Below is the Google Slides presentation for this project, and a condensed version of the design case study. You can view the full case study online as well.

Context

This project was completed as part of the Spring 2019 course, “Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio,” in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The studio is a project-based course in which students partner with community-based organizations to design real-world civic media creations. The Spring 2019 version of this course was focused on “hacking hackathons” and organizing radically inclusive design events.

Team

This project’s design team consisted of two key collaborators: Bonnie Taylor and Samuel R. Mendez. Bonnie works in development and communications at Instituto del Progreso Latino. She has experience in documentary filmmaking, as well as in communications and management in the nonprofit sector. Sam is a master’s student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He has experience in video/animation production, as well as community-engaged public health research.

Project Partner: Instituto del Progreso Latino

Instituto del Progreso Latino, at-a-glance

Instituto del Progreso Latino (Instituto) is a Chicago nonprofit organization working on education, professional training, and employment services for the city’s Latinx immigrant community. It began its work as a 501(c)(3) organization in 1977. Today, its educational programs include:

• Career pathways training in:
  • Nursing
  • Manufacturing
  • Retail
• Adult basic education in:
  • English as a second language
  • Spanish literacy and elementary education.
• Youth Development
  • Escalera College Bridge program, offering tutoring, application assistance, volunteer/internship placement, and mentoring
  • Keep Educating Youth program, offering tutoring, physical activity, and meals for elementary students when school is out
  • Early learning programming for young children whose parents are attending classes at Instituto

In addition, Instituto operates three schools, serving a wide array of students:

• Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, providing high school students with an education that focuses on preparation for college and careers in health care
• Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, designed for students 17 to 21 years old who are returning to school
• Instituto College, currently offering a School of Nursing, with plans to issue Associate Degrees in healthcare, production and operations, manufacturing management, and more

Beyond educational and professional development programming, Instituto also offers citizenship services.

Ecosystem Map

City Services in Pilsen

There are a number city institutions working in Pilsen to help residents achieve their goals in education, employment, youth development, and economic security. As Instituto works with a population that the city overall struggles to adequately serve, it is important to understand Instituto’s work within this public service context:

• Chicago Public Library
  • Lozano Branch
• Chicago Public Schools
  • Benito Juarez High School
  • Manuel Perez Elementary School
  • Peter Cooper Elementary Dual Language Academy
  • Pilsen Elementary Community Academy
• Chicago Park District
  • Dvorak Park Fieldhouse
• WIC – Lower West Side

Other cultural, educational, and workforce development organizations in Pilsen

There are a number of institutions and organizations working formally in education and workforce development in Pilsen. It is important to understand Instituto’s work as part of a constellation of organizations working toward similar goals in the neighborhood:

• Casa Aztlan
• Casa de Cultura Carloa Cortez
• Casa Juan Diego Youth Center
• Casa Michoacán
• Chicago Commons – Guadalupano Family Center
• El Valor
• Elevarte Community Studio
• Frida K Community Organization
• Spanish Coalition for Housing
• Latin American Youth Center
• Mujeres Latinas en Accion
• National Museum of Mexican Art
• Pilsen Montessori
• Poder Works
• Saint Ann School
• Saint Paul Parochial School
• SER Central States
• St Pius V School
• St Procopius School
• YMCA – Rauner Family

Economic development organizations in Pilsen

There are several organizations that focus on the economic development of Pilsen. Given the ongoing tensions between plans to spur the economic development of the area’s industry and the need to advance the economic empowerment of current residents, it is important to view Instituto’s work in the context of such organizations:

• Economic Strategies Development Corporation
• Greater Pilsen Economic Development Association
• The Resurrection Project

Organizations offering educational and cultural services to a Spanish-speaking population across Chicago

There are other nonprofit organizations across Chicago working with Latinx communities and Spanish-speaking populations. A few in particular have a big impact on local culture and might reach the people that Instituto would like to inform about their classes and development programs. Though these groups may not operate in exactly the same service sector, it is important to view Instituto’s outreach work within this broader context:

• AfriCaribe
• Casa Central
• Chicago Bilingual Nurse Consortium
• Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement
• Puerto Rican Cultural Center
• Universidad Popular

Funders, for Instituto and similar organizations in Chicago

There are a number of foundation and governmental sources of funding that Instituto and other 501(c)(3) organizations in Chicago currently turn to for funding. Although the grant funding may be specifically for work with certain population groups or in certain kinds of services, it is important to understand Instituto’s work within the funding ecosystem for 501(c)(3) organizations working with Spanish-speaking populations in the Chicago area.

