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.
Thanks to Sarah Slobin and Matt Ericson February 10, 2009
Posted by rda1 in : 4_ServiceDesign, Guests, Presentations , add a commentThank you to Sarah Slobin and Matt Ericson for stopping by today to share with us their data viz expertise from the newsrooms of Fortune and the New York Times. The interactive tales of two planes, as compared by Sarah, are here (Cory Lidle’s 2006 midtown crash) and here (US Airways 1549′s safe ‘ditching’). Highlights from Matt’s election maps are also posted to his own web site. Plane crashes and the Columbine shootings a compelling but grisly start to our case studies, we’ll return to the themes of experiential storytelling with dry data later in the semester. We’ll also return to Matt and Sarah’s contention that dynamic/interactive/screen-based graphics have advantages over print visuals, and explore other narratives that emerge where physical place/information intersect.
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.