If you've ever been to Barton Springs, a spring fed pool in Austin, you know that there are only two ways to immerse yourself in the icy water... Slowly wade in, or jump. Orientation at AC4D felt like jumping right in to the icy cold water. Aside from the occasional team-building exercise, we dove into the design process itself, applying it to the complex and multifaceted problem of housing access and affordability.

RESEARCH: We were first paired with a partner in our cohort and assigned to come up with a focus statement for our research. The next step was to design a research plan. We came up with open ended questions and found 7 people to interview about their experience finding housing in past few years. As intimidating as it was to ask people if we could interview them, we did not have trouble finding participants willing to share their stories.

SYNTHESIS: The next step was to synthesize the information we obtained from our interviews. We transcribed the interviews, so that we could find meaningful information easily. We wrote utterances on stickie notes using an online collaboration tool called Mural. Next, we grouped together the utterances based on commonalities, which allowed us to determine themes within our data. Our themes helped us develop insights, to explain our observations. Insights are framed as a statement of truth (that could be wrong) and should be definitive, provocative and complete.

IDEATION: During the last evening class, we spent time ideating. The goal was to come up with as many ideas as possible (quality over quantity) for how we could solve our problem. I initially felt a mental block from a desire to only come up with what I thought were “good ideas,” but I was able to set that aside due to the absurdity of some of the prompts we were given. Letting go of judgement of myself was an important part of the process when ideating. We then learned methods to narrow down our ideas to find the ones that we believed were the best.

PROTOTYPING: Next, we learned different methods for prototyping and created comic-book styled storyboards with an idea formulated during the Ideation phase. These depicted a scenario in which a user experiences our proposed solution. It was fun to see everyones creative approaches and stories.

Upon reflection of this week,

Here is what surprised me:

1. Asking the right questions is more challenging than I had thought. While I was transcribing the information and noting utterances, I realized that I should have asked follow up questions to learn more about peoples pain points. This would have made it easier for me to find common themes.

2. Peoples like to share their stories. I initially was intimidated to ask people to interview, but found that people were willing to share their experiences. Having conversations with people outside of my direct community, offered a valuable perspective .

3. Remote collaboration is not as hard as I thought it would be. I have never been in a professional setting where we communicated remotely. I thought it would be harder to collaborate online, but with my partner being in California, I was surprised to find that we were able to communicate well via Slack, Zoom and Mural.

Here is what I am still curious about:

1. How do I best organize my work? Due to moving quickly through the process, it was hard for me to stay organized. As a result, sorting through information was challenging. I am looking forward to learning techniques and tools that will help me improve my organization skills.

2. How will all of our unique perspectives contribute to this experience? With students and professors coming from many different backgrounds and careers, I am looking forward to the ways in which we will learn from each other. I wonder how it will influence where we direct our research.

3. Parsing through the ambiguity. It is not easy to think about finding solutions to problems as complicated as housing affordability. We are told to roll with the ambiguity, but I am curious to see how the process will help us uncover concrete solutions.

Orientation week at AC4D was challenging and time consuming. I enjoyed the process, but I was definitely overwhelmed at the amount of work I had during the week. I learned a lot of ways to improve the way I approach problems, and I am looking forward to putting them into practice in the coming weeks.