designing with people

duration:

Aug. 27 - Sept. 19

group members:

Alicia Zhang

Brigitte Gurrola

Isabella Pino

Will Kaufman

context

Approaches to user research have quickly shifted from market research techniques that value users only as customers (design for people) to techniques such as co-design that value users as a key component of a designer’s success (design with people). Co-design represents a broad set of activities that include stakeholders and users as peers in the design process, particularly on the “fuzzy front end” where needs are connected with potential framings of the problem and selection of development approaches.

goal

In this project, your goal is to use co-design or participatory design methods as a mechanism to engage user
and stakeholders and their knowledge in relation to your project 1 context. As part of your research strategy,
you will identify, plan, and execute activities that can be conducted with different levels and types of
stakeholders in the context of a co-design workshop. The outcomes of the planning and execution of the
workshop will inform a roadmap for the development of web resources as part of project 1: responsive and local.

process

understanding project

As part of a larger project in which we were tasked with designing a solution to a community-based issue among the Purdue student body or within the Lafayette, IN community, our team was tasked with designing with the users, rather than solely for the users.
Thus, our group conducted a co-design workshop in which we engaged different levels of stakeholders in an engaging set of activities to gain valuable perspectives while continuing with our design.

topic

food access and food education in areas prone to food deserts

Before our workshop, we recruited participants for the workshop, specifically Purdue students who lived in parts of campus where fresh food may be, at times, inaccessible — that is, not in a dorm with a dining hall. All of our participants lived outside of campus dorms; most lived in houses or apartments but some lived in Greek housing. Ultimately, we wanted to include a diverse set of perspectives in terms of food access.
We also assigned roles for each team member, as outlined in our protocol at the QR code below. We gathered resources such as dry erase markers, pens, printed maps, cameras, and (of course) pizza, as an incentive for participants.

codesign protocol

codesign videos

codesign activities

My group created four different activities to get more information about our focus:

1. what is food access?

Overview
Each person has a different view associated with food access. We broke up our participants into three groups, each with their own ideas and thoughts on what food meant to them. The groups talked for about 7 minutes amongst themselves and later shared with the rest of the room what interesting findings, similarities, and differences they had.

Findings
After listening to the conversations between each group, we learned most people only noticed the fast food restaurants around campus and believed their only source of fresh food was the farmers market on campus every Thursday throughout some months of the year. There were also a few people who did not believe that West Lafayette or Lafayette was considered a food desert.

Going Forward
With the insights gathered, we will take into account the different experiences people had in regards to what a food desert and food access means to them in order to make a more inclusive design — that is, taking into account people’s different experiences with food access.

2. food fiesta

Overview
We wanted to gain insights on the participants’ experience with food and food access. In this activity, we asked the participants to write down on Post-It notes what they would do in a given, real-life scenario. We gave participants the following scenario:
Imagine you are sitting at home on a weekend night and realize you are very hungry. What would you do in this situation, and where would you go?

Findings
To analyze the data collected and gain more insights about the participants’ diverse experiences with food, we gathered all Post-It results and created an affinity diagram. After analyzing the affinity diagram, we found out that most people would eat fast food on a regular weekend. Moreover, we also found out that people would look for a quick snack or cook at home, given the resources, in an attempt to save a few dollars.

Going Forward
By using the affinity diagram results here, we can observe how people act in various situations where food access is an issue.

3. mapping your route

Overview
Each of us have different means of getting food. There are different routes we take to access our meals. Through this activity, we wanted to know what routes our participants take and how long it takes them to get access to their meals. Thus, we provided each participant with a blank map and asked them to route any of their food trips from the prior two weeks, and how they traveled.

Findings
After analyzing the maps, we discovered that almost every map had routes to stores that offered groceries, such as Walmart, Payless, and Target. The average travel distance was about four miles and the range of time was 5 minutes to 1 hour depending on mode of transportation. The longer times were from walking or when taking the bus and the shorter times were from driving in a car.

Going Forward
We plan on ideating out ways to mitigate the hassle of trying to get food. Using the information gathered here, we can see where people are mostly going to shop and what distances they travel to get there, and what transportation method they employ.

4. what do you do?

Overview
In this activity, our participants had to pick one or two routes from the map activity and describe what they said, thought, did, and felt when they did not have access to food. We decided to make this activity, an empathy map, to understand and empathize with our participants to better understand their situation, potential pain points, and goals concerning food accessibility. Since our participants did not have a UX background, we decided to call this activity “what do you do?“ to not overwhelm the participants with unfamiliar jargon.

Findings
After analyzing what people wrote on the board, we found a variety of experiences throughout each subsection of the empathy map. With say, many of them wrote their excitement for food and questions they had regarding the place they were going to. With think, many thought about spending, their diet, and their transportation. With do, many of them wrote they would go out to eat or snack. With feel, many felt hungry, worried, and tired.

Going Forward
We plan to use these pain points and actions to create an experience or journey map. We hope to observe where there is a potential area where we could make an impact to the students suffering from food deserts or lack of food education.

analysis

To look deeper into the food habits of our participants, we utilized the Post-Its from our second activity to create an affinity diagram. We discovered three main areas students gravitate toward to obtain food: home cooking, fast food, and sit-down restaurants. Insights we drew are based on our analysis with the affinity diagram and conversations we had in our workshop.

A major insight that we found when looking over our empathy map was the fact that people buy out food not necessarily because they do not have the ingredients to make the food, but because they do not exactly know what to make so they find it easier to buy food to prevent the time needed in investigating what to make.
Another important takeaway from the empathy map and also from conversation between the group was the misconception between the amount of money it takes to meal prep versus the amount of money it takes to buy a meal. Some people find buying food for meal preparation to be more expensive, when in our codesign, some participants argued that it can actually be more cost-effective and ultimately last longer.

Home cooking
Students who live in housing with an accessible kitchen (such as an apartment) tended to purchase their own food to cook at home but often resorted to quicker options such as fast food in times where they did not know what meal to cook despite the diverse choices in their refrigerator.

Fast food
Students who were especially in a rush or those with a kitchen that did not want to spend the time to cook a meal often resorted to fast food for a quick meal, despite its unhealthy qualities.

Restaurants
Students who considered meals to be a social occasion often flocked to nearby restaurants; they did not drive more than 10 minutes to a restaurant and overall stayed local for convenience.

future roadmap

We plan on using our insights into our Project 1: Responsive and Local by focusing our scope down to educating students about cost-effective food habits through meal preparation. We decided to go this direction because of the insights gathered during our co-design.

Throughout our co-design, we continuously found that people on campus did have access to food; however, after a long day of classes and extracurriculars, they did not have the energy left in them to cook the food at home and resorted to eating fast food or at a restaurants.
Moreover, despite access to food, home cooks did not know what to make. Our participants often felt stumped when trying to figure out what to make with certain ingredients found in their kitchens.
There was a misconception about purchasing and cooking food. Some people thought that buying food in the grocery stores and subsequently cooking meals at home will end up being more expensive than purchasing meals at fast food and sit-down restaurants.

reflection

Conducting a co-design workshop was a first experience for each of us. Throughout this experience, we learned to plan an interactive, engaging workshop from the ground up. We did not receive a very large amount of guidance on creating this co-design workshop which we admired because it pushed us to carve our own path and take risks that we may have not taken with more guidance.
Through our co-design, we were also able to notice the value the participants provided in the ideation process. Doing this co-design made apparent the fact that this activity did not just aid in our academic and professional growth, but contributed to our future design decisions in Project 1: Responsive and Local. For future projects, we will consider conducting another co-design workshop now that we realize how impactful something like this can be.