Meet Me Half Way

2017

A toolkit of design methods and techniques for using empathy to design with, not for, disenfranchised communities.

This booklet was commissioned by Carnegie Mellon University to create a guide for best practices when conducting design research with underserved and marginalized groups. Through these different activities you can design with empathy and iterate potential solutions together with your audience.

The Problem

Most existing toolkits advocate designing for underserved communities which leads to a lack of adoption and inappropriate or exploitative designs.

My Contributions

My role was to identify the different tools used by different designers within our case studies. Through iteration and testing, my role was to create how-to guides for replicating these tools and develop prototypes that we could then test with different groups of users to determine if our instruction design was intuitive. My additional contributions included some of the illustrations and copy-writing for the book.

Conclusion

The toolkit was finalized and used by Carnegie Mellon University and Non-for profit institutions within Appalachia to empower impoverished communities. The toolkit is available upon request.

From this work, I learned the value of user testing, collaboration with other designers, and got the chance to investigate what remains in place once the designers leave.