Progress in Action

I haven’t posted recently for a few reasons:

1. I’ve been super busy…
2. I’ve actually been working on a lot of things recently that have had to stay under the radar… UNTIL NOW

So I am happy to finally give some big updates on lots of projects I’ve been working on for over a year through COVID and all, and we’ve been making such great progress!!

First up, school update!

School

While I did start college in 2017 (4 years ago) I am not graduating this year. My time in New Zealand plus COVID made me shift things back, so I will now be graduating in May of 2022 with a Business Administration degree and Social Psychology certificate. In the mean time, I will be spending the summer and next two semesters continuing to coach gymnastics, conduct research in team dynamics, and work for the two non-profit organizations I’ve been with for almost 5 years – Trailblazers and Wish for WASH. Additionally, I am spending the summer writing my application for a Fulbright Fellowship to study education at grad school in Finland.

Trailblazers

Last I wrote about Trailblazers, the student driven magazine about transformative education that I co-founded four and a half years ago, I was just announcing our new partnership with UP for Learning and our search for a new production team. I’m excited to say that we now officially have an awesome team of 8 learners ranging from sophomore year of high school – freshman year of college and representing several different schools and states around the country!! We had our first team meeting in April and have been slowly making progress towards Issue 8 of our magazine which we hope to have published late June 2021. I’m excited for all of the new things that will come from this new team including more efficiency and long term sustainability internally and more diversity with the stories we share and hopefully an increase in how often we share as well! Additionally, for the first time ever Trailblazers Production Team members will be getting compensated for their work on the magazine which is super cool to see the organization grow in this way after 5 years! Anyone interested in connecting with Trailblazers can reach out to trailblazersedmagazine@gmail.com and/or follow us on Instagram and Twitter @TrailblazersEd

Wish for Wash

Similarly, I have also been working with the social impact organization Wish for WASH (W4W) for going on 5 years now and am excited to say that we have also seen lots of great progress this year! First off, with COVID we started making our design thinking workshops virtual. This involved a learning curve for sure, but now with almost a dozen virtual workshops under our belt, I would say we’ve gotten into a great flow. In fact, I foresee this shift to virtual facilitation for W4W having a longer lifespan than anticipated as it has allowed us to expand our audience reach drastically and make scheduling significantly simpler allowing us to facilitate more workshops per semester. We’ve also received great feedback on our virtual design jams with participants being particularly amazed and delighted by how interactive the workshop is despite being online.

On top of changing our mode of facilitation, this past semester we also began piloting our brand new design thinking process which I’m excited to finally talk about! CLAP stands for Connect, Learn, Apply, and Pitch.

We created this process for several reasons:

1. To place connection/empathy at the beginning of the design thinking process – connecting with your team, the topic, and your user before anything else from research to brainstorming happens.
2. To create a process with young learners as the users of our design tools, meaning tools needed to be very straight forward to use and graphically engaging.
3. To enhance the level of empathy developed in a short design jam workshop (under 4 hour challenge).

The third reason to me is what makes our design tools really differentiated from other processes and guidebooks. Empathy is the core of design thinking; the definition is literally, “human-centered problem solving,” and to be human-centered, one must first empathize with their user in order to problem solve together.

However, we observed during early design jams both in person and virtual that participants often struggled with connecting their brainstorming and final ideas back to their user’s specific needs when going through the whole process at such a rapid pace, especially as a newbee to design thinking. When working on a long term design challenge, a big part of the process is identifying your user group at large then doing lots of interviews and ethnography work in order to eventually narrow down your scope to focus on one particular user or a composite user that includes generalized needs and combines insights from several users. This level of empathy work takes a lot of time though – time that doesn’t exist in a two hour design jam. Furthermore, it can often be hard to have a live user present for a short design jam, so on top of minimal time, there is also the consideration of how do you empathize without having a live interaction with a person?

These challenges lead our design team to ask:

“How might we enhance the level of empathy developed in a short design jam?”

