This class has been very rewarding in that it has guided us through a process that I hope to continue to go through after graduating when working with community partners. It has helped me reflect on how to position myself in relation to community organizations, and ways in which I can be more intentional with collaboration and relationship-building. I appreciated the ways in which listening methods, writing the design brief, and crits on our design brief presentations were integrated into the process. The weekly progress report to the class also helped push the work forward. Overall I have appreciated the opportunity to get more involved with CPA Boston through the class, and to get more connected with Boston, which was important to me coming here as a graduate student.

Questions I continue to have include 1) how to design with the community in a way that balances their needs with our skills and interests, and 2) how to facilitate collective creative processes instead of being narrowed down into a specific project at the beginning of our relationship with the community organization.

My concern is that we may be a little behind the class schedule (still have to power map and write a project agreement!) but I think we have a good idea of how to move forward.

I am reverting to my past idea — refugee relocation. I am looking forward to working with Talent Beyond Boundaries in late April and seeing if there is support in that organization for using a design approach with more engagement of refugees.
My design brief and presentation are here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VROKmld8Gshya5zLS3b_Tc8ISyUuORPM

Initial Learning Goal #1:
Exploring innovative and design-driven methods of approaching issues that are difficult to communicate…

Collaborating with Chinese Progressive Association itself requires a lot of learning, because their expertise is so diverse and layered. As a designer with no previous knowledge about the organization, I am approaching issues that are difficult to communicate and even understand myself, such as land trusts, public parcels, and data disaggregation. Nonetheless, this experience helps me see where others can feel stuck when interacting with the missions of the organization.

Creating power maps and utilizing listening methods have been immensely helpful, because these tools allow me to see the bigger picture while not ignoring the individual narratives and pain points.

Initial Learning Goal #2:
I actively seek out joyful moments in my design process…

Because a lot of my interaction with the organization and the potential of the project requires intense learning, there hasn’t been many delightful moments in co-designing with them. The dynamic of the organization is also very tense, and sometimes I don’t feel entirely comfortable with approaching strongly opinionated characters. The short time frame is also one of the challenges we must overcome. How do I co-design with people who don’t have the bandwidth, or with those who want quick answers to their questions?

My initial learning goals included: 

• Uniting administrative and creative practices — thinking about all assets of the project as creative. I think this helps stretch the boundaries of possibility through each element of the process. This has been a challenge, because communication with our partner has been sporadic based on limited capacity of the museum director. As a result, there has been much time dedicated to basic scheduling and administrative tasks that really haven’t felt creative. Perhaps my initial learning goal was a pipe dream and what I learned is that you can’t always unite the admin and the creative.
• Better insight on how to leverage technology & media in my practice. What might be helpful at this point is spending some time refining the muscle of how identity creative solutions to challenges & opportunities. I’m imagining almost a mock situation in class where we have to come up with creative solutions together for different orgs challenges, or maybe we do a rapid brainstorm for each of the other students’ projects. I feel like I’m still accessing my comfort zone of possible solutions for to address The Griot’s needs, rather than accessing new bodies of knowledge in terms of an ever more expansive and refined ability to help partners address problems in effective, sustainable and refreshing ways.
• Have better command of the north star within my practice (I called it my ‘nucleus’, which would be why I do the work, and to what end do I think it matters). One challenge of co-design is to have a strong sense of your contributions and expertise, but also be a deep listener and collaborator with your partner. Preferencing the voice of our partner over our own sometimes makes it hard to have our own voice. For example, right now we are having an interesting situation where one of our interviewees has said something somewhat contradictory to our central partner’s insight — how are we as an outside partner supposed to navigate and critically examine this? What guiding principals do we use — our own, our partner organization’s, our individual partner’s?

