This week team Thread Together started to create a medium fidelity prototype of our bookmark in Adobe Illustrator and began to speak with Kaila at the Community Cloth about what implementation of our design would look like going forward. In order to make the process of creating the bookmarks for artisans as new interviews are done as easy as possible, team Thread Together will hand over a template in Adobe Illustrator to The Community Cloth. This will allow Kaila to easily switch in and out photos and quotes from a particular artisan on the front of the bookmark while the … Continue reading Thread Together: Build/Test + Implement

This week, Team Thread Together introduced our low-fidelity prototype to the public to test consumer responses. We began with our colleagues in Design For America, who already had some knowledge of our project. Their feedback brought our attention to elements of our design that we had overlooked, such as that we never explicitly said that our featured artisan was a refugee! The other students also recommended that we focus more on the community of artisans, incorporate more photos, and better integrate our statistic about refugees in Houston into our overall design. After altering our design based on this feedback, we … Continue reading Thread Together: TEST

This past Saturday, team Thread Together presented at Mid-Semester Review in front of our studio and community partners. Our presentation covered the work that we had done so far which included our research on Houston’s large refugee population, the work that The Community Cloth is doing, and our insights into the conscious customer with an emphasis on learning what draws them to a particular organization. Eventually, we realized that the best way to increase customer engagement for The Community Cloth would be to create something that brought the organization to the conscious customer instead of waiting for the conscious customer … Continue reading Thread Together: Post MSR

We are in the next stage of our design process: coming up with ideas to address our project. First, we took a step back and re-evaluated what main points we wanted our final product to have. Through several brainstorming sessions we broke down our question– “How can we help The Community Cloth attract more socially conscious customers by telling the individual stories of artisans at places that these people already frequent?”– into smaller components. We thought about “What about the individual stories do we want to include?” and “What do we want the conscious customer to know?” We all had … Continue reading Thread Together: IDEATE

  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