So we went through our own design challenge starting in the fall of 2019 in tandem with on boarding new team members and introducing them to design thinking. We did lots of research on different design thinking processes to make notes on things we liked, wished, and wondered about as we began work towards creating our own process. We did this as we continued to host design jams to gain feedback from participants about what they liked, wished, and wondered about the experience.

“I felt like the group text input on the brainstorming worked out well overall but was either a little confusing or a little hard to use for some – it would be great if you could figure out an easier method/tool for this!” – Teacher participant

“I attended all three DT jams. I love that the design jams moved from least stigmatizing to most stigmatizing and in the future I wonder if our school could make this a series of mini classes where students attend all sessions and really delve into building empathy within each topic. I loved the empathy maps and story building exercises of the intended user. It was a really easy framework for the students to understand without shying away from really understanding the user experience.” – Teacher participant

“I love things like this, and I am so happy I finally got involved, but would like to do even more! I also have a product idea, not for water conservation, but something I am trying to start for a business.” – Student participant

Over time we developed the idea of “personas.” We thought, “What if we took the three how might we statements we use for our short workshops [water, sanitation, and menstrual health], but made them into long term internal design jams. If we have 2-3 people on each team interact with at least 30 people each through interviews, surveys, activities, and ethnography sessions, then we could analyze the findings and create composite users which we then use in our workshops so that these ‘made up users’ weren’t actually so made up but instead based upon real stories of real people without needing them live at our workshops.”

So that’s exactly what we did!

Fall of 2020 was all about brainstorming each team members’ Persona Research Plan. For this plan, each W4W design team member brainstormed three potential persona concepts (For example, one of our workshop topics is: “HMW de-stigmatize menstrual health?” For this topic, one member’s three persona concepts included: a middle school girl, a menstrual health and hygiene activist, and a transgender man who still experiences menstruation.) For each persona concept, designers also brainstormed 3-5 key research questions, method of interaction (interview, survey, specific activity, etc), a list of 15 people they might connect with relevant to the concept, and their next 3 steps to move forward with that concept. After developing these plans, the team worked together to give feedback and narrow so that each person went from 3 concepts to one focus concept; for some this was just picking one of their 3, for others this meant maybe merging two concepts together, and for others we came up with a totally new focus based on the discussion.

After plans were created, each designer spent 2-3 months interacting with users. Then we developed a Persona Template Tool for each designer to use as a way to analyze and connect insights to form one composite user that could be utilized in a design jam workshop.

This entire process was happening in tandem with the devolvement of our new CLAP process. So while we had a team doing user research to create these persona’s, we also had a team focused on the design and development of the process itself including questions like: “How do we visualize our process in a way that adds meaning through graphic design?” “What tools already exist in other processes that we want to build upon and what tools don’t yet exist that we want to create?” “What is our color scheme and icon character?” “How do we differentiate parts of the CLAP process and which tools should be a part of which sections?”

Starting Spring of 2021 we officially began piloting the CLAP process in our workshops with great feedback! Partners who had worked with us before and after the redesign said they loved our new look and the new tools we created. They thought it was easy to understand and really engaged their students while also doing a great job at introducing them to somewhat stigmatizing topics in a safe and open environment:

“[My daughter] talked about the period design jam for days. She (and I) had no idea about [the depth and breadth of menstrual health stigma] except for some of the ultra orthodox religions views. We are a very no nonsense household and it seems so crazy that concepts like [period-stigma] perpetuate. Hooray education and exposure!!”

By April of 2021 we were ready to start pushing the persona concepts from the research to graphics team in order to start piloting this fundamental new concept. There was a lot of back and forth about how to best present our user research to design jam participants in a way that would show depth without being overwhelming and how we would best facilitate the conversations around these personas.

