We tested three different prototypes during the test phase, each of which addressed a different element of our design. First we tested content, then form, then a combination of the two. Our content prototype test was guided by the … Continue reading Test: D.I.R.T.
Moving into Reframe, we revisited our key insights from Immerse. We developed them into the following four points: Proactive garden leaders are the main source of sustainability for a garden. A successful garden does not necessarily equate to many volunteers. … Continue reading Reframe: D.I.R.T
This week our team focused on using feedback from Mid-Semester Review and using insights to develop our first prototype. We began with a key insight we gained from our community partner – that they were only targeting swim teams. We realized that this left an untapped market of athletes from other sports that could be reached out to in order to diversify the applicant pool. From there, we had to decide how we would best reach out to this new market. The result was a flyer that would be distributed to high school student athletes. We determined that such a … Continue reading BUILD: Team YMCA
Having presented our progress so far to the rest of the studio at Midsemester Review, Team Switching Gears moved on to the Build stage of the human-centered design process. We initially brainstormed together and discussed what was important to include … Continue reading Building Toward Better Bike Maintanence
This week, our team focused on testing our prototype form for Mi Familia Vota. We had people try several lo fi forms and then answer questions about them that would help us improve on them. While we learned that our … Continue reading TEST: Mi Familia Vota
This week Team KTRU worked on designing medium fidelity informational posters for both the DJ room and the vinyl room and sticker designs. For the posters in the DJ Room, our goal was to flesh out the content of the … Continue reading TEST: Team KTRU
This week team MFV narrowed down our goal for the project to how can we create a way for Mi Familia Vota to engage students’ interests in civic engagement and stay in touch with them? We reached this conclusion after … Continue reading IDEATE: Mi Familia Vota
This week our team focused on analyzing the feedback from Mid Semester Review in order to narrow down the scope and focus of our project while me more forward into prototyping. As we began to reevaluate the scalability of our … Continue reading Team Compass: Build
On March 2nd, we had mid-semester review, a time for all DFA Rice groups to come together and present the progress made so far. Mid-semester review was not only a good time to reflect on the progress we made, but … Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Team KTRU
This week, we began to ideate solutions and prepared for mid-semester review. We looked over the DJ’s survey responses in open studio and from there, we brainstormed possible concepts to move forward with. From the survey we gained important key … Continue reading IDEATE: Team KTRU
We got lots of valuable feedback from MSR. One challenge we will have moving forward that was brought up a lot in our feedback was that we will have to balance having too much information and having our form be … Continue reading Team Mi Familia Vota: Mid-Semester Review
Ideate was an interesting phase for our team, that truly shows that the design process is not linear, and how iteration can lead to improvement. After lots of rapid ideating, we began clustering our ideas and saw that there were … Continue reading IDEATE: Team YMCA
Before spring break, we had our mid-semester review. This was a chance to reflect on our progress and pull together all we had learned to create a compelling story about where we were headed. We decided to present one solution … Continue reading Mid Semester Review: Team Compass
This week, the Compass team met up to do some insight-driven ideation. We first went over some of our key takeaways from Reframe to refresh about the insights that should guide our solution-brainstorming. We then laid out our narrow How … Continue reading Ideate: Team Compass
This week, we worked on synthesizing all of the problems we came up with into one, singular prevailing problem so that we can focus on that moving forward. The main goal we had this week was to create a single How Can We statement, along with our measures of success. Our final HCW statement was thus: How can we utilize social media to advertise the lifeguarding position at the YMCA to teens in a way that downplays the daunting responsibilities, while marketing the long-term applicable professional and leadership skills? This was based on insights we gained in the past two … Continue reading REFRAME: Team YMCA
IMMERSE : understanding the issue at hand to a greater depth through user/stakeholder interviews, and secondary research. This week, Team YMCA focused on immersing into the issue of addressing diversity in lifeguard recruitment for the YMCA. We did this through interviewing current and previous lifeguards, lifeguard supervisors, and the aquatic directors at multiple locations, including Houston, Charlotte, and Portland. Our first interviewee included the Assistant Aquatics Director at the Rice Recreation Center, Jaime Jones. The main insights taken from this interview include the importance and influence of the lifeguard supervisor in obtaining and retaining sufficient lifeguards for the job. In … Continue reading IMMERSE: Team YMCA
The team recently completed Mid-Semester Review (MSR). We presented our progress so far and received some meaningful feedback. Audience members gave us positive feedback, and asked the team some questions related to the sustainability of the project. One question that … Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Rice Bikes
The identify step in the design process involves understanding the problem for the community partner. This information is collected from the project proposal and the initial background that is provided by the community partner. The most important aspect of this … Continue reading IDENTIFY: Team YMCA
This week, Team Switching Gears solidified our How Can We statement so we could have a solid focus for the ideation process. We decided on: How can we encourage bikers at Rice to regularly perform maintenance on their bikes? With … Continue reading IDEATE: Switching Gears
For this step in the process we wanted to truly understand what our challenge was and assumptions we may have regarding the issue. So for the first part we revisited our goal, which is to help community gardens in food … Continue reading Identify: D.I.R.T.