• Allstate Foundation
• Alphawood Foundation
• Chicago Community Trust
• Illinois Community College Board
• Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership
• Chicago Department of Family & Support Services
• Chicago Foundation for Women
• Community Memorial Foundation
• Crown Family Philanthropies
• Field Foundation of Illinois
• Franciscan Sisters of Chicago
• Greer Foundation
• Irving Harris Foundation
• JPMorgan Chase Foundation
• Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation – Chicago
• Marguerite Casey Foundation
• Michael Reese Heath Trust
• National Able Network
• Northern Trust
• Oak Park River Forest Community Foundation
• Pritzker Foundation
• Illinois Department of Human Services
• John S. & James L. Knight Foundation
• Lloyd A Fry Foundation
• Polk Bros. Foundation
• Comcast, NBC5, and Telemundo Foundation
• Robert R. McCormick Foundation
• New York Life Foundation
• Speh Family Foundation
• TJX Foundation
• UnidosUS
• VNA Foundation
• Walmart Foundation
• White Sox Community Fund, a McCormick Foundation Fund
• United Way of Metro Chicago

Design Prompt

The prompt for this design project was to come up with a way of sharing program success stories with a wide audience. Success stories are currently gathered annually across Instituto’s wide array of programs as part of preparing annual reports. However, there is an opportunity to use more frequent sharing of such stories as part of outreach efforts to make community members aware of Instituto’s services. We were especially interested in ways of producing content that would be able to reach English- and Spanish-speaking populations. We approached this design prompt with an eye toward being able to create media content with Instituto clients at in-person events.

Design Justice Values

The Design Justice Network Principles informed this project’s co-design process. Three values in particular shaped thee process in the following ways:

1. Accountable, accessible, and collaborative process
   • We created a project timeline at the beginning of the project and came to an agreement of the roles we would each play. We made these agreements concrete through documentation in the form of a memorandum of understanding.
   • We kept meeting notes and prototypes in a shareable folder so other people at Instituto would be able to look in on the process if they wanted to.
2. Share design knowledge and tools
   • We shared with each other the design resources we had used in the past.
   • Sam shared resources from the Collaborative Design Studio class, as well as methods and exercises from past projects.
   • Bonnie shared her own educational resources on design processes, as well as analyses of illustrative examples of social media campaigns for us to draw from.
3. Prioritize design’s impact on the community
   • Throughout the process, we knew we would have ideas that we personally liked, but that might not make a lot of sense in the community Instituto works with. It was also important to try to get feedback that would let us know if some of our ideas might unintentionally exclude people or hit any dividing lines.

Background Research

The design process kicked off with background research to inform our approach to address this project’s design prompt.

Existing Resources

First, we took stock of current processes used to gather and share success stories as part of the annual reporting process. We walked through Bonnie’s current process of gathering storie. We also explored the affordances of Instituto’s website platform and content management system.

We saw an opportunity to enable the collection and sharing of stories with less depth and wider breadth through online methods, which would be more useful for reaching local community members than the longer stories used in the annual reports. Instituto’s current social media accounts also offered a useful starting point for thinking about how to engage local Chicago community members.

Analogous Examples

We also looked at the online activity of Illinois organizations that also served English- and Spanish-speaking populations: Mujeres Latinas en Acción, Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and the Joliet Spanish Community Center. We saw some useful examples for how to organize multilingual content, but we also saw that each organization handled its online presence quite differently. We recognized that there wouldn’t be a direct model to emulate or adapt, and a certain amount of experimentation and trial-and-error should be expected in this design process.

