Phase 1: Defining Our Territory
Team 16: Amrita Khoshoo, Diana Minji Chun, Hannah Koenig, Shambhavi Deshpande
This post chronicles our team’s progress as it happens for the first phase of our Interaction Design Studio 2 Project, taught by Peter Scupelli in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. You can find the full process publication here.
Monday 1/13: The Brief
We received our brief: Design to improve life. Inspired by The Index Project, the brief stems from the Index Project’s mission:
Design has the potential to solve real needs in our society. We need to redefine design from a commercially driven disciple to one that’s used to improve quality of life — for everyone.
Together, the world is facing countless critical problems, from cybersecurity to climate change, species extinction to social inequality. And now, more than ever, we need optimism and ingenuity. With the right knowledge and community, we can design a better future (source).
Tuesday 1/14: Team kick-off meeting
We started by discussing and drafting a team contract. We talked about our broader team goals, working styles, strengths, and weaknesses. We plan to continue developing our contract in parallel with the CollabU courses.
Then we went to dinner at Choolah!
Wednesday 1/15: CollabU + Territory
We learned more about each other with the team-building exercise two truths and a lie. We’ll continue with Part II and talking about our respective styles on Friday.
Exploring different territories
In an effort to define our territory, we started to explore our interests. We began by individually researching topics of interest related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Index Challenge categories, and existing wicked problems. Then, we shared, discussed, and drew connections.
We saw some emerging themes. We plan to reflect on our discussion more, research local PGH connections to various issues, and look up existing design interventions. To be continued on Friday….
Friday 1/16: CollabU + Territory continued
Today was awesome! We finished Part II of Collab U and created a finalized version of our Team Contract. We talked about our social sensitivity, ways of processing, dealing with conflict, and what we would appreciate. We also dove into defining our territory.
Defining our territory
Big shoutout to Hannah and her awesome facilitation skills! Hannah created an activity to help get our gears churning:
We all came prepared with printouts of different Index Projects that we liked or wanted to discuss. Each of us went around, summarized a project, why we chose it and mapped it to an SDG Goal or Index Goal. The SGD Goals and Index goals made up an abridged list based on what we had expressed interest in during our previous meeting.
As our whiteboard filled with projects, we noticed that we all were gravitating towards SDG Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. SDG Goal 16 reads: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Major seconds included two Index Goals: Navigating a post-factual society and Trust, Empathy, Tolerance.
A few projects we talked about:
- Human rights tattoos
- RNA Kit
- Debate Platform
- Basic workplace rights
We then started talking about key themes, things that stood out, what we liked, and what we did not during our project search.
On a high-level, we all really liked the idea of community-building through participatory experiences. Many of the examples we talked about centered around events in which people with different experiences or from cultural contexts come together and create something. We liked the idea of building understanding between groups of people that might hold differing views.
Other themes:
Justice system and rule of law, Sexual violence, Unions and employment, Political process and civic behavior, Politics and elections, Access to information, Navigating a post-factual society
We landed on the intersection between economy and politics — specifically within the context of employers and unions. A few points we talked about:
- The relationship between local government, employers, and unions here in PGH
- Policial power, employment law, unions, and collective bargaining
- Workers rights
- Uneven economic development
- Manufacturing, tech, AI
- Climate
- Quality of life / equitable and just distribution of resources
Our next steps include doing some more research on unions, employment, and politics. We’ll regroup tomorrow to discuss, flesh out our ideas more, and begin mapping our territory.
In other news! We have a team name. Meet Team 16.
We all love and believe in SDG Goal 16, so naturally….
Saturday 1/18: Labor
We started by sharing the research we had done about PGH’s economy, unions, and politics. Key things that came up:
- The economy is in a period of transition from traditional labor to a sharing economy. This has real implications/tensions for labor and the future of work. (E.G.: Google & HLC unionization).
- Our generation is the first to have a lower standard of living than the previous generation. What does this mean for the need for organized labor (unions/collective bargaining) in the future?
- Issues of labor touch multiple SDG’s.
- We all found connections to ghost work/the gig economy/contract work.
- Unions: Collective bargaining is a powerful tool.
- History of Pittsburgh's economy — steel and Industrial Revolution > unionization > shift to tech, energy which carried the city through 2008.
Questions that started bubbling up:
- How do ensure fair labor in the shared/gig economy?
- How do we modernize this idea of unions to ensure labor rights for all in the future?
- Educating youth about unions?
- Should the US government ensure sustainable careers for all citizens? If so, how?
- What are the different tools or mechanisms to redistribute value in the economy of the future? (e.g. collective bargaining)
- Who is benefiting from PGH transformation?
- How might societies start to redistribute equality and what’s the role of institutions?
- What’s the responsibility of gov’t, civil society, employers?
Bringing our Territory Map to Life
We started mapping key themes and stakeholders that emerged during our discussion. On a high-level, we noticed that we were all talking about issues around labor. So we put labor at the center of our map.
Because labor is implicated at many levels of scale, we started drawing circles the distinguish stakeholders at the individual, local, county, federal, global levels.
We further organized by influences. Labor is influenced by civil society, public sector work, and private sector work. And all three forces have very real implications here in PGH. We then noted key stakeholders at each level of scale and major themes. Major themes include the future of work, tech, quality of life, civic engagement, and solidarity as a collective.