In May we began our persona first test run – the template version. We realized during the process of creating these persona’s and our tools to facilitate the conversations, that perhaps a template version of these tools could also be useful if we want workshops where participants brainstorm the details of their user. Additionally, these templates could help us and others create future personas moving forward. So we tested out three new tools: Persona ID, Journey Map, and Influencing Factors. Additionally, we tested a new brainstorming tool: Digitype. And because apparently we were feeling really ambitious, we also had a new person step into the role of a workshop coach, and I personally took a stab at trying to be in the roles of both facilitator and coach during the same workshop so moving forward we can increase our max number of participants.

Despite all the new things being tested, our workshop ran on time and surprisingly smoothly and was an incredible first step towards increasing empathy and having final prototypes actually meet user needs! As a coach I noticed participants really engaging with the persona tools and starting to empathize more with their users, prototypes also started to be geared more towards user needs but I think there is still room to grow there. The teacher’s on the workshop were especially excited about the possibilities our new persona tools present:

“After each workshop we keep talking about how we love all of your graphics, and we really loved the new persona tools this time! We were actually sidebar texting during that section about how cool we thought those tools were for really working to understand a specific user as a team.”

Then this past weekend we finally were able to test out the full persona process including our composite users from those months of research and analyzing!!! We had small numbers for this workshop in partnership with the Museum of Design Atlanta, but the end results were astounding. I have been facilitating design thinking workshops for over 7 years now, and I honestly can’t remember ever seeing so many final prototypes so clearly related back to their users’ needs and problem statements. This was a huge success for us because that was always the goal of our persona project: To enhance the level of empathy developed in a short design jam workshop (under 4 hour challenge). In particular, we wanted participants to understand the idea of an “impact statement” to demonstrate how their prototype was meeting user needs and the participants in this weekend’s workshop really seemed to get it and there are few things more rewarding then watching that ah ha moment happen for young learners.

I now really can’t wait for June where we will be facilitating a design jam as part of the Atlanta Girl School Summer Institute! It will be our largest Zoom workshop yet and we will also be piloting our “DT Coaches Training” process to help others learn not only about design thinking but also how to implement design thinking concepts in their classroom.

It has been almost 2 years now since we first started ideating our own process, 3 years since we ran our first design jam, and 4 years since we first started envisioning and brainstorming on the topic of Wish for WASH running design jams. I’ve been with this team the entire time and it is truly incredible to see how far we’ve come. We are now even getting to a place where we can monetize this work, and while success to me doesn’t have much at all to do with money, it is a big benchmark to be able to demonstrate the value of the work we are doing, and that’s what makes this so exciting; we’re adding value to the community and being recognized for it in greater capacity.

It’s truly been a game changing year for Wish for WASH and I can’t wait to see where this social impact organization goes next. I feel like big things are coming and I’m excited to play a role in the process.

Pilot Success: Virtual DT Workshop

Today was a big day! We hosted our first-ever virtual design thinking workshop with Wish for WASH, and it was great!!!

It was by no means a perfect event – I have lots of notes for improvements… – but as a pilot workshop, I was super satisfied with the outcome of this 3-hour design sprint around supporting the homeless during COVID-19. We had a low turn out despite a solid registration which caused the need for a lot of on the fly pivots to our flow for the day, but we got through it and the feedback we got was enormously helpful!

Overall, our participants really enjoyed the workshop and were also very supportive and impressed with our quick pivoting and ability to adapt to be both participants and facilitators in an attempt to make for fuller teams. They even said that they would’ve been willing to do a whole day hackathon with us/would love to in the future. This really surprised me because we thought a 3-hour online event might potentially feel too long to participants. We also got good feedback around how to better word our pre-workshop email around what to expect/prepare with, and as expected everyone wished there would’ve been a bit more time for more elaborate brainstorming/prototyping/pitching – which was somewhat expected after we had a bit of a late start and a slow warm-up with getting people to participate, so we knew the whole time that we were running behind, but also good to know in the future we should better anticipate this potentially slow start. 

