The Challenge.

The youths in Sunderland (UK) do not feel like they are able to make an impact in shaping their community. We wanted to explore how we can give the youth a voice through the use of technology.​

My Role.

In this 2-Week project from my Digital Civics Study Abroad program. My team and I consulted on research methodologies through UX perspectives with a PhD student, Sean, at Newcastle University. My main contributions were in designing the co-design workshops. I was also a part of conducting the co-design workshops and analyzing the results. 

The designing of the co-design workshops was a key component of this project, I had to design the activities so that the participants are able to defamiliarize themselves from the situation and move forward in their projects. 

Outcome.

We used co-design to discover, understand and empathize with the users on a deeper level and provided our sponsor with suggestions on how to  move the project forward in this direction to explore the role of technology in the youth's lives to empower them to shape their community.

Reflection.

The biggest takeaway from this project is learning how to adapt different methodologies to fit the context and purpose of my goals. In this project, I was able to use co-design to accomplish sense-making in different ways. For us, it was making sense of the current state of the project. For our sponsor, Sean, it making sense of and putting a new perspective onto the research that he has already done. For the local youth, it allowed them to reflect and making sense of who they are and their role in their community.

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Getting
​The Context.

We framed the project based on previous research that has been done with the Youth Council in Sunderland​ in order to understand the context and target audience we will be working with. Through framing the project, we were able to identify meaningful ways to impact in this project.

Identify
​Key Problem Areas.

​We identified key barriers to creating change for the youth council through analyzing the research.

Scoping
​Down.

We narrowed down our goals using a word cloud to create a core statement to helps us keep focus on the values/aspects of the project we especially wanted to focus on.

Core Statement:
Spark proactive change through ​reflective community practices.

Talking 
​To The Expert.

We designed and conducted a co-design workshop with the goal to expedite our understanding of the Sunderland community and youth through the experiences of our sponsor.​

Connecting
The Dots.

Building on the insights of the co-design workshop, we ideated  alongside with applications with similar functions to what we are hoping to make. 

We created designs of the an application that will allow community members to collect data, propose campaigns and take action on them as a community with the inspiration from the listed applications.

As a result of ideation, we reflected and realized that we got side tracked from our original goal and our users. We re-aligned ourselves and decided to narrow down our scope more to consider the specific needs of the youth rather than the community as a whole.

Learning Through
​Interaction.

We decided to take a more participatory approached by designing and conducting a co-design workshop to g​et an understanding of the place technology has in the city and how it can help with taking social action in the perspective of Sunderland's youth.

As a result, we provided our sponsor with potential directions and considerations for moving his project forward based on our understanding of the context and users.

Intervention Ideation.

We revealed the youth's value and thought process through an ideation activity to see how the see they can take action on these changes and presented on them.

Fantasy Making.

We identified areas of interests that the youth want to create an impact in as well as their personal motivations and perspectives. ​

"... the younger generation are technically more important because they're the future"

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To Be
Continued.

This concludes my team's work on this project. From there, we gave suggestions to our sponsor on how he can continue his project using UX approaches such as using a more participatory design approach, continue having workshops to introduce and explore the role of technology in the youth's live as well as in-house technology available for the youth council to consider future possibilities on how to approach the area of focus.