Reframe: Team Rice Mutual Aid

This week, we have been refining our approach to the problem space by focusing on key insights, potential solutions, and setting specific goals. The major insights gathered are related to existing solutions, such as the AOP (Access and Opportunity Portal) and the Magister Furnd. We’ve identified barriers that we may face, which include the challenge of closed funds and the limited involvement of existing members in Rice Mutual Aid. We’ve brainstormed several How Can We statements to contribute to one ‘final’ HCW: How can we streamline RMA’s communication and outreach strategies at/in current students and alumni to enhance student awareness … Continue reading Reframe: Team Rice Mutual Aid

Immerse: Team Rice Mutual Aid

Our research was collected from our interview with the Co director of Rice Mutual aid and external research on RMA. Our users are Rice University students who face emergency crises (e.g., medical or personal) on a case-by-case basis who rely on Rice Mutual Aid during these times. Example of user scenario:  A Rice University student faces a sudden medical emergency. Needing immediate assistance but wishing to remain anonymous, they turned to Rice Mutual Aid (RMA). With a quick, anonymous request, they receive fast help without needing to go through a detailed explanation of their situation, thanks to RMA’s discreet support … Continue reading Immerse: Team Rice Mutual Aid

Identify: Team Rice Mutual Aid

This week, our team delved deep into the pressing issue: understanding how we can establish a robust Mutual Aid system to better support the emergency assistance needs of Rice students. Central to our exploration was the question of feasibility; namely, would we have the right stakeholders and influence to address this challenge effectively? A surprising revelation was that there’s currently no funding available, nudging us to consider innovative fundraising strategies. Our own experiences, notably some eye-opening insights from my past, underscored the need for this initiative. Going through this ‘Identify’ step has been transformative; it not only clarified the contours … Continue reading Identify: Team Rice Mutual Aid

Test: Team Baker Ripley

After building out our recommendations for Baker Ripley, we sought to test these ideas by sending a form out to the site specialists (people who run each Baker Ripley senior center) and get their point of view on these changes as well as discuss the ideas with Angie and Sykra. While we did not get any responses yet from the survey, Angie and Sykra were both very receptive to our suggestions and based on their feedback we decided to re-design our prototype focusing more on creating “one-pagers” that could be used for site supervisor training. Continue reading Test: Team Baker Ripley

Build: Team Baker Ripley

For build our team began to synthesize our insights from interviews, survey data, and visiting Baker Ripley locations. From doing so we came up with several different weak points within Baker Ripley that we wanted to address through our design. With these in mind we began low fidelity prototyping, what this means is brainstorming some initial ideas regarding how we can help Baker Ripley and identifying where we could make the biggest impact from the different problems we found. Once we decided communication was the most important problem, we could find we went to work figuring out how to set … Continue reading Build: Team Baker Ripley

Ideate: Team Baker Ripley

When contemplating the problem we aimed to solve, we successfully refined our focus through discussions with our community partner and visits to Baker Ripley sites. Based on the information acquired, we determined that our primary goal would be to reduce the communication gap among Baker Ripley staff members, enhancing the internal system and, therefore, generating a positive impact for senior users. Throughout the solution development phase, we consistently guided ourselves with our “How can we” statement, ensuring that our proposed solutions were practical and directly addressed the identified problem. Our approach to generating solutions primarily involved individual brainstorming to prevent … Continue reading Ideate: Team Baker Ripley

Mid-Semester Review: Team Baker Ripley

During the Mid-semester Review, our team presented our progress to the entire studio. We aimed to make the presentation engaging, considering that the audience could likely relate to having grandparents or knowing seniors. In crafting our presentation, we narrowed down our key insights and highlighted the upcoming steps before delving into brainstorming solutions for our problem. The feedback we received prompted us to make a decision and concentrate on a specific problem before initiating the ideation process. Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Team Baker Ripley

Reframe: Team Baker Ripley

In reframe, our team was able to cluster our broad and specific key insights generated from our conversations with seniors, Baker Ripley staff, our community partner, Angie White, and visits to the facilities. After going over our notes from these interviews, we determined that socialization and senior intrinsic motivation were two key reasons seniors want to attend health and wellness events. Our third key insight was transportation, which is one of the main barriers to attending a Baker Ripley event. These clustered insights formed the basis of our narrower how can we questions.  Our goal is that as we continue … Continue reading Reframe: Team Baker Ripley

Immerse: Team Baker Ripley

Our user persona is seniors living in Houston. Specifically, those who are interested in pursuing wellness of some sort whether that’s physical or mental. This user persona ties into our team’s main insights through our site visit of a Baker Ripley center. We found that most seniors in Houston were most engaged after noon, they found a mix of physical and social activities to be the most enticing, and they were encouraged with rewards for winning certain events. Many seniors had pets, with around 30% having dogs and would walk them. They liked gardening and had been requesting for Baker … Continue reading Immerse: Team Baker Ripley

Identify: Team Baker Ripley

The identify step of the human-centered design process involves getting a clearer understanding on the issue we are presented with by listing our first impressions and previous knowledge associated with the problem and finding problems spaces that we wish to address in our solution. Since our users are going to be seniors, we first focused on assumptions that we had on seniors based on personal experience and reasons for why attendance for holistic activities might be so low. Primarily, our assumptions were based on the idea that seniors were unwilling to engage in an activity that was not part of … Continue reading Identify: Team Baker Ripley