Week 5: Research summary and onsite meeting with TeleTracking
Research Summary
As the weeks pass, the Artists are finally able to start gathering insights from the massive amount of research that was done and which included secondary research, guerrilla research, surveys and interviews.
The team shared a summary of our research process so far and discussed it with fellow students. During the discussion, we were able to get valuable advice from another team and also to help them on their own research process. Our research schedule consisted of:
Secondary Research — 2 weeks
- Literature Review, News Articles, etc.
Primary Research — 2 weeks
- Guerrilla Research
- Interviews (Disaster victims, disaster responders, hospital staff)
- Mechanical Turk Survey
- Onsite meeting with TeleTracking (generative design activity & interviews)
TeleTracking Onsite visit
At the end of the week, we headed to TeleTracking’s office, in downtown Pittsburgh, to gather more data. One of the main issues the Artists were facing was not being able to find literature of a crucial affirmation made by our clients: Hospitals are a place of shelter during disasters. Literature reviews and interviews were not providing this information and the team considered the best approach to directly talk to our clients.
At TeleTracking we first conducted three interviews with the following employees:
- VP of Care Model Solutions
- VP of Clinical Strategy
- VP of Advisory Services
The interviews proved to be very valuable, allowing to confirm with these experts, who have years of previous experience working in hospitals, that injured people will come with their families for shelter at hospitals and these extra people won’t be accounted for.
Following the interview, the Artists conducted two design activities with the previously interviewed TeleTracking members, the company’s design team and company’s sales representatives. This allowed the team to have a view across departments of how each of their members responded to the activities.
Where Do You Stand design activity
This exercise was developed by the Dutch sociologist Fred Polak. (It’s also called the Polak Game). It is used to help evaluate how we feel about the future and our role in it. Discussion between participants revolves around how we perceive the world and how that is affected by our experiences and circumstances. We asked participants two questions (each representing an axis going from “agree” to “disagree” in a graph) and asked them to put a post it with their names representing their level of agreement on the board:
“While things will go wrong in disaster preparedness from time to time, overall they will get better in the next five years?”
“While there are large processes that will shape disaster preparedness in the next five years, the largest factor will be how individuals prepare and respond?”
After that, participants discussed why they chose a specific quadrant. Some of them were optimistic about the future others not so much, but all of them stayed almost neutral in the first question. The ones who had experienced disasters situations in which one person had made a big difference were the ones more positive about the second question.
How Might We… design activity
We then did our How Might We activity. This consists of providing participants one of our insights and having them propose suggestions for the insight in the format of How Might We… questions. It helps us to see how differently individual participants are thinking and how diverse their solution can be. Our shared insight was:
“It’s cheaper and more effective to adopt a disaster preparedness program than face a disaster”.
