Overview
Who We Are
Partner Team
Student Team
About the Partner Organization
Participatory Action Research is a method of research that began in the 1940s in which researchers and participants work closely to understand and solve problems for the betterment of the community. To achieve this, PAR focuses on listening and evaluating the impact of actions on society and by centering communities, leveraging institutional resources to help achieve these goals. Unlike standard research methodologies, PAR is non epistemic – it’s not data- or results-oriented – it focuses on people. A key component is that community partners participate heavily and have a marked stake in the work. Furthermore, community partners have equal influence with academic researchers and all parties involved “own” the research or project findings.
Currently, PAR consists of a group of intelligent, inspiring, and altruistic people who are passionate about what they are doing and volunteer to invest efforts in improving and spreading the work of PAR.
Design Context
When we met PAR at Cornell to begin this project, it was evident that it was a fractured organization; before the pandemic, periodic meetings kept the spirit of PAR alive. However, as the world moved online, PAR experienced the disconnect that plagued countless other organizations, leading to a decrease in its presence and dwindling participation of its members. PAR hoped to rekindle the mission that began its work 30 years ago and revive and expand its presence at Cornell. Our goal, then, was to use design thinking to develop transmedia solutions that would solve this problem for our partner.
Design Process
Timeline
Our project followed a 3-step process based on IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit. The goals of each phase were as follows:
- Hear Phase – 4 weeks
- Understand the context of our partner’s project, identify pain points, and define a design challenge.
- Create Phase – 5 weeks
- Ideate solutions to translate research into prototypes that we iterate on via partner feedback and feasibility.
- Deliver Phase – 3 weeks
- Implement prototypes into concrete solutions, test with partners, and create a plan for the sustainability of our partner’s project.
Hear Phase – Understanding the context of our partner’s project, identifying pain points, and defining a design challenge.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
We began the Hear phase with two sessions to understand what PAR is and its history at Cornell. We learned about the history of PAR and who and what is at stake in this project. Further, we examined the knowns, key questions, and current approaches that PAR utilizes.
With a better idea of PAR’s context, we asked questions to clarify our understanding of PAR and PAR at Cornell. From there, we used CAT and UX design frameworks to scope out PAR’s problems. We then created an interview protocol to probe for a deeper understanding of PAR’s current issues to help get to the root of the design problem. To assist with this, we used CAT and UX analysis methodologies.
From this, we created an interview protocol to gain key insights into the root of PAR’s problems. We again met with Julia to review the protocol to ensure we asked the right questions. Using our protocol, we conducted interviews with key stakeholders to gain insight into their feelings about PAR’s short-term, long-term, and general goals. We were able to identify problem areas that we mapped to a series of How Might We statements.
From the Hear phase, we identified our design challenge:
Design Challenge
“PAR wants to build community among its current members and expand its number of participants through
- Structuring a communication method and platform to encourage sharing and connection among its members,
- Engaging those who are interested in learning more about its mission, goals, and ‘why,’ and
- Collecting accumulated knowledge into an accessible, sharable medium.”
Create Phase – Ideating solutions through media models to create prototypes.
“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.” ― Edward deBono
Armed with our design challenge, we began the Ideate phase by synthesizing interview notes into an affinity diagram (see Figure 3). Using these interview notes and our knowledge of the project’s background and goals, we worked alongside our partners to dream big as we ideated and developed transmedia solutions to the How Might We statements. From this, we came to a common ground of possible solutions we were all excited about – the possibilities for expanding PAR were many and had the potential to have immense impact for the group.
Redirection
A main component of our solution was a website that would serve to achieve the goals of connecting PAR members at Cornell and disseminating information about PAR to the Cornell community and beyond. As we looked at how to structure and build out a possible website, Julia expressed her affinity towards the general structure as well as specific components of the website of Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics (CVG).
To explore how we could recreate this website for PAR, we met with Charlotte Williams, the website creator for CVG. Based on our labor capacity and time constraints, it became clear that our original plans were unrealistic given our limitations. This meeting served as a turning point in our work – with Charlotte’s explanation of the process of creating and maintaining a website for CVG, we were forced to reexamine the efficacy of our solutions; we found that the vastness of possibility must intersect with the project’s constraints at a point that defines its feasibility.
