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
This week, team Compass met to talk about how our insights from Immerse would change the focus of our project going forward. We went back and asked ourselves what food insecurity really is, given the new information we got from … Continue reading Reframe: Team Compass
This week team KTRU immersed ourselves into our problem space and the user’s experience. As a team, we visited the KTRU station to tour the DJ … Continue reading IMMERSE: Team KTRU
We began this week by brainstorming potential assumptions about our problem, and identified potential key aspects of our problem space that would be worth investigating. Firstly, we believe that many DJs may feel intimidated to play vinyl mainly because of … Continue reading IDENTIFY: Team KTRU
Hello! We are Team KTRU, and we’re really excited to be working on a project tasked with improving vinyl play at Rice’s student radio station: KTRU 96.1. On the team is Taylan Tuncata (junior studying Cognitive Science and Film), Toprak … Continue reading INTRODUCE: Team KTRU
This past week our team, Mi Familia Vota, got started on our project. How Can We (HCW) create a Mi Familia Vota contact information form that engages students’ interests in civic engagement and incentivizes them to fill it out? … Continue reading Mi Familia Vota – Identify
Hello! We are team Rice Bikes (alternative name: Switching Gears). We are a DFA team working closely with Rice Bikes, a student run business at Rice University, to encourage students to more consistently perform maintenance on their bikes. Our team has … Continue reading INTRODUCTION: Team Rice Bikes
Tell us about your project. Mi Familia Vota is a national civic engagement organization that unites Latino, immigrant, and allied communities to promote social and economic justice through citizenship workshops, voter registration, and voter participation. We want to help Mi … Continue reading Mi Familia Vota: Introduction
This week, our team met to identify what our challenge was, our assumptions, and break down each component of food insecurity. We realized that the food pantry itself had many different sub problems, and that food insecurity itself had many different components. In order to tackle the challenge in a meaningful way, we need to identify all the problem spaces. Our subproblems spaces were: Awareness: Most people do not know about the food pantry. Resources/Contents: Did the food pantry have food the users wanted? Hours: The hours are odd Perception/Level of comfort: There is stigma around food insecurity Access: Transportation … Continue reading Identify: Team Compass
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 our team visited Montrose Grace Place, a drop-in center in Houston we are partnering with, to get feedback from individuals currently/previously experiencing homeless in Houston on our help card. At this stage, we included a short description of services, as well as bus routes to the location. The insights that drove these additions were that when interviewing youth, they often felt uncomfortable trying out going to a new resource because they were unaware what a resource had to offer them, and most all of the youth reported that their main mode of transportation was the bus. Considering these … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Test
This past week we flushed out and revised our three emails given last week’s feedback and tested them with Maheen. We made sure to balance anecdotes and conveying the ethos of Arms Wide. We also made sure to be purposeful with the language. For example, we used “we” instead of “Arms Wide” in the second and third emails to make the email feel more personal. Overall, we are confident in moving forward with our email content. We have received eight survey responses that Arms Wide had previously sent to parents who have completed the majority of the adoption process. … Continue reading Arms Wide: Build/Test
This week we identified what information we wanted to include in our help card. For the bulk of our weekly meeting, we brainstormed how we can best organize information on the help card. We wanted to build on the previous help card, but this time including a description of each resource’s services so that users can choose which resource they want to go to based on their needs at the time, while also adding Metro routes to each of the locations to help better navigate. Previous help cards made navigation difficult because many housing insecure youth do not have cell … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Ideate