Brainstorming and Prototyping

The first step was developing a team contract and this step focused on defining the expectations that we have when it comes to the project. This also included the expectations that we have as a group. This step was needed for the brainstorming and prototyping part of our project because it helped everyone know the requirements that are needed for this project before we start brainstorming. 

We had different ideas as to what we wanted to show on our website at the beginning. We tried Wix for the first couple of weeks. We had pictures that represented our project and goal, and added more content as we worked on our activities. That was the first few weeks; thereafter, we had a new member, Alex, and he introduced us to another website (Webflow). This website had more options in terms of customizability and gave us a better page to showcase our content. Currently the website has the team member’s names, our beliefs,  personas, affinity diagram, our design ideas, and so on. 

We used personas to discuss who was gonna be our potential user base. We settled on people living in major cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. We then came up with a few qualities for our potential user base. We organized these qualities into three different personas. Don, Allison, and Mark were the names given to our personas. We describe their tasks, routines, and needs as well as their desired outcomes. We later use these ideas to formulate research questions.

Using the ideas that we learned from personas and  previous steps, we then created a research memo that was used to organize our ideas into one written document. Some examples of the contents that we included in our research memo included the research questions that we will try to answer and the techniques that we will use in order to apply solutions to our app. We also included other details such as the constraints that we have in our project. Therefore the research memo was very useful for our project because it helped us organize our ideas and it also guided us in developing a plan on how we would go about answering our research questions. This research memo was also helpful because it was also used as a reference in later steps of this process as well. 

After the research memo we then started to focus on the interviews that we were planning to do. The people that we were planning to interview were people who were experts in air pollution. However before the interviews, we created an interview and observational guide in order to help us with our interview questions. When it comes to the interview guide, we created a step by step process on how the interview would be organized. For example we first introduced ourselves and asked simple questions. After that we planned on asking the person we were interviewing the main questions that we had in our guide. For the observational guide, it focused on learning more about the setting of these interviews. Therefore the interview and observational guides were very useful during our interviews because it made us more prepared for them, and helped us discover the information that would be used to inform our users on the issue of air pollution in our product. 

The information we gained from our research, interviewing, and completing the clustering analysis through open and axial coding led us to build our affinity diagram. With our open coding process, we worked together to highlight the main takeaways that we got from each of our interviews, including suggestions of what citizens and cities can do in order to help improve air quality and air pollution, and placed them on sticky notes; we made sure to organize these sticky notes by ensuring that they were placed with notes that were close in relation. With clustering, we decided to organize themes into the following categories: what communities/citizens can do to improve air quality, and what cities can do to make it easier for air quality to improve in larger cities. With our analysis, we described everything we learned (such as knowing that reducing vehicle mile travel would be an essential part of improving air quality), and how we can better inform the people on how they can take part in their cities’ air quality improvement. We also made sure to mention the ways we would apply everything that we learned to our final product; we did this by deciding what we would include as far as information and facts that would best inform our users. Finally, we took all the information that we gathered throughout all of these steps and organized an affinity diagram using the insights that we acquired. This process helped us decide that we would officially be creating app features that people could use to engage in their local cities’ environment through community forums, volunteering, and keeping track of their own carbon footprint and what they could do to improve. 

For the research findings and analysis report, the analysis had to do with the data and information we were able to gain prior to writing it. Again, the first insights of information that we gained were through interviewing experts. We used our interview guide to ask questions on the potential causes of air pollution in cities and what we might do to improve it, whether it be individually making changes or a major city implementing city-wide solutions with more access to transportation and options to make the city more based in more sustainability. We each contributed to the report by helping explain our goals and what our mission is about, and how our mission is to inform citizens so that they can have an impact on the quality of their cities’ air; we explained our research findings by first establishing that the leading cause of poor air quality in the United States has to do with man-made causes such as vehicle usage and the emissions that come from not having societies built on enough sustainable energy; we also decided to go into detail about solutions that could be used to reduce poor air quality in major cities. Our second insight we gained was through conducting a survey that gave us helpful visualizations about what potential users might think is causing air pollution, and how they might be contributing to it or not. This allowed us to have a better idea of the profiles who may be using our app, contextualize our target audience, and helped us to determine how we could cater to and inform them. We also decided we would relate this to the part of our app where we provide information on air pollution and the average person’s role in it as well as solutions that are involved. 

The process of creating user assumptions, in which we applied beliefs to goals, was partially responsible for us making the carbon footprint calculator (a feature that asks you a series of questions which allow you to calculate your own personalized carbon footprint). We realized that it was necessary to add this feature because although air quality is something that is regulated by the people and the city collectively, there are ways in which a person can individually help to reduce emissions. 

The last step to our brainstorm process took form as a 10+10 brainstorm exercise. When doing this exercise, we filled our chart out by thinking about what we might want to offer on our app. We as a team were able to think of all of the different things that the app would be able to do, and many of the labels listed on the Design Thinking chart are current apps on our prototypes such as volunteer opportunities, the calculation of an individual’s carbon footprint, among other things. After brainstorming many potential features, we decided to make our app a volunteering platform within a community. In other words, our app aims to connect people who are concerned with climate change or air pollution to volunteering opportunities that help prevent those issues. They would also be part of a community who does things on a day-to-day basis to reduce carbon footprint.