This week, team Rice Bikes gained new insights via a survey filled out by nearly 100 Rice students. Our survey asked a variety of questions, and revealed the following: Rice bikers bike pretty often: On a scale of 1-5, the … Continue reading REFRAME: Team Rice Bikes
Although we had some initial difficulties, after some refocusing, we have gained some new insights and generated more relevant questions to be used during interviews with our stakeholders. Our main idea with these set of questions was to figure out … Continue reading IMMERSE: D.I.R.T.
Hello! We are team D.I.R.T (in Urban Gardens). D.I.R.T stands for Designing and Investigating Real Things (in Urban Gardens). This semester, we are working with Urban Harvest, a Houston-based nonprofit organization that is empowers people to grow food in their … Continue reading INTRODUCTION: D.I.R.T.
Over the past few weeks our Team has immersed ourselves into the problem space by conducting a deeper dive into research within our problem space. We then constructed a user persona of the what we determined to be the average … Continue reading IMMERSE: Team Rice Bikes
This week we focused on understanding our users and the unique challenges they face while living off campus with respect to food. Each of us interviewed a few OC students, since there is a wide variety in the experiences of off campus students, to better understand their current struggles and perceptions of food insecurity. Based off of these interviews we were able to develop a user persona of the typical off campus student: Bob is a junior off campus student who did not get housing at his residential college. Bob is on a reduced meal plan but lacks the time … Continue reading Compass: IMMERSE
Hello, we are team Rice Village People, working with the YMCA to diversify its lifeguarding staff! Our names are Matthew Perez, Christian Carr, Sabrina Bisaga, and … Continue reading INTRODUCTION: Team YMCA
Phase: Reframe Team: Mi Familia Vota Date: 02/22/19 What are the biggest key insights you’ve gained for your project? We have spent the past few weeks interviewing people and learning more about our problem space, and we learned three … Continue reading Mi Familia Vota Reframe
We kicked off the design process by examining the problem space in more detail: looking at subproblem spaces, establishing our assumptions, and identifying some questions to guide our further investigation in the coming weeks. To begin, we split our problem … Continue reading IDENTIFY: Team Rice Bikes
This week, team KTRU gained two major insights after immersing ourselves into problem. Our problem was rooted in both human and systematic issues. Human-Centered issue Vinyl Care Fragility of vinyl Special management for vinyl Training Process Generation to generation passage … Continue reading REFRAME: Team KTRU
Did you conduct user interviews this week? If so what insight did you gain? We conducted interviews with Carolyn, Andre and Alex. Carolyn works with Civic Duty Rice, Andre is an AP U.S government teacher at KIP, and Alex is a Harvard bound high school senior. Through interviewing people of diverse backgrounds in terms of their involvement with the voting process, we were able to gain a wide variety of insights in to our problem. Through our interview with Andre, we learned that students feel particularly strongly about political issues that directly impact their communities. We also learned that although … Continue reading IMMERSE: MI FAMILIA VOTA