Project Timeline

During week 1, we spent time refining the problem space. We later conducted a literature review, refined our research questions, and drafted our interview questions to prepare for the week after. During weeks 3 and 4, we conducted semi-structured interviews, intercept interviews, and analyzed the data from the interviews. Lastly, we started the ideation process during the last two weeks of the project timeline.

Problem Space Refinement

Being immigrants ourselves or having parents who are immigrants, we all resonated with the problem of not being able to get help in our local community. With busy work schedules, living far from our friends and family, or being afraid to talk to strangers, we all found it difficult to get to know our neighbors and feel comfortable asking for help. We talked about the problems our parents are facing living in an urban environment, how urbanism is making rent in cities more and more unaffordable, and how being distant from our local community might have affected our mental health.

Due to time constraints and difficulty reaching older demographics, we focused the project on facilitating better connections within urban communities.

Literature Review

We started the research process with a literature review. We came up with a preliminary design question to help with our research process: “How might a physical or digital service help city dwellers lead healthy and harmonious lives in increasingly unaffordable urban centers?”

Some common themes we saw related to the negative effects of urbanism are:

1. Affordability

2. Sustainability

3. Aging

4. Multigeneraltional housing

5. Decline in neighborliness

6. Loneliness

7. Mental health

We realized compared to networking in college, that it has been hard making friends and inviting strangers over to our apartments since we don’t know our neighbors that much. We decided to focus on the last three topics: decline in neighborliness, loneliness, and mental health issues.

The first version of our design question was: ”How might we reduce feelings of loneliness for young adults living in the city, and increase their feelings of connection through human-centered community design?”

Research Plan

We came up with a research plan to ensure that the research we were conducting aligned with our goals. Below is the highlight of the research plan

• Stakeholders:

  • Adults aged 18-30 living in Seattle

• Participant criteria

  • Be within the age range specified above

  • Seattle first, then metropolitan American cities: acceptance to a wide range of people and ideas

  • Consider ethnic diversity

  • Consider socio-economic diversity

    • Tech workers

    • Not tech workers

  • Gender diversity

• Research methods:

  • Primary method: semi-structured interviews

  • Secondary methods: guerilla interviews, literature review

Interview Guide

For intercept interviews, we came up with four short questions to get a general idea of what people’s experiences are living in an urban environment:

1. Do you live in an urban area?

2. Do you have friends/relationships in your local community?

3. How do you make those relationships?

4. What gets in the way of making those relationships/connections?

For the semi-structured interviews, we created an interview guide. Some of the questions we included are:

1. On a scale of 1 being least connected to 10 being most connected, how would you rate your connection to your local community?

2. How do you currently try to connect with people in your local community?

3. Can you tell me about a time when you were frustrated while trying to connect with someone/people in your local community? 

4. Can you recall a situation where you made a genuine connection with someone in your local community? 

5. What is one thing that you think would help you feel more connected to your local community? 

Research Findings

We conducted 6 semi-structured interviews and 10 intercept interviews. Below are our research findings:

• Participants’ goals

  • People want genuine and authentic connections

  • People want their connections to be high-quality

• Participants’ pain points

  • Safety and health concerns meeting new people in the city

  • People don’t want to put a lot of effort into building relationships

Revised Design Question

After analyzing the research findings, we wanted to put more emphasis on helping people build authentic connections in the city. Our revised and final design question is:

How might we increase the feelings of belonging and authentic connection among city dwellers through human-centered community design?

Project Ideation

This was the most difficult part of the project as we were all working asynchronously. We decided to come up with at least 10 ideas on our own and come together to group similar ideas and decide on ideas that we all like. Some common themes of the ideas we came up were:

1. Unifying neighbors through community-wide forums + experiments + activities

2. Providing community-supported services

3. Making public social situations easier, more fun, less anxious

4. Nurturing quality friendships

5. Finding people

6. Provide hangout activities

With the help of our mentor, we narrowed these ideas down to three final options:

Reflection​

​What went well:

• The group accomplished a lot during this 6-week design sprint!

• Communication with our mentor was successful; Kimberly gave valuable advice that helped us refine our ideas.

• The literature review helped a lot with preliminary research and which direction the team want to go with the project.

If I were to do this project again, I would have:

• Set up a screener survey, sent it to various group chats online, and recruited interview participants from further outside our social circles.

• Continued the project with prototyping (with more time).

• Conducted more research specifically focusing on building relationships with neighbors, rather than exploring several directions with interview participants.

Back to all projects