Week 15: Spring Presentation!
May 7, 2018, the day of our spring presentation finally arrived. This presentation was crucial for the Disaster Artists. We had 7 of our clients coming and wanted to show them all our findings and insights for the semester along with proposed ideas to move forward in the summer. It was hard to summarize 5 months of work in 30 minutes, but we reached our goal by speaking about key points.
Disaster game:
We started our presentation with the Extreme Event game, explained on the previous post. Clients, faculty and students worked together to solve the problems of their neighborhoods during a hurricane. We used this game to better familiarize people with the complexity and unpredictability of disasters. Participants were engaged and added interesting points during the post-game discussion.
Presentation:
We started the presentation by introducing our client to the audience and talking about the prompt given to us in the beginning of the semester:
To develop a solution for citizens in disasters helping them to make better decisions and safely survive, while alleviating the burden faced by hospitals, which become a place of shelter.
We then presented our research process:
And talked about the type of disaster we chose to focus on: hurricanes. Hurricanes are the most frequent type of disaster in the USA and produce the most damage. They are also the easiest to plan for since they are predictable, but still people don’t plan for it.
We moved into talking about our key insights:
Citizens are generally unprepared for disasters. In fact, a recent Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) survey found that nearly 60 percent of American adults have not practiced what to do in a disaster.
Non-injured citizens shelter in hospitals during disasters. The main reasons for that are because of resources (hospitals have backups for resources such as electricity and food), safety (place that is part of community) and convenience (individuals who are unprepared and live close by will come when the disaster was worse than they anticipated).
Many people sheltering in hospitals have special needs. Though there are special needs shelters, people do not register for them, and so when they show up, they are crowded and underprepared. When special needs citizens are turned away, they have no choice but to shelter in the hospital, since this is a life or death situation.
Caregivers have to accompany people with special needs. Caregivers will be the ones who are checking up and taking them to appointments, and they most likely are the ones creating the disaster plan for the special needs citizen.
Next, we presented our design ideas:
We had many different ideas for solving the surge of non-patients in hospitals during disasters, but decided to move further with our redirection idea.
Redirection:
Our final design idea is a mobile app that helps special needs citizens find shelters that best match their needs.
While special needs citizens, caregivers and emergency medical shelters are the main user of this application, Hospitals are the direct beneficiaries because it redistributes the surge from them to more appropriate and customized places according to the special needs person’s requirements.
The solution not only encourages the users to plan for and find an appropriate shelter before a hurricane but also helps them may their way to this shelter during the disaster.
The main screens of the app, along with an explanation of the reasons for creating each one, are below:
Final thoughts:
Our clients provided positive feedback on the shelter mobile app and approved our plan for the summer:
- Identify an app to embed this solution.
- Evaluate the solution with caretakers and special needs citizens.
- Design an accessible user interface.
The artists will now take a one week break before coming back full of energy for the summer term!
