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.
Cynthia’s 1:1 Prep: A Few Thoughts April 6, 2009
Posted by cdh263 in : Assignments , add a commentWith a thesis project that is essentially a service design exercise, I have been using weekly diagrams and readings to clarify and organize an abundance of research related to strengthening the connection between children and nature.
Probably most meaningful to me so far, though, were the articles that defined service design and discussed analytical techniques used in the service design discipline. Sylvia Harris’ Presbyterian Hospital and Rachel Abrams’ Queens Museum case studies helped bring that info into context. They showed how stories can be crafted from the process of gathering information, then interpreting and representing it.
Somehow or another, I’ll be crafting my own story from children’s reaction to props I have made as part of project representation along with research into the the diminished role of nature in our lives today, play and pedagogical theory (situational meaning, contextual learning, inquiry-based learning), game design (boredom thresholds and ambiguity, e.g.), etc.
Because my design works a lot with edges or boundaries — pushing children just beyond their comfort zones to connect with Mother Nature — the universal constructs that Kevin Lynch presents could be helpful. Since I intend to start my design where the children are, one way I might think of this could be to represent these states as his….
* paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
* edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
* districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
* nodes, focal points, intersections or loci; and
* landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as reference points
….Then pull the children towards a different state with my project; beyond their ordinary, everyday experience.
Week 3-4 Out+About assignment: Post here! February 10, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 3_Public space, Assignments, Outside inspiration , 3commentsThanks to Ari and Angela for their great presentation today – for pushing the observation to interpretation and for the Grand Army Plaza example. Please post your slides. Meantime, Nobu and Sara went to Port Authority; Sonaar and Karla went to Grand Central; Cynthia, Gloria and Jeehyun went to the DMV; Madeline and Jonathan went for a stroll on the Brooklyn Promenade; Here are Mike and Nahanaeli’s on flickr. Kristin, can you share yours too?
Week 4: Introducing Service Design…and our first guests February 4, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 4_ServiceDesign, Assignments, Guests , add a commentIn week 4, Ari and Angela will lead the review of our Out+About assignment. We’ll review the parameters we’ve come up with for characterizing public space (that whiteboard will make sense…). I’ll be introducing you to some key ideas in Service Design. Then, we’re lucky to have two visiting visual information designers present. Sarah Slobin and Matt Ericson are going to join us – both with mucho experience from The New York Times. This article about the print-digital revolution at The Times, from last month’s New York magazine, provides a nice little preview.
Week 3-4 Out+About assignment February 4, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 3_Public space, 4_ServiceDesign, Assignments, Presentations , 1 comment so farClass: Please find instructions for this week’s out+about assignment on the SDPS server space, under Week 4, here.As instructed, once you’ve done the exercise, you can upload your photos and notes to the server space, under Week 4, here . That seems preferable to editing/commenting this post with links. Either way, we want to pool everyone’s material. Thanks, and have fun out there!