Other Lingering Questions

I’m still wondering what the best tactics are to be able to address the needs of a co-design partner when you do not possess the skills needed to address their challenge. If, for example, Lois chooses to work with 3D printing, should Aki & I master 3D printing and work with her, should we bring in a new partner who is more knowledgable, or should we try to find a different tactic that addresses the need? My gut says the first, that we collectively learn to use the tools that the work is calling for. But this still remains a question! Especially with the limited time of the class it is hard to accomplish mastery of a new skill and then also apply to a real life partner where there are real stakes.

It may be helpful for me to practice in class some of the methods we have discussed, like listening method, before trying them with partners. This will give a better sense of familiarity with some of the new tactics involved in co-design that will allow us to present these methods to our partner with a deeper understand of how to enact them and what mutual benefit we will gain from engaging with them.

I looked back at my first post for this class to refresh my memory about what my learning goals were.  This sentence that I wrote jumped out to me: “I am excited to learn more tools and use my curiosity and desire to find connections as a way to co-design new solutions.”

I am realizing this sentence sounds pretty vague!  And one reflection is I’m wishing I had written more concretely what my goals were so I could see if I was reaching them (or at least orienting to them).

Another thing I noticed is that my goal is “tool” oriented.  I have SO appreciated the tools I’ve learned from this class.  The listening methods, Daphne’s research on power mapping, writing a design brief, etc.  I have felt like I am learning some pretty specific tools that I hope to implement in my work going forward.  I also think that “tools” is just the tip of the iceberg of what we’re learning.  I feel like most of our work has been about giving me the chance to practice the framework of design justice.  I have been trying to be really intentional about thinking about my approach to life and work (in and out of the CoDesign Studio class) through Design Justice Principle 1: We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.  The idea that our work can be a tool for collective liberation really speaks to me and I keep thinking about how to implement that well.

I have also been reflecting on how much I wish we could speak with our partner more.  It’s hard to walk the line between showing her respect by diligently reaching out to communicate with her versus showing her respect by not burdening her too much with our outreach because she has so much to do.  I’m grappling with how to show up best for our partner and thinking about how much easier it is when you know your partner well.  Thankfully I have Mallory to help guide me!  And it’s reminding me that when I do any sort of design work in the future (for me, that will likely be policy design work), I need to make sure I bring the community based organizations I’ve worked with before into the room.  I’m better positioned to bring them into the room because I think I have a positive, developed, trusting relationship with them and I know them well enough to have a better sense of the cues that suggest whether I’m reaching out enough or too much.  And if I have that positive relationship with them and I can help bring them into rooms with my fancy Harvard degree, then hopefully there are other organizations that they know that I don’t know and they can bring those people into the room too.

Not being able to reach out to our partner more and not knowing more about how our partner is perceived has also been something I’ve been thinking about in terms of how to best show up for our partner.  I love getting to know new people, and it’s really hard to know how to support someone when you don’t know them.  So I think this is good exercise for getting to know a partner through what they say and what others say about them.  I think Mallory and I will be working to get more information on what others think about our partner to help build out our knowledge.  I wish we had done that a little bit sooner.

Design Brief: Paper and Presentation

Fascinate, Inc. is on a mission to bring cutting-edge technology to underrepresented students nationwide, while exciting them about STEM. During the course of the studio, we will be working together to create a cohesive process that will be used to have tech showcases on a consistent basis. We will also reach out to communities in order to get at least 500 people of color committed to being mentors to students of color where they reside.

For this design brief, we used the Activity Analysis and Affinity Diagrams listening methods. We believed the Activity Analysis method would be helpful in detailing what worked well and not so well during past showcases. The Affinity Diagrams method will foster creative ways to pitch the impact of these showcases to prospective partners.

The challenges we anticipate include generating quantifiable results and finding the financial resources needed for these projects. Nonetheless, we will be hopeful moving forward.

