Week 3: Designing for a second chance
01/27: Presenting our findings and discussions
During this week, we started with the idea to design for a second chance. We want to focus on people or groups of people who find it challenging to adjust to their daily lives and be a part of the society due to their health conditions. On Monday, we presented our approach to Peter in the following presentation.
Acceptance and resilience as wellbeing.
We believe that acceptance and resilience are a crucial part of wellbeing as they give patients and families the stamina to continue on to achieve a better life.
Who is part of this question?
While we were discussing the people who were part of the “second chance” need, we focused on people who needed health care too and not just social reintegration requirement. So, the people who we thought would be interesting to design for were: elderly, physically challenged and people with chronic illness. Once we had these stakeholders narrowed down, we created a flowchart with the different conditions that are categorized under these groups. The surrounded ovals are the ones we thought were interesting to design for since these are conditions that are impacted by society bias.
Research approach
While we were doing research on how we would be approaching this, since we wanted to be integrating health with play, Michelle found the TED talk of Mara Mintzer, a urban architect who used participatory design with children to create new solutions for a city. Her talk helped as inspiration to possibly incorporate children in our ideation process, since they are inclusive and see all the living beings, without any constraints.
We found direct contacts from our CMU network that we thought would be important collaborators of our research, and we also put a list of Pittsburgh Communities who might be interested to see and contact for our research purposes.
Additionally we presented to Peter the next steps, starting with Secondary research based on the groups we want to focus on. Scheduling interviews with the experts and resources we found. And start looking at protocols for research methods (interview consent forms, IRB permissions, interview templates, etc.)
The feedback we got from Aadya and Peter that day was about how we should narrow down the target groups, like how many people have that condition in Pittsburgh — for us to think about accessibility — and how costly it is to live with that condition. And also to go and talk with the disabilities office in the campus and the Cyert Center for Early Education to get more resources to explore later.
01/29: Secondary research
During the next days, each of us selected a topic to investigate further within the selected conditions of each group, since we decided to divide and conquer. Yiwei got people who had cognitive disabilities, Michelle selected the group who had heart disease, Anuprita took the group of physically disabled, Sanika took elders in the grey zone and Stefania took the elder veterans. For this secondary research we were looking at urgency of their condition (how much research was focused on them), general statistics, symptoms and major challenges.
Once we gathered again to look at our findings, we realized we needed more time to look more in depth of each group. Each of us had general statistics and possible design opportunities of their condition, some examples below:
Cognitive/Intelligence disabilities (including Autism):
Heart Disease:
Physically Disabled:
Veterans:
When we presented our findings to Peter and Hajira, they mentioned that even if our design is specific and towards a particular group, it can be scalable to any of the affected categories mentioned before, and this could be our design argument, starting with one group but making it scalable after. Additionally, he told us to think about the stakeholder’s challenges and how we can help as designers, or to think of resilience as a gamification opportunity. Additionally he mentioned to contact Bruce Hannington and Molly Steenson about the IRB permissions to work with children, and how the slow change interaction framework could help us understand the behavior change and resilience of people.
During this meeting, we also had a group dynamic proposed and led by Yiwei, where we shared the things we wanted, we preferred, and we feared from the project outcome and process. This was a very interesting and fun dynamic and we opened and supported each other ideas to find a thing we all agreed upon.
From the discussion, most of us wanted a complete, evidenced and well-documented design process, as an outcome in general, and we wanted something that in the end could be useful to our target population. Further, we agreed not to have an app as an outcome unless the process really showed the need for it. And we agreed to integrate useful research methods to get the best of our integration with the research methods class.
When the class ended, we decided to do further research on each group to understand the challenges and base our investigation in the following criteria:
- Scalability of design
- Research opportunities (scope to do contextual research in PGH)
- Urgency of issue (affected population and amount of work that has been done for this population)
- Number of resources (experts, institutions, organizations etc)
This framework was explored by Anuprita and Yiwei, for us to narrow down the target group based on these categories and pick the one that had more points of each.
02/02: Narrowing down the target group
During this session, we each talked about the possibilities to pick a specific group. In the end, we picked the elderly in the grey zone, since the accessibility for this specific group is really high in Pittsburgh and there are many resources that we can contact for information. Additionally, the rest of the groups had too much research about their condition and funding from the government or private associations that made them not an urgent group to focus on (elder veterans, heart disease, autism).
Yiwei also explained a resilience framework based on a psychology paper called “Factors and processes contributing to resilience: The resilience framework” by Karol L Kumpfer, which has been cited and has inspired many other interesting papers about resiliency like this one. Based on this framework, we would be able to see design opportunities in the context of the elder people who are in the grey zone.
And to understand the context of the elders in the grey zone, Sanika showed the statistics of it. Explaining how the indicators of social health and social support vary between age ranges in Allegheny County as shown in the graph below. And how understanding the different factors that affect resilience could be impacted during these age stages could provide a design opportunity.
The term “social health” comes from the World Health Organization definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
In the end, we made an individual mapping of the criteria explained before, in a diamond, and making an average for each point resulting in the following score for each category and in the diamond in the picture:
3.1 points for Scalability — since there was a disagreement about how a design for an elder white American population could not be scalable to other contexts or applications.
3.3 points for Urgency — since there are some resources and research for this particular group, but we’re thinking on focusing on a subset that needs more attention, like elder people with dementia.
4 points for Resources — because we haven’t reached out to the experts in this field, but we know there are some that could be easy to contact.
4.8 points for Research Opportunity — because there is a huge elder population in Pittsburgh.
For our next steps we have scheduled 3 meetings already with people that can clarify the children workshop approach that we want, and also we will be having more interviews with experts in the geriatric area of UPMC, have a field trip to understand how health could meet play and finally gather all of the insights and research together and plan for our next phase.
