10 ideas & 3 sketches

- November 27, 2019

Hand-made design sketches

According to our observations and interviews, we found out that Emerson College as a community provides an abundance of collaboration spaces and opportunities. Unfortunately, these events are not regularly attended by students because of time, content, etc. When we were brainstorming together, we came up with several keywords that guided our thinking: “expression”, “shared the experience” and “working collaboratively”. In thinking about expression, we wanted to provide the Emerson community with a platform for students to express what they may be reluctant to express on a public platform. By shared experience, we wanted to give students opportunities to build and offer their skills to their peers through interdisciplinary communication. Lastly, working collaboratively meant that we wanted to encourage students to work or play together recreationally, not just academically. Moreover, we paid attention to the places where students spend most of their time and visit most frequently.

After getting the general direction, we chose to merge some similar ideas. For example, we decided to incorporate different academic collaborations into the “Escape Room”; also, we took two similar ideas that were to take shape in different locations (“message bottle” and “love wall”) and combined them into a format where students can both ask for help and offer help in the same space. We chose to give up some ideas such as an interdisciplinary workshop, or an app that can be used to add more curricular collaboration and that would directly communicate with Jan, the Dean of Grad Studies. In the end, we decided this idea was too complex, with many different moving parts. As a result, we chose to focus on more informal methods of collaboration.

One of the three sketches: Elevator Exhibition

One of the three sketches: Escape Room

One of the three sketches: Emersoulmate

In choosing the 3 sketches to focus on, we wanted to select ideas that were fairly different from one another. We first chose the elevator exhibition idea because we felt it has a low barrier to access, though after getting some feedback, we realized this idea involved a lot of steps in the user journey, and that the barrier to access (or rather, the barrier to completing the goal of collaboration) was higher than previously thought. Next, we chose Emersoulmate because it was the only idea that involved an app. We believed the dating-stye app would be an effective and easy way to connect students who have expressed the need for a specific skillset with students who have that skill set. Lastly, we chose the escape room because it was an experiential event that guaranteed students would be linked with students from other programs. This idea would also allow students to collaborate and share their skills in real-time in a playful way.

For our presentation, we decided to organize our ideas in a sketchbook to really lean into the fact that this was the product of an initial brainstorm. Our approach was very D-I-Y, with the final product having a zine-like quality to it. We wanted the viewer to feel as if they are sifting through our collective, not-so-private sketchbook like they are interacting with the initial creative energy that went into the ideas--not quite polished, but still tidy and easily comprehensible nonetheless. To create our sketches, we used markers, colored pencils, and pens. We also used glue sticks to paste the extension page for the three sketches that we developed further.

Our ideas and sketches relate to our findings from the stakeholder map in that much of it fall closer to the self-initiated, informal end of the continuum of collaboration we identified. Even though the three sketches we focused on all require some financial and human resources that Emerson would need to provide (i.e. funding and labor for developing Emersoulmate, escape room props and space, etc), ultimately, students would have to take the initiative to connect with their fellow peers, thus falling on the informal end of the continuum. We also incorporated findings from another group, which discovered that Emerson has a wealth of spaces that can be utilized for collaboration, but that they lack prompts or other external motivators to connect with new people. Many of our ideas seek to enhance the spaces around Emerson, or the experiences offered, to give way to more opportunities for collaboration across disciplines.