Local Expertise

We talked with an Instituto employee who specializes in partnerships and who has worked with Instituto’s university partners on community engagement projects. She urged us to think about local social media practices among Spanish-speaking populations, such as the importance of video and Youtube.

Prototyping Process

Cycle 1: Wide-Ranging Prototypes

Based off of the background research, we made and evaluated an initial set of lo-fi prototypes, ranging widely in form and audience:

• Zine: Hybrid booklets/fliers advertising specific Instituto programs.
  • The in-person idea was cool, but Instituto would benefit more from a more visible online presence.
• YouTube Series: Instituto OpenCourseWare.
  • This concept led to more questions than additional ideas.
• Success Story Form: an internal form on the website to send to instructors periodically, or fill out with clients at Instituto events.
  • This idea was seen as a potentially useful tool that the organization’s IT team could carry on with.
• Success Story Website Section: an easily accessible portion of the website for community members to see stories showing the range of programs and participants at Insituto.
  • We selected this idea as something worth building out regardless of the form that the main project idea would take. For example, stories from a social media campaign could be adapted to fit in the Instituto website.
• Social Media Campaign: #learningAcrossGenerations, #institutoFamily, and  #BiggestChangeIn4Words
  • We selected this as the main idea to pursue with this project. We liked the ideas that focused on community and mutual support.

Cycle 2: Social Media Campaign Prototypes

Based off of the results of the previous cycle, we focused this cycle on social media campaign prototypes. We started off with more background research on social media campaigns that seemed particularly relevant to the tone we wanted to achieve:

• Shout Your Abortion
  • Interesting as an example of a hashtag and campaign name that give you all the instructions you really need to know to participate
• Run As You Are
  • Interesting as a way of uniting people with a variety of different life experiences under the same umbrella
• Write for Rights
  • Interesting as an example of storytelling online
• FEED Supper
  • Interesting as an example of an in-person group activity, scaffolded through a social media campaign

Then, we developed 4 social media campaign prototypes that spoke to community support, friends celebrating each other, and intergenerational dynamics. We arranged a feedback session with people from various arms of Instituto, including instructors, a social worker, and a high school student. Their feedback focused on the need to be inclusive of all of the programs at Instituto if we were going to launch a single campaign. For example, though we wanted to highlight intergenerational touchpoints with Instituto, it is important to keep in mind that not all students will have that exact kind of support network. Their feedback also focused much more on a centralized social media campaign, rather than one approached as decentralized and openly participatory. Finally, feedback session participants were eager to help connect us with more high school students who could help provide feedback on the next round of ideas.

During this period, we also worked on fleshing out a new section of the website that would allow stories to be viewed by program, without cluttering up the main navigation. This required some trial and error in working with Instituto’s website platform and content management system. We received all-around positive feedback on this part of the project.

Final Prototypes, Beginning of Cycle 3

Website Section

Figure 2: Success Stories website section.

This website section is effectively ready to go, waiting for content to fill it with. We can include English and Spanish translations pretty easily on each page. We may run into more hiccups as we try to update each section, but it is good for our purposes now.

Social Media Campaign

Figure 3: Prototype Mock-ups resulting from cycle 2 of development, serving as the starting point for cycle 3.

None of these prototypes is exactly what we’re looking for, but we’re at the point now that we are ready to get feedback directly from community members that Insituto serves. The overwhelming feeling at the table was that this is a necessary next step that we are ready for.

Next Cycle

The next cycle of development for this project will start with feedback sessions with high school students on the final prototypes as seen in Figure 3. There are plans to present the project at the next board meeting in the summer. Overall, other people working at Instituto are very enthusiastic about the project and about the partnership developing with Instituto.

Although this process did not produce a set of tangible outputs that Insituto can immediately use, it did enable a lot of co-learning and a lot of relationship building. In the context of a population that has a strained relationship with teams coming from high profile universities, this is an incredibly important outcome that must precede the kind of work we’re still looking forward too, e.g. direct community outreach.

