GO4: SDPS’s services for New York’s New Jobless June 9, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 10_Storytelling, 14_Final, 4_ServiceDesign, 6_DesignAsUrbanIntervention, Assignments, Class admin, Guests, Outside inspiration, Presentations , add a commentChin Up!
The students of the SDPS Spring 2009 class proudly present the full write-up of our end-of-semester assignment:
GO4: A ‘Go Bag’ for New York’s Recently Laid-Off
GO4 is a suite of services for New York’s New Jobless, connecting people to resources they need for the arc of time between a layoff, surviving unemployment and getting back on their feet:
Click the image above or here to download the full presentation
For further details about this project, please read on or get in touch.
About GO4:
After 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) ran a campaign called Ready New York to prompt individuals to prepare a bag of essentials to have handy in case of emergency, whenever a natural or man-made disaster called for a quick exit out of town.
This year’s ‘Go Bag’ responds to New Yorkers facing a crisis of a different kind:
The economic downturn – intangible and invisible and not site-specific, but no less disastrous for some.
It’s a concept proposed by an architect and an interaction designer and articulated by a group of ITP grad students who live and work and study (in) NYC:
In late ’08, two friends, Don Shillingburg, architect with Peter Walker + Partners, and Rachel Abrams (class instructor), had been wondering what the city (and The City) would make of all the human capacity expelled from office cubicles, washing up in neighborhood coffee shops and public spaces. They conceived the GO4 project, treating design as a form of social, cultural intervention, later inspired by Obama’s inaugural address about what can be achieved when “…imagination is joined to common purpose”.
In spring ’09, Rachel was teaching this class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and set her students an assignment based on the original project.
Participating students:
Karla Calderon, Angela Chen, Derek Chung, Cynthia Hilmoe, Sara Huong, Madeline Jannotta, Ari Joseph, Gloria Kim, Sonaar Luthra, Jeehyun Moon, Nobuyuki Nakaguchi, Kristin OFriel, Nahanaeli Schelling, Jonathan Ystad. Their individual contact info is available here.
The students’ response:
Over three sessions, the students gathered material, organized it and represented their proposition.
Specific roles to introduce the design process
In pairs, students each took on specific roles, to focus on and explore particular tasks at key stages in the design process:
Investigative reporters, City clients, typical NYC new jobless, design strategists, interface designers, typical subscribers of the Go4 services – jobless people’s outlooks transformed, and historians from tomorrow looking back from the future.
This way, each pair focused on a stage of the design lifecycle: from discovering, defining, designing, detailing, deploying through documenting the outcomes and next phase.
Guest critics
The students presented twice, first to service designer, Ben Fullerton of IDEO (San Francisco), formerly of Live | Work, London, then to public space advocates, Raj Kottamasu (NYC Parks Department, Arts Program Manager for Freshkills Park) and Cassim Shepard (Editor, Urban Omnibus.net)
The Outcomes:
In a concept document of single slides for each stage in the process, the project is summarized as a slideshow. Some highlights below, from the full presentation (which you can download from the top of this post).
The slides tell the story of a proposition worth responding to, and a plausible design process towards an effective, context-appropriate outcome.
It is both attractive and topical, timely and collaborative document of their proposed intervention;
It reflects the design methods that the students had been exploring all semester.
We’ve decided to publish the results not only to attract attention to the skills, process, values and experiences that these ITP students draw on to tackle real-world issues, but also to articulate what could be done to smooth out the bumpy time many people are navigating adapting to right now.
The Safety Net: A NYT article echoes Nobu+Karla’s “investigative reporting” May 11, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : Uncategorized , add a commentJason DeParle’s article, The Safety Net, in this weekend’s New York Times, on scattershot access to services during this downtown is highly relevant to the class assignment. It is, if you like, equivalent to Nobu and Karla’s ‘investigative reporter’ presentation – stage 1 of the design process: Stating the problem/framing the opportunity.
Week 13-14: Ben’s Worklessness case study April 28, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe Live | Work case study that Ben Fullerton showed at the end of week 13 is neatly summarized here. Download the pdf at the end of that article to see how the customer journey becomes the organizing framework for the whole presentation: It recurs not only to set the context of the audience experience, but also as a place to situate all the existing organizations, and map one person’s experience through phases of progress.
Weeks 13-14: Around town April 23, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 14_Final, Outside inspiration , add a commentRelated to the final assignment, I recommended these talks during week 13-14:
Frank Duffy, ex-President of the UK’s RIBA (equivalent to the American Institute of Architects), talking about his new book, Work and the City, at DEGW
An industrial study break with Urban Omnibus and WNYC to Newtown Creek – on Thursday
Saskia Sassen’s lecture “What is Next for Global Cities: Post-financial crisis scenarios” at the Architecture League
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: For all we discussed about the importance of format for interpreting and representing content: Sophie Calle’s “Take Care of Yourself” at Paula Cooper Gallery – til the end of the month (maybe early June?)
And this interesting summary of open thinking in a context of closed-minded fear – from the Rocky Mountain Institute’s e-newsletter (overlook the company promotion to focus on the substantive point here!)