Because our territory map was still quite broad, we discussed key sectors to explore. We’re all interested in tech work, manufacturing, and energy (all three major industries here in PGH). We found two case studies across all three sectors: autonomous vehicles and natural gas. There are many value tensions within these spaces when it comes to the intersection between sustainable futures and the future of labor.
We continued iterating on our map throughout our discussion.
In our next meeting, we plan to refine our territory map and talk research questions/methods. Stay tuned!
Monday 01/20: Refining & Research Qs
On Monday, we met up for a session on research downloads and research questions. Diana kicked off her week as facilitator with a masterful use of Korean emojis as a way to see how we were all doing.
Next, we took turns sharing out about the research or synthesis we had done. Amrita went deep into the future of work in Pittsburgh. Themes from her research included convergence around needing to update the social contract of workplace protections between people, government, and employers, as well as how to prepare workers and do so equitably. Shambhavi went deep into job postings, descriptions, and qualifications for factory work and union jobs. Most of her search yielded results in industries and trades that require manual labor, including machining, piping, and electricity. She also investigated tech sector contract jobs with an eye towards students in Pittsburgh. What issues might this population face? Is there a possibility of a student union?
Meanwhile, Diana and Hannah thought about research questions and tying them to the brief. After workshopping lots of different options, we ended up with the following draft:
- We are researching the relationship between local government, tech employers, and contract/informal workers in Pittsburgh
- Because we want to find out about the forces shaping local economic development
- In order to better understand potential pathways to a sustainable future of work.
We agreed to reconvene the next day to report out on additional research defining our terms (informal economy? sharing economy? gig economy? contingent work) and dive back into our territory map.
Tuesday 1/21: Territory Map and Presentation Prep
We convened on Tuesday afternoon for what would become a major work session in advance of our Phase 1 presentations. We started by generating territory map components and getting them onto the wall using sticky notes. We felt this was needed given the volume of new information we had taken in over the past few days in order to update our map to reflect our latest understanding of the territory.
We also revisited the Sustainable Development Goals and considered an updated short list of contenders that were more aligned to the direction our research and conversations had taken us. This was important to ground our thinking about the economy and future of work and connect it back up to the ‘design to improve life’ brief.
With our ideas on the wall, we started to sketch and discuss various frameworks for how we might arrange our ideas. We looked at examples of territory maps from projects in previous years to get a sense of how other teams organized their thinking and visualizations.
We poked and prodded at our concepts, with each sketch earning positive attributes as well as a list of desired improvements. One sketch spurred the next, until we managed to draw a framework that needed to be populated with our sticky notes in order to be evaluated. The stand-out framework placed workers and families at the center, surrounded by relevant issues like quality of life at work, workplace arrangements and workplace protections. From there, each concentric ring introduced the government, industry, and civil society stakeholders, trends, challenges, and opportunities in the Pittsburgh economy and at the national level. By this point, we needed a snack.
Next, we divided tasks in order to conquer. Some of us worked to create a digital version of our territory map, while some of us focused on building out the presentation.
After some additional research, negotiations about color, and narrowing down stakeholders, we arrived at the final version of our territory map for our presentation.
In order to discuss our research approach during our presentation, we needed to brainstorm a more specific list of potential research participants, what we might hope to learn, and activities for gathering that information. A late-night whiteboarding session ensued, which Amrita gracefully captured in a much more organized document before we translated the main ideas into our presentation slides.
The last thing to do before breaking was generate and refine our talking points for the presentation. We left studio with a game plan for Wednesday’s presentation, eager to hear how our ideas would be received and to hear from other groups about how they interpreted their territories.
Wednesday 1/22: Presentations
We met up in advance of class on Wednesday to do a quick presentation run-through and ensure our slides were legible on the screens in the classroom. Class began with an introduction to our videoconferenced guest critics from Index: Arnold Wasserman, Liza Chong, and Simone Jacobsen. We were thankful to have the opportunity to share our ideas with such a group and appreciated their time and attention given the late hour in Denmark.
Feedback we received included:
- We’ve chosen an interesting area to investigate. It’s a subject that’s very close to our current generation, with technological advances and rethinking what work really means. The territory map is very thorough, and we’ve outlined a good starting point in terms of stakeholders to do research with.
- We might think about sectors, including this idea of ‘dying trades.’ Opportunities for workers to be retrained or have progressive career pathways intersecting with educational opportunities, over and above people who are doing a job for a salary.
- We were encouraged to investigate the meaning of work on a more philosophical level, in addition to the system of the economy. Consider the integrity of what work means: being productive, and contributing to society. Being part of something. Not just maximizing profit for employers, but doing something that’s needed.
- Stay calm and persevere: this is a big topic that will get messy and unmanageable before we find our way. What drives work is philosophy, politics, economics, economic theory. We should consider drivers, current status, past status, future, as well as forces that will create change outside of our actions, and forces that are available for us to drive the kind of change we want to seek. Look at weak signals and early signs that are all around us that could align to potentiate your direction.
We were asked:
- What assumptions or expectations do you have about what you might find when you begin doing research with stakeholders?
- On a tactical level, who are you starting with? Uber drivers and Google contractors are very different populations. Brainstorm where you want to start so you can try to track people down, thinking about it practically. Who do you begin with? What questions do you ask?
After our presentation, we felt proud of our work and that we were on a good path. We came up with a direction that was specific enough that it made sense to our audience and yielded targeted feedback and suggestions for what to do next. Going forward into Phase 2, we will be discussing how to incorporate this feedback into our exploratory research plan. Follow along with our progress in Phase 2 here.