The biggest changes I’d like to consider for the future (in case anyone else is interested in leading a virtual workshop and wants insight into what I learned):

1. Try to get higher levels of registration in anticipation of some no shows / more intense and maybe more targeted marketing. Potentially even create the date/time of the workshop after gauging interest and feedback on times that would work well for those interested.
2. Re-structure our planned amount of time per activity to account for a slower start as everyone tries to get to know each other without the little side conversations that would normally take place in person. (This way we have the full time for a good experiment and produce phase.)
3. Have one person designated for watching the time and updating the facilitators about where we are in the flow relative to where we planned on being. I found it really hard to pay attention to timing (didn’t help that I also had to convert the time zone) while also leading the facilitation because I could only have so many things going on in my head at once. Furthermore, since I had to also be a participant (which was not originally the plan) I didn’t have downtime while teams were working to be able to think through the big picture stuff like we had planned on, but should not have counted on. While I knew from the beginning we were behind schedule, I think we could’ve better made up time earlier in the workshop/ better allocated time to activities throughout the entire flow if I had been more aware of just how far off we were.

(Also on a personal note, I think I might’ve done too much of the facilitating/coaching and wish I would’ve done better at finding ways for other W4W members to play a greater role in the leadership side of the workshop. The original plan was for me to co-facilitate, and therefore, lead 3 parts of our flow, and I was not supposed to be a participant at all – just float between breakout rooms supporting as needed – but then one person on our team last minute couldn’t make it and a coach was feeling concerned about leading a team on her own, so I was going to assist her but wanted her to take lead. Then with all of the last-minute changes that happened once we started and realized we had less than half of the people signed up, I ended up doing almost all of the facilitation in the full room with the way things got cut, and I ended up leading in the small team despite what I originally wanted… So I need to do better there.)

The most valuable part of the day though was just knowing that this kind of event is possible. We successfully ran a 3 hour full DT workshop online! THINK OF THE IMPLICATIONS?!?!?!?

1. The success of this workshop means the potential for future opportunities has increased exponentially! We can have digital workshops with people from all over the world; that’s pretty spectacular to think about the ability to expand the scope of people aware of design thinking and WASH-related issues.
2. Building off of implication 1, with successful online integration, imagine the diversity of people that can be brought together for future collaborations?!?!? The success of today’s workshop was greatly supported by our ability to get professionals in the WASH sector as well as experienced design thinkers together in a “room” with a bunch of college students with open minds and crazy ideas. Even when we can meet in person again, I think in some ways online workshops might still be a great way to facilitate DT challenges, because it makes it a lot easier to bring together people with so many different knowledge points. It also makes me wonder if when we get back to school in person if this experience with online learning will make people more open to things like virtual guest speakers. The mix between experts and students is truly amazing to be a part of and I think if we capitalize on this experience with online education it could lead to some great collaborations with schools in the future.
3. To me this proves any class online can still be interactive. The idea that an online class needs to just be lecture-based or for quick check-ins and – the idea that drives me craziest –  that teamwork can’t happen online is a myth! It’s all about intentional design. We used the tool “Annotate” on Zoom to allow participates to write directly on our slide deck as if they had a printed version of the activities in front of them. We also encouraged a “use whatcha have” norm – so even though we might not all have access to the most high-quality prototyping tools, we enforced the idea that anything can be prototyping material if you are creative enough. So even though we were all in our own homes, we were all able to build physical prototypes and share them with each other. Furthermore, we used a combo of full room sessions and breakout rooms (to stimulate table teams) to allow for streamlined facilitation in addition to small group discussions. With this feature, we were also very intentional in our flow by limiting the number of times we had to switch back and forth between rooms. We found in our testing/experience with Zoom classes, that when you constantly go into breakout rooms for short periods of time it becomes too disruptive and time-consuming, so instead we made our flow work so there would be longer chunks all together and longer chunks in small groups this way both types of conversations felt meaningful. We even made a “cue-to-cue” document like you would in theater, which a document just outlining all of the times we have to change a technical component of the “performance” so that we could practice all of the tech changes and see if anything felt weird being too close together in timing.