Reflection and Next Steps

Sam’s Reflections:

The feedback session with the staff highlighted some key factors to keep in mind as we move forward with this project: people responded well to the aspects of the images and captions that portrayed an image of mutual support. The feedback focused on the campaign as something centralized, though our mockups were focused on how people might participate in a social media campaign on their own. We will emphasize this aspect of the campaign and focus more on how we would fit specific event photographs into a story-sharing format through our social media campaign ideas. Overall, the people around the table saw the ideas as workable, and were excited to get the ideas in front of students in various programs, which will be our next step. I think this internal process and context-setting for the project was an important part of not just rushing through a design project without regard for the local culture at the partner institution. Context setting was very important within the context of the meeting, and I was glad the people at the table were able to get a better idea of where I am coming from and how Bonnie and I are approaching this project as something that will benefit everyone involved.

I’m excited to continue working on this project and strengthening my relationship with Instituto as I work on other media projects with them moving forward as well.

Bonnie’s Reflections

The feedback session with the staff was crucial to the success of this project. They provided valuable insights and criticisms that helped us restructure how we would present the project to future focus groups. Staff members were actively engaged and asked questions, in addition to requesting clarification as needed. Everyone at the table was invested in the success of this project and how it would raise awareness about Instituto in the future.

Overall, the project has progressed in line with my expectations. We are in the ideal place to test how it will be received among focus groups and tweak it in line with their feedback. Working with Sam has been a pleasure and I feel very confident that it will be well received as we fine tune it over the next couple of months.

Existing web platform

The current website platform uses a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) visual editor. That makes it very user friendly for the staff, while limiting layout options, interaction possibilities, etc. It also includes features to schedule, make plans, and other procedural tasks common in the education sector. It also includes a built-in form creator, and response collection platform.

Existing success stories

Existing documented success stories have been collected largely for the purposes of annual reports. There are a few in the form of a paragraph-long third-person narrative and picture of someone who went through a program, alongside some statistics about that program as a whole. Others are a page long with an accompanying photo. These stories are all in English, and are not shared out with the community in a systematic way.

Examples from other community organizations

I looked at three organizations’ online presence to get an idea of how other organizations serving a Spanish- and English-speaking population share their work online. There were some useful ideas, but nothing that addressed the challenges in an ideal way. I might need to ask more people for resources/models to take inspiration from.

Literature Search

A Pew survey of US Latino news media sources suggests that using online methods might be a good way of reaching Millenials and Gen X Latino populations, with a lower share of Baby Boomers (though still a significant amount). That same survey also suggests that we should put materials online in Spanish to reach a foreign-born population, which community partners noted in observations of response when material is put online in Spanish.

current work process

The current process to collect success stories is pretty involved. It involves connecting with clients via program staff, interviewing the clients, asking for a photo submission, and writing it up to varying lengths for use in materials like an annual report.

Ecosystem Map

Highest priority personas

In thinking about this design project, it is helpful to think about a few key personas that we can imagine interacting with our design in some way. For this design, we are focusing on communications staff, Spanish-speaking clients, and funders.

Anticipated Challenges

Sustainability

One key challenge is that templates, workflows, solutions must be able to stand on their own. Ideally they won’t even require new accounts for free online services. Money, time, and energy are all valuable resources and the best effort needs to be made to conserve time and energy in a project without a budget.

Multiple Audiences

I have a sense of a tension between wanting to give funders a clearer idea of what Instituto does, as well as giving local community members a better idea of what Instituto does. The messages we would want to send to both groups come from the same place, but might need to emphasize different things or take different forms. I think a significant challenge will be coming up with a process that can either speak to both at the same time, or easily enough lead to multiple outputs from the same source material.

Next steps

• Talk with other people doing communications work within my networks.
• Create lo-fi prototypes for more concrete feedback from others at Instituto. None of the items mentioned above takes that much effort for me to produce an unpolished version with existing materials or placeholder text/media.

