Pushing Forward and Shaking Things Up

This week we tried to get out from Analysis Paralysis to a prototype to test. Spoiler alert: we did it. We had to take our ideas, shuffle and shuffle again, tell stories and push the dot to a double diamond.

But we’re focusing on testing prototypes this week. I love this, because this is maybe one of the only times in design school that we get to go back and actually iterate. Totally making to learn.

So we’re testing a new idea now. We’re not making the-best-earthquake-kit-ever™ but instead we’re testing an idea about preparing for an earthquake together, as tenants of a building or a neighbors on residential block.

Once we passed our ideation roadblock and made a decision (literally any decision would have worked), we made something and took it out to the street.

we gave free lemonade and blood orange soda on a hot day.

Our idea now relies on activation of the community. A sort of sf72-meets nextdoor-meets-skillshare. Details to come in following posts, don’t be greedy.

Some of what we learned yesterday:

There are natural leaders built into community. People like the teachers, nurses and paramedics that stopped by to talk to us and give us ideas.

Those people are looking for tools and frameworks to reach out for more people in their neighborhoods. People mostly want and need this connection.

We don’t need to re-invent the wheel but work with and based on the existing resilience projects in the community

(Thank you Captain John Caba of SFFD)

For anything about community in San Francisco, we have to work in multiple languages. SF is very culturally diverse, and we need to help people bridge language barriers to connect.

We need to work on creating social engagement tool to empower those people that are involved and to bring in the people that are less so. Then — we need to give them tools and tasks to work together.