Week 9 Generative Research and Presentation

03/28 Sunday

🌹 Rose:

• Talk with Stacey
• Developing concept cards
• Prepping the workshops

🌱 Bud:

• Workshops (x4)

🌵 Thorn:

• External stresses on jobs and the body
• Previous workshops
• Client presentation participation
• Sleep deprivation

Sunday Workshops: Future Personas

Our day began with a sprint to finalize our research protocol and add finishing touches to our digital workshop before participants arrived. Two of our classmates Xuehui and Yueru had generously agreed to be our test subjects for this workshop before we ran it through with our participants. In total by the end of the day we would run three workshops. The first would be the test, then a workshop with young parents and finally a workshop with teenagers.

For young parents (early 30s) we asked them to talk about their child (3 years old) and build out a digital collage/persona based on what they thought. We would then ask them to think about their child 10 years into the future. What were their interests, fears, etc. Often the parents were hesitant to project too strongly onto their children in the future. Furthermore the idea of thinking this far into the future proved to be a challenge.

For our teenage participants we asked them to build out the persona for themselves and then to project themselves 10 years into the future. During this time we saw an interesting difference in confidence when projecting forward based on their life situations. One participant who was still in highschool but making plans and thinking about college had an easy time projecting into the future. She felt confident about her choices and where she wanted to go. The other participant was a freshman in college and felt much more unsure when projecting. She expressed that she wasn’t really sure what her strengths were. There is a possibility here that confidence ebbs and flows depending on where you are in the journey of your academic path and that it may shift in a new environment.

Many of the participants had difficulty using Miro, the platform we chose to host this workshop on so we ended up playing the role of the hands for them. This included typing out quotes and aspects they mentioned and pulling in images that were relevant to the subject material for them.

Sunday Workshops: Concept Card Speed Dating

Our final activity of the workshops was the conpet card speed dating. Essentially we would present the 4 cards to the participants and give them a brief pitch on each one. Then we would ask them to choose one that they found interesting and why. We would also probe for why they didn’t choose other cards. We are still in the process of sythesizing these findings at this time.

03/29 Prepping for Presentation

While unable to synthesize our current findings we did identify some potential trends to present on Wednesday to Prospect Studios. Peter Scupeli was able to view our initial presentation and give insights and feedback. One of the most impactful messages was that currently and in the future we will need to justify how our design principles shaped the concepts we created.

At night we were also able to perform another workshop with young parents. This time their children’s ages were 5 so we were able to project into their highschool days for further insights. More on this to come later.

04/01 Prospect Studio Presentation

By presenting to Fiona and her team we were able to get valuable feedback on what was working in the concepts we had generated and ways to adjust our approaches. They felt that our concepts were in alignment with the Santa Clara futures plan and were excited about the direction they were going. Suprisingly many of the team members of Prospect Studios favored the Culture Game concept of ours (one that was not favored by any of our participants) and gave advice on ways to reframe it.

04/03 Student Facing Employees Workshop

Our final workshop that we did was with three employees of the company PIC. Through their work they have specialized in helping teens on their path whether to college or internships or any number of futures available to them. They spoke with passion and a great deal of knowledge about the people they have worked with in the past and where they could go in the future. One employee had also spent a great deal of time working with latinx youths in the Boston area. While not entirely the same we do see some correlation with the demographic there and in Santa Clara.

With all of the workshops done it will now fall on us to synthesize our finding next week and hone our concept.