Questions for the class

• Have you seen any community organizations taking a bilingual approach to online communication, which could serve as a model?
• Do you have any ideas about how to make this process/outputs more relevant to educational programs and participants themselves?
• I feel like I’m a little too limited in my thinking right now. What are some wild ideas you have about this communication topic, without any regard to feasibility? I could use some out-there inspiration.

Personal Notes

I find it important to note a few things before presenting my reflections on the event:

1. I have not had the lived experience of disability. These reflections come from my own attempts to think more critically about my role as an ally.
2. I had a small part in helping to prepare the ATHack event this year, and my main planning contributions were around documentation. I present only my own personal views here.
3. Related to the above, I had a positive impression of the organizers and the event itself before going into it. I aim to present constructive criticism in this blog post that I can build on as I hope to have a more active role in planning next year’s event.
4. I will not really dive into an examination of the politics around the category of “assistive” tech. That could be a whole article of its own (in this case, one written by Sara Hendren).

ATHack Overview

ATHack is a student-led hackathon at MIT focused on assistive technology, i.e. technology designed specifically for the needs of people with disabilities. Within the broad terrain of accessibility and assistive technology, ATHack has a specific scope of social and educational goals, as written in its mission statement:

Our mission is to make the world more accessible to everyone
 by building connections within our community and fostering collaborative efforts to create inclusive technology. Through ATHack, we introduce students to the fun (and challenging) design space of assistive technology while building connections between community members, engineers, and designers. We hope to inspire participants to pursue projects in the AT space in the future.

The event’s central concept is that the planning team matches student “hacker” teams to form a partnership with a “co-designer”. Co-designers are people living with disabilities who come in with a design challenge/prompt to collaborate on with hackers, typically based off of a hurdle they face in daily life. There is an open call for participant applications, though there is a (flexible) emphasis on attending two in-person events at MIT. The primary purpose of the applications is to ensure a certain level of commitment to the 3-week timeline of the event, as well as a good fit with the event’s overall goal of a collaborative learning process, rather than a completely ready-to-deploy project.

Event Format

The event is split into 2 parts. The first is an introductory dinner where hackers meet co-designers, learn about their particular design prompts, and submit an online preference list for which co-designer’s team they’d like to join. After a matching process by the event organizers, teams have about three weeks to get to know each other, learn more about the co-designer’s problem space, brainstorm, and order materials for from the event organizers. The second part of the event is a 12-hour hackathon, ending with brief project presentations and an awards ceremony in which teams are honored for categories including usability, innovation, and documentation.

Design Justice Strengths

The major strengths of this event as seen through a Design Justice lens come from its emphasis on a collaborative design process that centers the expertise of a co-designer.

Co-Designer Collaboration

The organizers are very purposeful about their language, framing, and event organization to set the tone that hackers are addressing design challenges with co-designers, not for co-designers. The most obvious way this comes across is in the language around co-designers. Importantly, the structure of the event underscores this message as well. Teams are given a few weeks so that all team members can learn more from the co-designer about their specific design prompt. Teams are expected to learn from the expertise of their co-designers, and they are expected to be able to show how their project meets the needs and engages with the contributions of their co-designer. This learning process centers the co-designer, and can include activities ranging from interviews to tagging along on a typical commute or shopping trip.

Collaborative Flexibility

There is a lot of flexibility in how co-designer teams are arranged. Some co-designers have formal engineering backgrounds and come in with prototypes or concepts to iterate over with a team in terms familiar to them. Others come in with a rich understanding of a particular problem space, and they’re looking for a team who can help brainstorm solutions and test them out. Some want firsthand experience in every stage of the design process, while others would rather provide expertise/feedback at particular stages. Some collaborate with their teams independently, while others collaborate along with parents or caretakers. The event is organized such that none of these differences in collaborative process is treated as the norm or as the ideal. There is no “best” way to collaborate, but there are processes that are better fits for individual teams.

The 3-week lead-up to the hackathon event also allows for increased options for remote collaborators. Hackers and co-designers who couldn’t make it to the hackathon event due to unforeseen circumstances were still able to meaningfully engage remotely day-of thanks to the time spent collaborating ahead of time.