Link to Design Brief: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKhU7yqkJVEZOt3FTZ1Ve9vx2HsBMUU42piTr8W0-5I/edit#heading=h.g7ghxkjezuo3

Link to Slide Show: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PgZpOWncRB-LW6e8fKCAr6qDtF4asFEkbSkUTnf6LXE/edit#slide=id.g723630543_3_0

Massachusetts has some of the most expensive child care in the country and has some of the most vast income inequality in the United States. That coupled with limited spots in child care centers, swaths of child care deserts, strict laws around child care, and hefty fines for informal child care leaves in-state child care unaccessible and acts as a barrier for wealth accumulation.

Lower income families and single parents must either stay home, find inexpensive child care centers, or find other means for care. Mothers in the Roxbury, Dudley, Dorchester neighborhoods have explained that you “get what you give” suggesting that quality care is achieved when price is high. However, many families from these communities have found a system that provides personal quality care at the cheapest price: Family Child Care Centers.

Project Hope provides a variety of programs to assist the community, particularly women within the community. For example, they provide 11 families with shelter, the provide adult educational services, workforce development and employer partnerships, and offer a speakers bureau. They have a program dedicated to helping women with child care talents to start these Family Child Care Businesses in the Roxbury neighborhood. However, they struggle to get the community involved or to get them to take advantage of these programs unless they are already affiliated with Project Hope. Many of the mothers who came to Project Hope for assistance in times of struggle now are family child care business owners. However Project Hope feels that they have many more services to offer the entire community, not just those who are already engaged with the nonprofit. They hope to spread their services of promoting Family Child Care Businesses throughout their greater community.

The project so far has simply been referred to as “The Interactive Walkthrough” because we haven’t really come up with a title. Since the project if the first of its kind for our organization, we haven’t really needed to call it anything else. We’ll probably come up with a better title as we work more!

The project we are working on is meant to achieve the goal of presenting information to trans students and their families in a wholistic yet easy to follow manner. We decided a great way to do this is to create a choose-your-own-adventure style guide that gives information as users/players choose their paths in the interactive walkthrough. This project will be a lot more engaging than walls of text, and is a way to have all the necessary information in one easy to reach place.

Design brief: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pax6V618WbVHR-4-zaBH75Z2ZLv9PxSLlOrWgSWVreQ/edit?usp=sharing

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l2DVwKvdRrkegA2z0zZIH2aNmBTV2m28AnsfZMiyeE8/edit?usp=sharing

Project Title: Expanding the Notion of Public Good (Presentation Link)

The Chinatown Progressive Association (CPA) organizes working-class Chinese/Chinese-Americans in Boston around issues of housing and workers rights. Civic action and political education around economic and racial justice are embedded in their organizing model. Currently, CPA is fighting for community control and ownership of public land alongside other work around Chinatown Stabilization, including affordable housing preservation and helping tenants fight eviction and displacement from development. The Public Good Campaign at CPA is centered around this fight over community land ownership, specifically with Parcels 12, 21, 25-27.

We discovered after further conversation with Mark at CPA that the Public Good Campaign is linked to a larger 10-Year agenda effort led by Massachusetts Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition of community and labor organizations around Massachusetts. It is centered on pushing back against the increasing privatization of essential social services such as healthcare, and public transit.

During the weekly CPA staff meeting last Friday, Karen Chen, the director of CPA, voiced the lack of a deeper understanding of what is “public good.” Utilizing our skillset—urban design, art, graphic design—and co-design framework, we plan to help expand the notion of “public good” through public education. We hope to explore and engage with CPA members (including residents and workers) around what is at stake with increasing privatization for the working class Chinese/Chinese-American community, and how to mobilize and take action against it.

At the Right to the City Coalition meeting at the Asian American Resource Center, neighborhood leaders and residents from around Boston explored the definition and potential of collective power. They discussed how with collective power, Boston neighborhoods can resist the privatization of land, education, transportation, and labor markets. We hope to connect the notion of public good with community members’ everyday lives, expanding their understanding, aligning them with CPA’s mission, and ultimately mobilizing them to learn, build and take action collectively.