Howdy! Spring 2019 kicked off to a great start today. We have 17 returning members and 9 fresh faces, and we’re looking forward to see how this semester goes with our studio’s first ever slate of fully pre-scoped projects. The … Continue reading First OS of Spring 2019!
This week the team discussed our insights from last Wednesday’s visit to Arms Wide’s information session and the survey results from that and other information sessions. These insights include that parents are set on foster care adoption but are worried … Continue reading Arms Wide: Ideate
One of the most challenging aspects that we have faced on our journey with Arms Wide has been the potential scope of the problem. When we were initially presented with the foster care adoption process at Arms Wide, we were … Continue reading Arms Wide: Reframe
This week we worked to define our goals for this project. Because this is a human interest project, we have struggled to assign a quantity to our success, and what we are designing is more abstract than concrete. Our focus … Continue reading Thread Together: Reframe
How did you immerse yourselves in your respective problem space, what have you accomplished (summarize)? This week we had a phone call meeting with Kaila, our community partner and asked her about what The Community Cloth’s needs and goals are by the term “customer engagement”. This led us down the path of discussing how we want these women to be seen and what would make a good story. During our weekly team meeting we each classified our own expectations for this problem space and discussed how they aligned in terms with our team and the community partner’s vision. We … Continue reading Thread Together: Immerse
So who is our typical user? Meet our users Caroline and Stefan, a married couple who have no kids and are interested in adopting from foster care after meeting Arms Wide at a recruiting event. They have been interested in … Continue reading Arms Wide: Immerse
Who are we? Medha Gupta – I’m a sophomore at Sid Richardson majoring in Neuroscience and CAAM. This is my second semester on a DFA project and my first semester as a team lead! Outside of DFA you can probably … Continue reading Thread Together: Identify
Final_Design_Journal-12kf1xn Continue reading Take a look at The Design Journal!
To recap, last week we tested our lo-fidelity 1.0 prototype. This prototype was used to test only the content of our design journal with two user groups – those with high familiarity with DFA and those with low familiarity with DFA. This is a snapshot of what lo-fi 1.0 looks like: Feedback on lo-fi 1.0: Our team consistently heard from both test groups that our text was too abstract and used a lot of inaccessible language. Resulting action: We went through our content and looked at the words that our test users said they had no context for — if we … Continue reading Team Design Journal: ITERATE + TEST 2
This week we completed the first phase of our testing process. We presented lo-fidelity prototypes of four different pieces to be included in the Design Journal: a project snapshot, an interview with community partner, an interview with a studio lead, and an interview with a team lead. This week we only tested content. To accomplish this, we printed out text without any fancy layout, just to see if people were able to digest the text. In general, there were some common observations across all pieces. Readers often commented that they were unfamiliar with some information crucial to understanding the design process … Continue reading Team Design Journal: TEST
DFA @ Rice has had an exciting semester so far. We recently held our Mid-Semester on March 3rd, bringing studio members, community partners, and friends & family together for presentations of teams’ progress thus far. Teams presented on their current progress, … Continue reading Mid-Semester Review
Our team’s doing it! The remainder of the semester will be spent riding a build-test-iterate-test-iterate-test-present train. And we’re doing it! This week we compiled our lo-fidelity prototype (“lo-fi 1”) comprised of four content blocks. We have a “snapshot” template for a DFA project, a community partner interview, a team lead interview, and a studio lead interview. All four have an emphasis on lessons learned and/or social impact, reflecting our user research findings from earlier in the semester. We’ll be testing later today and hope to have results ready to publish for next week’s blog post. We’re doing it!!! Continue reading Team Design Journal: BUILD
The Design for America studio at Rice is back in session for 2018! We kicked off the Spring semester with a design sprint hosted at the Liu Idea Lab, a new entrepreneurship and collaboration center on campus. A design sprint walks through … Continue reading Design Sprint (Spring 2018)
After a fruitful immerse phase, we sat down and synthesized the results of both our personal, 1-1 interviews with other studios as well as the survey we sent out to a variety of national projects. The first key insight we gained from this research was that studios have a problem with recruitment/retention, as many students lack a fundamental understanding about what DFA does, and many students who are part of the organization end up dropping quickly when the workload becomes too much. Secondly, it seems that DFA studios have problems recruiting community partners, as many partners do not know how … Continue reading Team Design Journal: REFRAME
