Duration: 3 months
Done at: Indiana University, Bloomington
Collaborators: Vignesh Ramesh, Laura Brunetti
Tasks done: Fly on the wall observation, Affinity Diagramming, Focus Group Discussions, Literature Review, Contextual Inquiry, Concept Generation, Generating Low Fidelity Prototypes
Design Problem:
Design an object, interface, system, or service intended to support the state of living without a house. Use methods of ethnography and contextual research to understand the problem space, and develop user-centered design solutions to support, assist, enhance or otherwise benefit your target audience. Your solution could address the environmental state of being without a house, including issues of physical sustenance and safety, or it could investigate the emotional, social and cultural needs of this group of people.
Research Goals:
Our research is concerned with how community building among medical volunteers can increase their
productivity and retain their knowledge and experience, to achieve our ultimate goal of providing efficient
support for the homeless in medical clinics. More specifically, we wish to determine if plants and goal-setting can be used as tools to build the same community to create a satisfying experience for medical volunteers and in turn retain experience.
Fig: Conducting fly-on-the-wall observations
Design Process:
The first step in the process was narrowing down the scope and defining the problem statement for a particular user group.
Fig: Brainstorm of defining Problem Statement
Since targeting the homeless directly was going to be difficult since they are a protected group, our team focused on the health centers that provide free health care to homeless patients. We visited a few of such centers around us to determine the problems they faced and designed a solution around the medical volunteers.
The understanding of the users were done using Fly on the wall observations, Contextual Inquiries and Focus Group Discussion.
Fig: Affinity Diagramming
The affinity diagramming process began with collecting field notes from a focus group, a fly-on-the-wall observation,and an observational interview with a center director that we conducted. An analysis of the data to flush out existing patterns allowed us to first place the field notes into groups with specific labels, and then form sets of groups categorized by yet broader headings. Finally, major areas of concern emerged from our primary research. Reflecting on these concerns, we articulated a significant insight and realized how it will play a role in the direction of our design process.
Proposed Design Solution
We are designing a virtual community application for cell phones, for clinical volunteers in medical clinics that provide care to the homeless people. We chose to design for this population, owing to the extreme importance of health in a person’s life and the high number of volunteers who work in this field across the US. Our design uses online communities and the effect of plants on human psychology as a motivating factor to make volunteer spend more time at medical clinics. As a result of this, we feel the volunteers will be able to spend more time with the organizations and hence working with the homeless to a larger extent. This would lead to a greater human-human interaction and provide the homeless with the personal care that is so often missing in their lives.
Fig: Rough Sketches of concept.
The volunteers would use the interface to take care of their plants. They would set real time goals to be achieved that when attained would allow the plant would grow and gain health. Negligence on the
part of the volunteer in achieving goals would cause the health of the plant to deteriorate.
Using the interface the volunteers can monitor their own plants and also view the organization’s garden. This, we feel would give them a sense of belonging to a community and provide motivation to keep their plant healthy. In the process, we attempt to increase the satisfaction level of their volunteering experience and aim at retaining their knowledge and work experience for the organization.
