We had an awesome time at mid-semester review! Our CP attended our presentation and we got a lot of helpful feedback from him and our studio members. Some notable feedback that we received includes suggestions to ensure our website solution is easy to implement, sustainable long-term, and that we should reach out to organizations that are trusted by underrepresented groups. Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Team The Walk
Our midsemester review was a little unconventional in that we had to that point still not been able to collect any user data. Thus, a lot of the conclusions and ideation that we had were from proxy sources and online … Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Team Tony’s Place
After our week of Reframe and sending out surveys to existing STEM programs, we are still waiting to collect our responses. In the meantime we are researching what makes other STEM programs successful and what can we implement in our final product. We had enough information to look at our problem from another perspective: we wanted to make the HASSE program more accessible to more people. Their current program is expensive which has lead to not as many people in the Houston area knowing about HASSE. As we move forward, we want to create something that makes STEM and Space … Continue reading Ideate: Team HASSE
IMMERSE This week, we completed Immerse. Our team started by conducting secondary research, identifying our stakeholders as coordinators, students, alumni, volunteers, TWP administration, and members of the community interested in volunteering. In addition to learning more about the mission and curriculum of TWP, we researched each potential problem space. For example, we previously identified engagement of young volunteers as a problem space. We learned many young people do not volunteer because they do not feel qualified, are afraid it will take too much time, or are not connected with a cause that motivates them. We conducted primary research by observing … Continue reading Immerse: Team The Woods Project
INTRODUCTION Hello! We are the Design For America team that is working with The Woods Project (TWP) this semester. Here is some more about us: I’m Chloe Livingston, and I’m a sophomore at Wiess. I wanted to work with the … Continue reading Introduction / Identify: Team The Woods Project
Hello! We are team Urban Harvest, composed of Minjung, Leigh, Ryan, Esther, and Kelly. We will be working with the Houston non-profit Urban Harvest, who promotes the consumption of healthy local fruits and vegetables. Urban Harvest facilitates farmers markets, community … Continue reading Introduction/Identify: Team Urban Harvest
This week allowed us to look back at our design process, and it was exciting to share our work with the studio! We presented our problem space, shared a user journey map, and elaborated on tackling the problem from a people-oriented and a space-oriented perspective. Continue reading Mid-Semester Review: Team Magpies & Peacocks
In Reframe, we took a hard look at our insights and our initial problem space and put them into perspective by creating design goals, a more focused “How Can We” statement, and measures of success. We then decided the specific problem within the problem space that we will be focusing on. How Can We We identified 5 key insights from Immerse: The space is also used as an events space & art gallery, so M&P pursues a look of a stylish, aesthetic mess. To keep the warehouse aesthetically pleasing, messes are swept under the rug, leading to pileup. No … Continue reading REFRAME: Magpies & Peacocks
This week’s testing was two-fold. First, we left our prototype out in the wild (the RMC) with a link to a survey, which we also distributed digitally. We ended up getting 114 responses on this survey, but the vast majority of respondents said they encountered the survey digitally, rather than in person. However, even if users weren’t taking our survey, they were taking products from the prototype. When we removed the prototype two weeks after putting it out, almost every product was missing. All of the bundles were gone, but we hypothesize that this was influenced by the bundle drawer … Continue reading Period: Test & Iterate
Once our team created our medium-fidelity prototype, we moved to testing with this prototype. Our first round of testing was at Open Studio, where we asked members of our studio who menstruate who interact with our prototype. We laid our three drawers out side by side and asked users to read each label, take a look at each drawer, and then tell us which they would be drawn to and why. One team member facilitated dialogue with the user, while another team member took notes. We were able to rapidly iterate and make edits to our prototype as we … Continue reading Period: Test
Hello friends, The past week we got a lot of feedback on our low-fidelity prototype from the rest of our DFA group. Boiled down, they were: What materials will you choose, why, how,… any specific colors/textures? etc. Focus on being solid on function and then move to aesthetics. Material constraints may influence how it looks. Make sure our design doesn’t exist already In the future we’ll be thinking about these while making mid and high-fidelity prototypes. Our materials search is going to be thorough and probably somewhat lengthy. We should definitely make something that works first. And before all of … Continue reading TIRR- Mid Season Review
After Ideate and Mid-Semester Review, we had one big, general idea of how to improve access to menstrual products at Rice. Our idea revolves around the concept of a “period pack”, which incorporates multiple products bundled together to eliminate concern over taking more than one. Although we had a basis for our solution, we still needed to work out the details. Which location on-campus is private, yet centrally located for all users to access? How many products should be in each pack? Maybe the “packs” are not pre-built, but customizable instead. How do we regulate the amount of products taken … Continue reading Period: Build
One major insight that we got from the audience’s feedback form is that our user research was well conducted and our user insights were well communicated. We also saw that our audience was compelled by our reframing of the design goals from one that tackles the physical advertisements themselves to one that tackles the way that residents and staff at New Hope Housing moving forward. We were proud of how our statistics from primary and secondary research were clearly conveyed to show why we decided to make the certain design choices that we did. We also received feedback that it … Continue reading Week MSR: Team New Hope Housing
Mid-Semester Review is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our progress thus far , and receive valuable feedback from a more objective perspective. We presented key user insights, stakeholder insights, and focused on communicating our period pack idea with its areas of variation. At the end of our presentation, we were seeking feedback on which of the different areas of variation seemed the most exciting/feasible to studio members. We received feedback relating to different aspects of the solution: Location: Would these packs be accesible only when the women’s resource center is open? What about non-rmc bathrooms? Structure: Excited … Continue reading Period: Mid-Semester Review
During Team Period’s ideation stage, we worked to take our user insights and new and improved How Can We Statement to generate ideas for what our solution could look like. During Open Studio, we began this process by thinking individually about different potential solutions on post-it notes. After we had time to think and process individually, we gathered as a group and put them into general clusters, which we found to be education/stigma reduction and physical period product-related solutions. After a few days, we regrouped for our team meeting. There, we went about the same process again during our … Continue reading Period: Ideate
Hello friends, This week at DFA x TIRR we’re moving into prototyping! We couldn’t get interviews for some bureaucratic reasons this week. But for now, the interview we had with the patient therapist (the person who works with those with spinal cord injuries), in addition to lots of informative youtube videos by people with spinal cord injuries, are a solid enough foundation to start designing a mid-fidelity(solid but unrefined) prototype. Looking forward, we hope to gain access to interviewing more users at TIRR. When that happens, we will be adjusting the prototype (user-testing) to better fit their needs. After … Continue reading TIRR Reframe
This week, our team focused on making a variety of tangible prototypes of voter pledge cards to communicate and test out our ideas. We identified a few points that we believed were essential to keep on the voter pledge cards, and which points could be condensed or reframed on the newly designed cards. We worked on lo-fi prototyping, or creating simple, low-cost prototypes to implement and receive feedback for our ideas. We prototype at the lo-fi level first to test out multiple ideas we have for the final product, so we can learn more about our concepts. We are currently … Continue reading BUILD: Mi Familia Vota
This week, Team Thread Together drew from the insights we had gained during the previous weeks to build lo-fidelity prototypes of our design. One audience comment after our Mid-Semester Review presentation was that consumers would be more likely to hang onto our design if it were multipurpose. In our team meeting, we decided that in addition to prototyping postcard-style designs, we should also prototype bookmarks. We agreed that we personally tend to keep bookmarks that we acquire at various events because they are useful and unobtrusive. We also discussed what content we thought we should include in our design. Our … Continue reading Thread Together: Build