“When people feel that things are bad and getting worse, there is a natural tendency for them to get defensive, act selfishly and close off from the world. But when people see concrete investments in solutions to problems, they engage and become part of the process. [...] The great irony, [...] is that in order to get people to embrace change, one must reinforce stability. [...] we have consistently and forcefully called for the same thing: driving the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. ”
Week 13: The Assignment – A Go Bag for NYC’s Recently LaidOff April 23, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : Uncategorized , add a commentIn weeks 12-13, you were assigned the task of conceiving and designing a Go Bag for the Recently Laid-Off. Instead of a bag full of products for surviving a physically situated emergency, you were asked to consider the suite of services this user group in NYC might want to access as the economic crisis affects them personally – to weather the experience of a different kind of disaster from immediate shock, through response, recovery and stability. In pairs, you each had a role and related task - investigative reporter, client issuing an RFI from the City agency, creative strategists specifying a brief, designers detailing aspects of the system, Area Man users giving feedback about your experiences, an economic historian of the future interpreting artifacts of this service retrospectively. You presented in a sequence that matched the design process lifecycle: Discovery, Definition, Design, Detailing, Documenting.
In week 13, we were delighted to welcome Ben Fullerton, erstwhile employee of Live | Work and now at IDEO in San Francisco. Together, Ben and I played good cop and good cop. We were seriously impressed with your presentations, and ideas. You all rose to the five day challenge, raising a white board’s worth of questions about public space and design methods. It was an excellent way to try out some rapid conceptual prototyping and draw on the secondary resources and the methodological frameworks we’ve encountered this semester. In the final week, we’ll find a way to gather everyone’s material to tell a coherent summary of the project to the readers of Urban Omnibus, taking SDPS to new audiences.
SDPS food for thought April 14, 2009
Posted by ac2691 in : Uncategorized , add a commentThis semester I have been meditating upon themes of urban mentality, emotional life in the city; the shaping of cities and probably most importantly the idea of designer as agency. Because of this, I chose the latest reading Natural Capitalism, and the 5D’s of design methodology based on our discussion of IDEO’s design approach, as the two things that have had the most influence on me personally. The idea that as designers we can become instruments of creative change, is one that is empowering and forward thinking at the same time; and that in order to embody a more efficient, successful and evolving framework, we can offer more than just products is simply smart. This idea in relationship to the urban environment can be translated in a myriad of ways. Eliminating muda, or waste, from our workflow is definitive in the shaping of cities that will in turn shape the way that we look at our own work on a smaller scale. Why should we not work towards creating “Smart Cities” that are efficient in its production and customizable in their services? IDEO has it right with a design methodology that is looking at the situation from all perspectives and experiences as a means to subvert traditional modes of practice. I believe this is especially relevant in today’s economic times, in which the need for developing products and services that address the inherent needs of our society on a deeper level rather than beyond the superficial is especially important.
In my own work, this need has influenced the way I am thinking about people’s emotional attachments to objects in my Computational Cameras class and the Dérive time clock that I developed for my Flash of Flash class which tells time according to changes in the urban environment.
Overview of “Million Dollar Blocks” Project by SIDL and the Justice Mapping Center April 14, 2009
Posted by sh1621 in : Presentations , add a commentLaura Kurgan of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) at Columbia University presented her work on the “Million Dollar Blocks” project at a lecture sponsored by the School of Visual Arts’ Design Criticism (D-CRIT) Program. Our presentation group (Nobu Nakaguchi, Nahana Schelling, Sara Huong) attended the lecture and put together a short overview (Overview of Million Dollar Blocks) of the SIDL’s approach to the project and used it to lead a class discussion about the interpretation and representation of design stories. The discussion was followed by a short in-class exercise integrating the SIDL approach with that of IDEO, specifically IDEO’s “five steps in the process of designing a better consumer experience.”
Week 12: Gems about public space all over the blogspace April 13, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : Outside inspiration, Uncategorized , add a commentThanks to Nobu and Ari for some great resources this week:Ideo’s Urban Pre-Planning methodology, featured in a Fall 2007 issue of Metropolis, here.The Geography of Buzz. Our friends at the Spatial Information Design Lab looking at LA/NY glamor – from Million Dollar Blocks to…million dollar frocks…wahhh.My review of Postopolis LA, in conversation with Alissa WalkerAnd, as promised, City of Sound has transcribed the excellent talk by Ben Bratton, from Postopolis LA.
Week 11: Software as Service April 13, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 11_Ethics , add a commentThanks to a service snafu, Netflix didn’t deliver the movie we wanted to watch to address our ‘ethics’ topic this week so that falls into week 12.
By no means a runner-up, Eddie Opara of The Map Office stepped in to showcase the “MiG”, a Rich Internet Application that his team has conceived as a SaaS – software as a service. The Mig is shifting the burden of content management, project management and web site interface maintenance to all the right people between client and design teams. As the “lean thinking” reading from said this week, tasks become an end in themselves, not a means of accomplishing something else. Systems based on principles of lean production like this one encourage flow, because “[clients'] activity involves a clear objective, intense concentration, no distractions and immediate feedback on their progress” (from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, on Flow).
service design for public space April 10, 2009
Posted by gsk240 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI chose the Georg Simmel chapter from the Metropolis and Mental Life as my most influential piece of reading from this semester. Simmel helped me articulate my interest in observing people as a way of understanding the way technology works with people and vice versa, without focusing on or fetishizing the technology itself.
The most useful diagram/ tool for thinking for me has been the 13 points for urban strategies as outlined in Iain Borden’s article “The Good Life”. I think Borden has selected very integral and core positive qualities of the urban life that we as urban dwellers can use as tactics to be used on a daily basis or even integrate into long term strategies to ameliorate our environment. His point taken on integrating play into our daily environment has been a critical aspect of a project for my Design Expo class.