 

Some final takeaways: 

I loved how inspired and happy everyone was after the workshop. One participant commented that she spends all day at work focusing on the issues caused by COVID-19 and she really appreciated having the ability today to note real human struggles and then brainstorm ideas rather than focus on all of the negatives.

I appreciated hearing our participants talk about wanting other co-workers of theirs to participate in future workshops with us, and they also wanted to work with us again.

And finally, I was really proud of our team’s work both leading up to and during the event. This couldn’t have happened without the hard work of lots of individuals each doing their part and be willing to totally change plans on the fly as necessary.

It was a great pilot! We learned lots and have great potential for the future!

(Just a few of our prototypes by our awesome facilitators and MoVe talk speakers! I wish I had more pics but haven’t been sent them yet/we want to make sure our participants approve of the pics before we post, so for now it’s just us.)

If you’re interested this was our slide deck (without the MoVe talk slides because we found it easier for the presenters to have their own deck for screen share maneuver purposes). We used the DEEP process with tools designed primarily by MV Ventures (formerly known as MVIFI).

Physical Development in Education

One of my classes this semester is Human Development Through the Lifespan. Our textbook is broken down into chapters that represent each stage of development as seen with the lifespan theory (so pre-natal, infant, toddler, early childhood, middle childhood…) Within each chapter there are three sections to breakdown the three major types of development: cognitive, social-emotional, and physical.

Currently we are studying middle childhood which is highly associated with the beginning of formal education. Something that stuck with me after reading the chapter today is that I feel like school disproportionately focuses on these three types of development. Cognitive development being the most emphasized, then sometimes social-emotional development, and really physical development seems to be more of a side thing.

Sure we may have “Physical Education”(PE) time, but often this is a short amount of time, sometimes it’s only for a few days a week, sometimes it’s on rotation with other classes so kids only take PE maybe for a semester or a quarter, and as kids get older recess time becomes smaller and smaller and PE often becomes a choice class that kids can elect to take or not. Granted, as you get to high levels of education most schools will still have some sort of physical requirement like playing a sport if you choose not to take PE, but learning about development is making me wonder, is this enough? At the same time though, as a student, I’m personally very grateful I didn’t have to take PE in high school. PE was kind of seen as a class you tried to avoid because it “wasted time” in your schedule and wasn’t fun… But what does this say about the societal views on physical education?

Research says kids should be getting at least one hour of physical exercise a day for healthy physical development. Furthermore, physical ability is correlated with increased cognitive ability (which school definitely stresses). And there is also a trend in decreased physical activity and increased child obesity levels over recent years.

So why is it that physical development in school is often treated as just a box that has to get checked off and then ignored?  Why don’t we spend more time not only talking about it’s importance, but making it fun so kids actually want to spend an hour a day exercising rather than sitting on their computer?

First HW Assignment

Last night, in an attempt to get closer to becoming composting toilet experts, we gave our first “homework assignment” for the Paideia class.

We had every individual pick a different composting toilet brand and label all of the different parts and functions of that particular toilet. Additionally, they were asked to create a pros con list for their toilet. This information we then used today as a springboard to discuss what are necessary pieces required in a composting toilet versus where are areas we can brainstorm creative new ideas for.

When I announced the assignment I was expecting detesting remarks about how they were getting homework after not having it so far in the course.

Surprisingly though, no one even questioned the assignment. I couldn’t believe how calm everyone was because honestly, I was nervous about announcing it. Especially since it was a day-of-pivot we made because we thought it would be helpful for the students to more deeply explore different composting toilets currently available after hearing an external expert talk about a few different toilets.

I suppose they also all understood the purpose behind the homework and knew it would be beneficial to their teams and maybe that was why no one was shocked or annoyed with our ask of them. Sure I’ve only known these kids for a week or so now and maybe this is how they always respond, but maybe it just goes to show how when work has a clear and meaningful purpose, it’s less likely to cause tension and complaints.

18 Days for Impact

For the past year, I have been working on the Georgia Tech Engineers Without Borders team called WISH for Wash.

