the first activity, we designed tabloid-sized worksheets for 2D collaging for each participant.
For the second activity, we cut out a large square sheet from butcher paper and drew a circle in the center representing ‘work’.
For the third activity, of making ideas tangible, we decided to combine the ‘Thing from the future’ card game developed by Prof. Stuart Candy in the School of Design with different 3D materials like blocks, soft toys, puppets, or legos from the ‘MakeTools’ kit by Liz Sanders.
Thinking about the future, and moreover making those ideas tangible can be a daunting task, and we wanted to let people take their time to think before discussions and share outs, so we created worksheets for individual ideation.
We were feeling ready and excited for the workshop on Monday! 😃 🖌 🎊 🏃♀
3/2 Workshop
During the class time Monday, we had our first workshop with the Carnegie Mellon University librarians and MBA students.
Preparation
We arrived at the booked classroom (MM107) around 1:30 pm. We expected that there won’t be many tables but we did not think about the fact that there won’t be many chairs either! We had no option but to use the chairs that had desks attached to them around one of the buffet tables. We pushed all the remaining chair-desks to the back and set up the two buffet table at the front of the class with the materials for the first activity.
We were going through our presentation when the first couple of librarians arrived 5 minutes early. We welcomed them with some Lo-fi music.
Introduction
Hannah introduced our group and what the purpose of the workshop was. and then we did a quick icebreaker activity where we asked everyone their name, current role, and their first job. This allowed everyone to get to know about each other and primed them into the first activity.
Individual Activities
Shambhavi introduced the first individual activity where we ask the participants to draw and collage about their careers. They were engaged in this activity, understood the process and utilized the materials well.
Using the same material, we also asked them to make a collage of the ideal and worst future for their careers. Some of the participants had some problems doing this activity while others had no problem at all. We noticed that people tend to write more during this activity. After the two activities, we did pair sharing where all four of the facilitators listened to each pair.
Group Activities
Group activities made people more lively as well as more tired. Amrita introduced the group activity and while she talked about the instruction, we took away the glue (we wanted to make sure participants would not glue down the reuseable abstract shapes). They made a collective vision as the two groups of four.
We did a longer share out after both groups finished the collective visioning. Some of us took notes. We lost track of time for a bit, but we were able to hear more insights that were helpful.
After the group sharing, we moved onto the last project- making the concept more tangible! We asked them to draw a card that would tell them what kind of thing from the future that would make their collective vision possible?
Feedback
Closing the workshop we asked them for feedback on how we can improve our workshop.
- Have more abstract words and collage images, diverse genres and styles
- We did not know but one of the participants had hearing difficulty. We should give out instruction both verbally as well as written
- Be clear and direct on the purpose of the activities