For Immerse, we reached out to different studios and had them fill out a survey. We also all did phone interviews with studio leadership and asked them a series of questions about their studios. If we create a design journal that includes many DFA studios, all the studios are stakeholders (our super-stakeholders could be the studio leads). “Design thinking is a principle of understanding human needs.” -Jason Charles We realized that pain points of the studio come in many different flavors: Studios have problem with recruitment / retention People outside of DFA don’t know what DFA is / … Continue reading Team Design Journal: IMMERSE
Welcome to Team DFA Design Journal’s first update! As our team name implies, our project this semester will entail working on birthing a DFA Design Journal. Why? There is not yet a standardized way for DFA studios to share their projects (buzzwords: cross-communicate and cross-pollinate). Our users are DFAers and we assume their day-to-day involves DFA. By increasing reference to works that’s being done/has been done we have the potential to significantly impact their lives. We have found that our project differs from other typical Rice DFA projects, in that we kinda have our solution already. So our first pivot … Continue reading Team Design Journal:IDENTIFY
Architectronica: Before Architectronica was shut down this year (R.I.P.), a few members from our team had the opportunity to see how accessible the party was after party organizers were given a copy of our accessibility checklist. We found that Architectronica was … Continue reading Access Rice: TEST
Design goals: We want our checklist to be easy to… Add Comprehend Execute – to the current event planning system – we want our checklist to be intelligible and easily understood by event organizers – we want the information on … Continue reading Access Rice: BUILD
This week, we ideated 50+ answers to our final HCW statement, “How can we ensure event organizers on Rice’s campus accommodate for and make events appealing to students with disabilities?” We narrowed our findings down to two final ideations. A … Continue reading Access Rice: IDEATE
Testing Insights: 100% said they would reach out to the mentor from the Lookbook 87% would want to become a mentor in the future 60% felt like they developed a personal connection by reading the profiles “A lot of us, after the … Continue reading CPR: TEST
Our frame has narrowed to the improving the social experience of students with physical disabilities at Rice University. Our interviews with both physically disabled students as well as event planners have revealed some important insights: Students with physical disabilities feel as … Continue reading Access Rice: REFRAME
Ease of Use: How many clarifying questions will the students ask? (5 second intuition test) Engaging: On a scale of 1 to 10, how engaging is it? Interactive: How likely are you to reach out to a mentor? Scalable: Create a guide for how … Continue reading CPR: BUILD
Top 4 Ideas Surveys for Creating Mentorship Pairs Successful mentorships lead to successful futures for the current students and a sense of meaning for the alumni Newsletter Keeps the alumni connected to Breakthrough Will drive engagement and motivate the alumni … Continue reading CPR: IDEATE
Through all our research and interviews, we managed to narrow down our problem space to three primary areas, expressed as How-Can-We statements. HCW enable and support Rice students that want to consistently volunteer? HCW train and keep track of Rice … Continue reading Team Harvey Relief: REFRAME
Pedagogical Insights: Rice DSS appears to be reactive as opposed to proactive in accommodating the needs of students at Rice There are too few existing resources for individuals at Rice with disabilities Sometimes there is a lack of understanding between faculty/staff … Continue reading Access Rice: IMMERSE
4-5 Possible HCW’s: How can we engage and retain the Breakthrough alumni to stay in the network? How can we maintain long-term mentorship relationships between Alumni and current students of Breakthrough? How can we make a system that is easy … Continue reading CPR: REFRAME
We met today to discuss potential interviewees, our research, and important insights. Here are a few: Sixteen percent of students with disabilities earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to 27% of students without disabilities… (Horn & Berktold, 1999) Quality of disability … Continue reading Access Rice: IDENTIFY pt. 2
This past week, our team jumped off the diving board and into the water. Our scope has narrowed to “The effects of low socioeconomic status/background that yield disadvantages in college preparedness and resilience”. We began identifying organizations that might have … Continue reading CPR: IMMERSE
In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Rice organized an impromptu volunteer response, allowing students to go out into the Houston community and give back while school was cancelled. The volunteer response, termed R-HAT (Rice Harvey Action Team), was formed from … Continue reading Team Harvey Relief: IDENTIFY