Final Reflection for Collab: Human Services

 

Like all good things, this class of mine finally came to an end. I a period of great learning, made possible by my awesome professor and awesome peers. As I reflect on the past four months, this is what I think happened during my time in class –

 

Part 1 (Week 1 to Week 3)

 

This period of time was my first ever introduction to the field of service design. Nonetheless, to say, I was intrigued, to put it mildly. I was quite pleased with the first class itself that we were discussing services, systems, infrastructures and how design might play a role in them.

 

The best thing about it all for me was the opportunity to work in the education sector. I believe that education is a tool for great change and shaping civilization as we know it, and designing for it regardless of scale, has aided me in thinking on how to better the human condition through design.

 

As we discussed what it meant to truly engage or participate in a design process, we came across terms such as co-design and co-creation to describe such collaborative creative efforts The question still remained whether the individual authorship of a designer should be more valued than that of the user. While it could be rightfully argued that co-participation can make design better, people do have tendencies to accept things as they are and only a few of them study those things and postulate that they can be better. Personally, I believe this is on a case by case basis, but one thing is for certain- a designer should always take into consideration the needs, wants and expectations of their user, but employ their own expertise and observation to devise the most optimal solution.

 

That being said, it is undeniable that most of the things in this day and age are produced through collaboration. Be it services, goods or even artistic endeavors like film, music, or video games, seldom is the purely individual contribution found if one takes the wider view of things.

 

So as a group, we came with ways to encourage the thing which triggers collaboration in the first place – listening.To encourage listening amongst groups, we came up with an idea for a game in which for a certain amount of time, the player does nothing but listening. After a fair bit of thinking on this, we believed that introducing our prototype as a deception party game would be a good way to encourage the act of listening amongst a group.

 

The idea was not too unlike Cards Against Humanity, but here across the table, when one player asks the question about something, one other player has to answer this, while all the other players try to guess whether this answer was true or not.

 

The player answering the question is at liberty to answer honestly or dishonesty. During that round, for each time another player makes an incorrect guess, the player answering the question is awarded one point. Otherwise, the other players get one point if they predict the nature of the answer accurately.

 

This process is repeated across the table and at the end of the game, whoever with the most of amount of points wins the game.

 

After a fair amount of iteration and a healthy amount of discussion, we presented our prototype. And throughout the creative process, we got the wonderful opportunity to finally engage in the realm of participatory design where participation is the crux itself.

 

Much to my delight, I found that the rest of class came up with quite good ideas about to enforce, for the lack of a better word, cooperation, and teamwork. It was quite wonderful to engage in user testing for all our prototypes, the very act of which was highly stimulating for our minds as potential service designers. And through the said user testing, we were able to find ways of making our prototypes more effective and optimal.

 

So in summarization, I believe that these three weeks strongly helped me gain new insights into the idea of engagement, cooperation, user testing and most importantly, participatory design.

 

Part 2 ( Week 4 to Week 7)

 

This is where for me the class really kicked off. I got introduced to WHEELS for the first time and in many ways was given an insight into a public school experience in New York City. Truth be told, I never thought how impressed I would be with my school and my country’s education system until I went to WHEELS. Over the last two years, I had heard many American high school experiences ranging from Flagstaff, Arizona to Bronx, New York, and much to my shock, I came to realize that high school systems can be wildly different from state to state. But this was the first time I ever set foot inside one. And I have to say, while I have got nothing against the school or the wonderful students and teachers we came to meet, I felt the high school transcript system for New York City to be excessively byzantine and bafflingly incongruous. That being said, if looking at the transcript system achieved one thing, it made our purpose crystal clear. And that purpose is to design a better system for the students to help them navigate through this antithesis of a helpful academic progress record and help them achieve their goals post high school. To put it overzealously, It would be criminal to do otherwise.

 

After a quite intriguing reading delving into heavy topics like the effects of race and segregation and the effects of it on education, how differences have played a positive or negative role in the access of educational facilities for some individuals of some communities, It was relieving to discover that we were heavily encouraged to keep our potential ideas at bay until and unless we meet our partners at WHEELS. We again got into new groups to make new prototypes.

 

It was nice to to meet up with the group later and come up with new and intriguing ways to encourage collaboration with our partners at WHEELS. Some of the key questions that we came with were –

● How do we know what values everyone has?
● How do we collaborate efficiently when we have different set of values?
● What is it about the values in the people we tend to like collaborating with?

 

The presentation which Shana gave and the subsequent exercise we took in one of the classes seemed to me a crucial step in the right direction of learning more about services and how to design them.

As we got to reconvene with our partners at WHEELS and we formally initiated the process of designing a student led system which shall help our fellow Wheels cohorts successfully navigate their academic journey from high school to future opportunities such as college and further employment. I felt that while we resorted to a little bit of improvisation, our group’s interaction with WHEELS went better than what we expected and dare I say it, quite well actually. As luck would have it, there was quite an advantage of letting our group go first, as our exercise was a very light hearted one and I feel that primed our partners for further collaboration and engagement and helped creating a more accessible environment for the subsequent groups as well.