Emphasis on Real-World Needs

At the introductory dinner, event organizers stress that a good design isn’t necessarily one that uses the newest and flashiest technologies. A good design is one that meets the needs of the person who will use it, and there is a usability award at the end of the hackathon to honor that. A good design is also one that is documented well enough that the process can be repeated, and there is a documentation award at the end of the hackathon to honor that.

As with many hackathons, this event has a few big-name corporate sponsors . However, unlike many other hackathons, their involvement is very minimal. Sponsors do not receive participant resumes, and they do not send any promotional materials to the event. This greatly reduces any incentive a team might have to build a flashy but unusable tool that might grab the attention of an outside onlooker.

Design Justice Opportunities for Improvement

Where the event succeeds in centering voices of co-designers on individual teams, it could improve on its own organization process to follow the co-design model in planning the event itself. If there is difficulty in recruiting event co-designers, maybe the first iteration of this process improvement could be in the form of an advisory committee of particularly engaged co-designers from past hackathons.

Planning Follow-Up

In class, we talked about the benefits of engaging community partners and co-designers in hackathons, but we did not talk about the challenges of follow-up with them. Event follow-up is a tricky subject for hackathons that promote strong, short-term personal connection with co-designers. How do teams navigate a situation where they don’t get as far with projects as they thought they would? What about when they get farther than they imagined, and their project seems like it could be quite close to being deployable? The event organizers say in the application and at both in-person events that participants are not expected to work on their project beyond the timeline of the hackathon. However, some teams are very excited to continue work on their project past the timeline of the hackathon. It’s not hard to imagine teams’ expectations may fall out of alignment as people get caught up in the excitement of the day’s progress or in the disappointment of not accomplishing everything they thought they would. I wonder what it would look like to adapt a Working Agreement for use in this context so it’s accessible and non-intimidating for everyone involved? Is there a guided conversation teams can have built in to the hackathon schedule, to discuss whether and how they want to continue work on their project?

Linking Out to Advocacy Issues

ATHack targets the scope of its projects to its educational goals and its timeline. The hackathon projects end up targeting a specific individual experience, which makes a lot of sense for a short-term commitment. However, evident in many of the presentations at the end of the hackathon is the fact that the co-designers’ experiences are not just their own. They come in with design challenges in the context of broader issues, for example: existing assistive technology that doesn’t assume the active lifestyle they lead, existing assistive technology that’s not very usable independently, or lack of accessible options for an activity of daily life. Some co-designers call these broader issues out specifically, while others do not. I wonder what it might look like to be able to link event attendees with local advocacy groups that might be pushing for industry/policy change, or service organizations that focus on disability. Could there be brief presentations from such groups at the closing dinner/ceremony at the end of the hackathon? Could the organizers invite representatives from these local organizations to be judges at the hackathon, or sit and talk with participants at the closing dinner?

Managing Space

The hackathon is hosted in the Beaver Works space, with a few distinct rooms for group work. The room where most of the software-focused teams were working was a little hard to navigate once teams were settled in and working there. Though there is probably a little more room to rearrange the space for better accessibility, the most straightforward solution is probably to reduce the number of software-focused teams. Alternatively, there might be space for a spillover room for participants, since it’s easier to find a space suitable for teams working on software projects. However, both of these potential solutions come with serious downsides for the event, and a spillover room creates more potential logistic issues, like the ones this event faced due to inclement weather.

Overall, the rest of the physical setup works when everyone is not in the same room, which basically only happens at the end of the day. This is typically in a different venue on campus more suited for all the participants to navigate at the same time. However, this year there was a last-minute change in location for the event closing, due to inclement weather. In responding to participant concerns in getting to the other campus location in snowy conditions, the event closing ended up being in a space that wasn’t really suited for it. I think it’s easy to say that there should be a better Plan B for that kind of situation, but I am not sure what that would actually look like. A combination of lab/classroom/workshop spaces works really well for this hackathon, but not well for a dinner or closing ceremony, and vice versa. This might be a case where an advisory board or co-designers for the event itself could help find a suitable back-up plan, or a completely new way to think about closing the event.

