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Designing for Civic Solutions Recap

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On Saturday, April 23, 2016, Open Austin hosted a one-day workshop. The workshop was a first-time collaboration between Open Austin and Austin Center for Design (AC4D) alumni that aimed to help Open Austinites and the greater community understand the design process and how it could be applied to civic projects and application development.

The day kicked off with a presentation by Open Austin giving an overview of the workshop. Past transportation and mobility projects developed by the community were highlights as examples of success.

Then, Daniela Nunez, a local activist and community organizer with the Georgian Acres Neighborhood Association gave an overview of the Rundberg community and history. This primed participants on the issues that the neighborhood faces. It also gave context to the research that would be conducted during the workshop.

Daniela's Presentation

A slide from Daniela’s presentation: An outline of the ongoing work in the area

Eric Boggs, Alumni Coordinator for AC4D, then took over and introduced his team of designers. We had a stellar crew which included Bhavini Patel a freelance UX & interaction Designer who has worked with Projekt202 & Chaotic Moon, Lauara Galos a research designer for IBM, James Lewis a user experience designer from IBM, and Samara Watkiss an interaction designer leading human-centered design efforts at a local cyber security company.

First, Eric introduced participants to a design methodology taught by AC4D. This method boils down to ethnography and immersion in cultural context, Synthesis which is making meaning through inferences and reframing, and prototyping through storyboarding and storytelling. View a version of the presentation on Ethnographic Research here.

Afterwards, Bhavani lead the presentation on field research. She primed participants on how to ask the right questions to the right people to gain valuable insight. View the research planning worksheet here.

After coming back from their field research participants ate their lunch and started to make meaning of their research. They synthesized quotes and the behavioral clues of locals to uncover overarching themes. Laura lead the synthesis phase and helped participants find meaning in the data they gathered. Find a version of her presentation on syntheses here.

The rest of the activities were capped off by Samara and James who taught about ideation, down selection, and storyboarding as a prototyping tool. By forcing opposing ideas together and deviating from initial thoughts on potential outcomes, participants were encouraged to diverge and think more broadly about the subjects they were exploring. This encouraged attendees to think of unique ways to solve their problems. From there they picked a solutions and started illustrating what that could look like by storyboarding. By drawing pictures that represented real and imagined situations the participants gained a better idea of what could work, how it could work, and how people may potentially feel and interact with their imagined solutions. Find AC4D presentations on storyboarding and ideation here.

After wrapping up we encouraged the participants to continue the work at our hack nights and hack Saturdays if they felt strongly about the issue and contributing to mobility in Rundberg or the greater Austin area.

Since the workshop we’ve had a guest blog post by a local UX designer and member of Open Austin, Ellen Lazaretti. You can read Ellen’s post here.

Additionally, participant Alejandro Ramirez published a Medium article about his experience, insights, and suggestions for improvement. View Alejandro’s article here.

This event was made possible by generous donations from: Workshop Donors

What we do would not be possible without our community and corporate sponsors. Having supporters such as these makes it possible for civic collaboration, creativity, and solutions.

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