We communicated this to Julia, who was receptive and flexible with reimagining and narrowing down more realistic work we could do this semester to make progress toward PAR’s goals. With the website and other solutions we intended to transmediate for PAR, we used Edelman’s concept of resolution to scale down the deliverables to be more manageable through the use.
Therefore, we came up with a final list of deliverables for PAR:
- Create a skeleton of a website for PAR in the form of a high-fidelity wireframe
- Establish a PAR Listserv to streamline communication
- Host a reception for current PAR members to serve as a call-to-action remind them of the organization’s “Why” and to encourage increased engagement from members of PAR
- Create info comics about PAR to communicate PAR’s mission and purpose
From here, it was time to begin building the foundations for our solutions. We began with the creation of an internal set of guilds that would allow us to partition work more effectively. Based on the aforementioned design challenge, we further used Edelman’s ideas of representative media to establish media models to inform our design thinking process.
Media Models
Based on the aforementioned design challenge, we further used Edelman’s ideas of representative media to establish media models to inform our design thinking process.
Moodboard
We sought to visually represent PAR via a moodboard, which we generated from notes from the Hear phase and revised in session with one of our partners, Julia Felippe. Session notes are available here and thumbnail images of the moodboard may be seen below.
Thought-Action Figure
As a part of a class exercise in Becoming Builders, we created the following Thought-Action Figure. Through this generative process, we developed a thought-action figure that represented PAR:
The lightbulb represents the ideas and knowledge that are shared with the community. This is representative of PAR’s efforts to make research a transparent, collaborative, and equitable process centered around and informed by communities to create democratized knowledge. It is shaped like an Earth to highlight PAR’s ultimate goal of making the world a better place and the people on top with the heart represent the community that we hope to protect and support through empathy in academia.
The Path to Final Prototypes
With PAR’s media models we created, we began the work of prototyping, beginning with a reanalysis of PAR using the UX and CAT frames. Through this reanalysis, we generated general themes we could transmediate into prototypes.
Transmedia Prototypes
Website for Cornell PAR
The initial lo-fi prototype of the website consisted of a website structure for Cornell. To structure a website for Cornell PAR, we started with a diagram that sorted out some objectives, needs, and wants of potential audiences. Cornell PAR website will likely have two main audiences: those we know about PAR and those who don’t. We will mainly target the group who already know about PAR and those who are interested in PAR. Once the structure was built out, we got feedback from our partner regarding current sections and sections they would like to see. This iterated version will serve to inform final deliverables related to the website’s structure and design.
Info Comic
Our objective for the info comic was to use strategic storytelling to help people understand PAR’s mission and advertise a home for Cornell PAR to motivate members to get involved. We used the three pillar diagram to help us decide on a storyboard that met these objectives; using this, we were able to establish a storyline for our comic which introduces PAR, provides an example of what kind of research can be done, and discusses lastly how students can get involved.
Here is an initial draft of what the comics will look and feel like:
Deliver Phase – Ideating solutions through media models to create prototypes.
High-fidelity Website Wireframes
After finalizing the structure with our partner, we started working on high-fidelity wireframes using Figma. Through the wireframes, we are able to address intended experience design and information design.
- to inform and interact with the community
- to motivate and re-engage PAR members
Link to Figma:
https://www.figma.com/file/evDeU8HERLQquU3mrOhiBu/PAR-website-wireframes?node-id=149%3A21
Info Comics
We also created different info comics:
- Generalized PAR Comic to encompass and define PAR as a whole
- Other comics to highlight our other stakeholders such as Julia and Bruce & their research
PAR Final Showcase Event
We also held an End-of-Year showcase for PAR to share our work with PAR members with the hope of inspiring more participation, on May 18th, 2022.
The showcase was a success. Our work done for PAR this semester gained positive feedback from PAR members, and elicit their excitement in PAR’s future work and potential. Wrapping with the work, we also outlined some future directions and possibilities for PAR:
- Potentially passing it on to next iteration of class
- Figma access of wireframes
- Web Comics for inspiration
- User Research Interviews
- Our entire PAR drive
- We see our work as laying a groundwork for the creation of PAR’s…
- A knowledge hub via a fully-functional website
- Community space via a Listserv
- Knowledge democratization through a public archive (not eCommons)
- Student and faculty engagement through student organizations
Final Report
Here is our final report.