 

Part 3 (Week 8 to Week 14) –

 

As we moved into the final phase of the class, we were again put into new groups to design a more refined prototype serving the needs of our WHEELS cohort. I noticed that for each phase of the class, I was put in a different group, and I wholeheartedly appreciated this as I got to know a lot more people than I normally would have and had the lovely opportunity to work with them.

 

For the first portion of our group project, interestingly our efforts were somewhat separate. While we shared the same underlying design strategies behind our proposals, they appeared to be quite different. I personally proposed an app/website service to help the students navigate through their academic progress and the design goals were –

 

To make our design user-centered, the app or online service would be built to complement the academic experience rather than supplement it. This would start by fully integrating SKEDULA, an online reporting tool with the student, family, teacher access used by WHEELS staff and students to access information regarding transcripts. This could be done by each student a making profile account for themselves where they enter their grade level and the classes they’re in, and can then intuitively access their records and the requirements for graduation. A “progress map” would visually chart out how much they have academically achieved and what’s required to graduate with the desired level of credits.
It could further be extended as a tool used for keeping track of attendance, submitting homework and gaining information about student resources. The design goal was to have the app serve as a mediation between systems and people by being an entry point to the macrocosmic system of WHEELS through a microcosmic model. This shall become the face of the WHEELS experience for the users, not only be building a more effective relationship between them and the institution but primarily be giving them a clear map to optimally navigate their academic journey.

Using the same aforementioned the design goals, we also proposed an analog version of it. And when we presented the two proposals, we found that most students found the digital version more applicable for themselves and found the analog version more tangible and appealing for their parents who might not be as technically fluent like them.

 

Now looking back, I do admit that our goals were a tad too lofty with the digital version. It was soon sadly revealed that it would be practically impossible to make that a reality owing to numerous reasons. And after a fair amount of soul-searching, we came to the conclusion to build a fully functional analog version. While I still in some capacity wished to have been given the opportunity and resources to work on the digital variant, I am nothing but excited and grateful for having participated in making an analog version which is a more physical and tangible interpretation of the design values and strategies we came up during the conception phase of the project.

 

As we took conclusive steps to finish our project,  we received feedback from WHEELS regarding our idea. Much to my delight, the idea was certainly positively received, even though we have to make certain changes based on certain requests. One of the most particular suggestions was to arrange the credits not holistically, but in terms of each subject. This certainly was implemented as we finalized the design of our tool, which is an abacus-like device which helps students appropriately assign their earned credits accordingly to the subjects in order to assist them by providing a cohesive and intuitive experience navigating through the academic requirements they have. And as we took substantial steps to make this idea a reality, it was certainly fascinating, to say the least, engaging in the process of making of a student-led system and my first foray into the realm of service design. Later, as we reconvened with our WHEELS cohorts and got together to produce our tool. It was good to see how everyone involved with us was so excited to engage with the idea and learn more about the production process. Especially the students at WHEELS were fascinated with the idea that we were producing all of this through the process of laser cutting, which again not only helped them understand the design of our tool more better but also gave them an interesting look in the world of product design.

 

As luck would have it when we finally got to present our prototype to our cohorts at WHEELS, I, unfortunately, fell sick at the last moment and I couldn’t accompany my group. That being said, my group said that the presentation went very well and the people over at WHEELS responded positively to the prototype and the functions it served. I certainly am nothing but proud for having been a part of this project and been given this wonderful chance to engage in the field of service design.

 

Some Questions and final comments –

 

So, after four whole weeks, these were still some persistent questions I had while working on our projects –

 

With the evolution of both design and technology,  the emergence of fields such as interaction design, user experience design and service design has essentially transformed the designer’s role in communicating to the “consumer” into that of interacting with the “user”.  With design still being an authored process, should the user’s role in it be truly active?  

 

If design is subject to the individual and specific culture of the designer and has the power to affirm cultural norms, should it be more holistic and lessen cultural individuality to become truly global, or more specific and culturally individual to serve more nuanced and localized needs?

 

In other words, is global design really effective?

 

I feel that I can’t answer these questions conclusively just yet, maybe I never will be to do so. Maybe the answers to these will become more apparent as I progress further in my career as a designer. Maybe reason will prevail as it always does and the next iteration of design will contain desirable amounts of both individual creativity and mass input to accommodate the nuances which both groups have to offer. Until then,I feel that it is best that both creators and users practice a holistic approach to things.

 

But one thing is for certain – I have come to learn the immense value of collaboration and experienced the joy in engaging in service design. In closing, I must say that this class been a great learning experience like no other, and I am nothing but proud to have been a part of it.

 

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