design intervention: ideation

on monday we had went through a "poverty simulation"  wherein we divided into family units and roleplayed a "month" in their lives. surrounding the perimeter of epperson auditorium, our location, were tables, staffed by the volunteers who put on the simulation, representing the various businesses and services we would be interacting with. each week was fifteen minutes long, and those who worked full time had to spend eight minutes at their "employer" while school-aged children sat at school and those who didn't work attempted to run their errands, spending "transportation passes" to get to and from every stop in the short amount of time they had. occasionally it was even necessary for the "children" to try to take care of errands such as bill-paying or grocery-shopping or occasionally even pawning. this experience was, not unexpectedly, extremely stressful and frustrating, although the imagery of ryan (my professor), ivan, and jumper as my mother, father, and grandmother, respectively, did prove amusing.

after this experience, we were told to consider moments of communication breakdown, or dysfunction, and consider a way that, as designers, we might be able to help. the smaller and more specific, i think, the better.

i'll be perfectly honest: this project makes me extremely nervous. my own modest upbringing aside, the idea of us, as young, lucky students, looking poverty in the face after a two hour "simulation" and deeming ourselves suitable to fix it, or even some part of it, turns my stomach a bit. it seems presumptuous to me, and demeaning to real people who've lived their lives, maybe struggling for generations, that we could just pretend to be them for a few hours and then step in to help them out.

soapbox aside, a project is a project, and it is our responsibility to convert the expectations of the program into something that we personally can agree with, and then work from there. so my josh (my partner) and i decided to work on proposals that could be valuable to people of all income levels rather than targeting specifically the impoverished.

we have three proposals, which i will simplify considerably for blog purposes.

1. on transportation: a visual campaign, based on infographics and calculations, that helps people decide what the most efficient and responsible mode of transportation is given a circumstance, taking into account not just money but also time, safety, reliability, etc. for instance: if i need to get across town by 5pm, and i only have $x, is it more efficient to spend the money and buy gas, or bus or cab fare, or is it more efficient to spend the extra time to walk or bike and save the money?

2. on the frustration of waiting rooms, and political apathy: a two part idea, half of which being about providing a distraction from the blank white walls and quiet rage of service office waiting rooms, and half of which being about how difficult it is to educate ourselves about local/regional politics and have any real say in the political goings-on that affect us, whether directly or indirectly. it could work like this: a board or visual of some kind within the waiting room that explained the bills up for vote within the next month or so, and a station to facilitate writing letters to the politicians that will be voting, including information on the politicians and a pre-arranged delivery method. (while i really like this idea, i'm thinking that it might be less useful for this project and could instead be more useful for something else. so i'm gonna stash it.)

and

3. on the importance of teaching children age-appropriate lessons about finance and bookkeeping: a family friendly set of workbooks that could be provided either through census data to households with children, or distributed by schools that teach basic lessons about money and budgeting with a twofold hope that a) the children can become more immediately helpful in the short term by becoming part of the family team for keeping track of finances and b) that the gradual exposure to budgeting and bookkeeping will lessen the shock of when they grow up and suddenly are expected to take care of those things themselves.

this last option is both the one that josh and i were most invested in, and also seemed to get the best response from the class in critique today. so i think that's probably where we're gonna go!