“Wish for WASH is a social impact organization that seeks to bring innovation to sanitation through culturally-specific research, design, and education because #EVERYBODYPOOPS” – wishforwash.org

2.5 million people do not have access to basic sanitation needs which is the moment of visible empathy that WISH for Wash was founded on; however, it’s important to note that sanitation problems aren’t only a global issue. There are sanitation issues in our own backyard.

Here in Atlanta, we are running out of water and yet our population size is constantly growing. We need to find a way to reduce our water usage, and one place we use a lot of water is in our toilets.

This was the train of thought that a teacher at Paideia School had when he approached the leader of WISH for Wash curious about a collaboration between our two organizations.

This teacher has a five-year plan of developing a tiny home to be put up for rent that will be entirely sustainable; this home will be created by students in different phases over the course of these five years during various “Short Term classes” at Paideia.

Meanwhile, our WISH for Wash team is currently doing research on compositing in order to build our latest prototype of a composting toilet.

The trade-off: our WISH for Wash team is conducting composting research in Magnus’ backyard in exchange for us leading the first of several short-term classes contributing to this tiny home. This course, “Giving a S***: Design for a Better World,” is all about design thinking and sustainability with the goal of having two prototypes of a composting toilet by the end of the 18-day class. The key part of this design challenge is that the composting toilets the students’ design should be a toilet that a family in Decatur (potentially their own family) would be willing to use.

This partnership is actually why I joined this team back in the fall in the first place; I love working on innovative education endeavors and this team needed someone who had experience with curriculum planning and facilitating design thinking.

Since joining the team, it’s been a crazy process because it’s the first time I’ve ever taken lead on developing a large-scale design thinking curriculum. I’ve helped with workshops and conferences, but I’ve always been working alongside very experienced facilitators. Going from that kind of advanced team to now leading a team who has had minimal design thinking experience has been a big change, to say the least.

We’ve come a long way since the fall though, between having Innovation Diploma members lead us through a Flashlab, creating multiple iterations of our outline, getting feedback from various DT facilitators and then today, leading our first day of the course!!!

To be honest I was low key terrified for today. The stakes are high on day one because if you can’t get kids hooked on day one then you’ve basically lost them already and it’s hard to get them back.

Luckily for us we ended day one on a very positive note! The seven students, four girls and three boys 9th-12th grade, admitted that most of them joined just because they thought the title of the course was amusing and the description seemed intriguing and different from other courses offered. (Different due to it being lead by Georgia Tech students and hinting at very interactive and interdisciplinary learning.) However, by the end of the day, we had everyone pumped about discussing toilets and excited that the work they will be doing is hands-on and has a larger purpose and impact. (They told us this themselves at the end of the day when we asked why everyone joined the class and what their expectations are after what they learned today, so this isn’t just me putting words in their mouths based on observations.)

To me, that means day one was a huge success because everyone is excited about our work moving forward, and I couldn’t be happier about it!

17 days left to go…

 

Present Class: Why not?

I was texting my friends today and I was expressing my disgruntledness with Jihad versus McWorld. It is a book of facts and statistics, but from 1995, so these statistics are not current at all in the sense of world trade and resources which is what the book is about.

To this one of my friends said, “Well it is called history class, not present class.”

My first thought was, “Why not?”

Why don’t we have a present class? A class where we do talk about current events happening around us. It is just as important to know about the present as it is to know about the past.

It could even be integrated with history class. What if once a week your history class turned into a present class? I think a missing concept of history classes is that you don’t always turn around and look at how the things from the past compare to now.

You could claim that everyone would ace this class because kids know about stuff going on. However, this isn’t always the case. A lot of times kids don’t look into things that they don’t have to (meaning it isn’t class or homework) either because they aren’t enticed to or they don’t have time. This is not the best mentality perhaps, but it is often the case. Therefore, until the mentality can be changed, why not just give students some incentive and time to stay up to date in the world?

This all goes back to learning in the “real world” rather than just about it, and in this case just about the past world.