Epistemology

• Kinds of knowledge constructed
  • The biggest form of knowledge I see myself gaining is around the collaborative process. I hope that all project partners can learn more about what forms of communication and organization will work in this context to accomplish our goals of collecting and sharing out success stories from within the organization.
• Degree of trust in the knowledge
  • I hope that the stories we are able to collect as  result of this design collaboration feel genuine and connected to what’s actually going on in the city. I hope to enable the creation of stories that people trust and that people feel a personal connection to.
• Potential for transfer
  • It would be nice to see a workflow and supporting tools that could be shared freely online.
• Sharing of knowledge
  • I hope that I am able to help design a system of sharing and collecting stories from my community organization partner that allows community members and a wider public to see the assets and successes of Pilsen/Chicago.

Values

• Driving values
  • I think the driving values of this project are respect for community of Pilsen and equity in decision-making.
• Change of values in the process
  • I don’t forsee any changes of values in this process. But I do hope that project partners feel comfortable pointing out when values seem to have shifted unintentionally, or when they need to shift to respond to unforeseen circumstances.
• Reflection of values in the decisions
  • I hope that all decisions are agreed upon with regards to the goals and expectations of this project as agreed upon at the beginning of the collaboration process. I hope this shared understanding will contribute to mutual trust and shared ownership of decisions made. And I hope my project partner’s immersion in the community they serve help guide me to learn about any of my own blindspots I may have in my current position as a student at MIT.

Outcomes

• Different interpretations of outcomes
  • I hope the interpretations of outcomes are pretty well aligned, owing to work put in at the beginning of the collaboration to align expectations and goals
• Owner of outcomes
  • Instituto will be the owner of the outcome, though I hope that a process we come up with can be shared more widely to other organizations that might be able to benefit from what we learn.
• Sustainability of outcomes
  • I hope that the outcome of this project is a process that can be used for several years.

Stakeholders

• Stakeholders
  • Right now, the stakeholders in this process are the folks at Instituto and myself. It would be nice if
• Participants
  • I hope that we are able to share out the success stories of the community that Instituto serves in a way that affirms and creates joy. I also hope that there might be a way to share stories back with the community in a way that makes them accessible and enjoyable memories/commemorations.
• Benefits for stakeholders and participants
  • Instituto will have a tool/workflow that helps fill a communication need, and I hope the participants are able to feel celebrated and affirmed, and possibly have access to a recording of their success in an enjoyable way.
• End of project
  • When this project ends, I hope that I am able to integrate this work with other projects I am working on with Instituto, and help maintain/refine this project as needed. However, I do hope that this project can develop something useful for Instituto, that they are able to sustain without much outside intervention. I hope I can help share any lessons learned with other similar groups as well.

In this semester’s codesign studio, I mainly hope to support ongoing work in the Boston area around some aspect of social equity. My focus in my academic work is usually some aspect of health equity. It’ll be interesting to see how this focus can bring something useful to the table for an organization working on a topic that might not seem directly related at first glance. I’m super excited to learn from people who have been focusing on a different set of social issues than I’ve been.

On the production side of this class, I have skills in animation, video, and basic front-end web development. I’m constantly exploring new methods of expressing ideas and bringing people together to discuss them. Most recently that’s included performing and writing short stage pieces. I enjoy the surprises that pop up when I’m helping to figure out what methods are best suited to realize a certain idea and accomplish engagement goals. In this codesign studio, I’m looking forward to the process of exploration and finding the right methods to help a community organization further its goals through a specific project.

I think the codesign process should be something that invites codesigners to flip on its head, rotate, take apart, and toss around to find the best angle from which to approach their goals. I think it should be a cycle without a very clear starting or ending point, both exciting and challenging in its flexibility. I represented these qualities through my abstract image in our “Name That Tech” exercise.

As such, I don’t yet have a clear idea of what I want to work on in this studio. I hope to find the area where I can best contribute by learning more about some of the projects and groups that classmates have connections to.