Critical Design
Started conversation about the struggles that students face from the overcrowding issue in universities through a speculative design approach.
Project Overview
For this project, we started off with the issue of parking at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since it is a perpetual issue due to limited space and a growing student body. Despite efforts like new structures and shuttles, demand often exceeds availability, causing frustration for students and staff. After constructive feedback and further discussion, we realized that the parking issue could be expanded into the more broader issue of overcrowding at UCSD since parking is only one cause of this bigger issue. The issue of overcrowding in universities shows up in different ways, such as packed classrooms, lack of parking, and overwhelmed support services. When more and more students enroll, universities struggle to handle them all properly. This leads to many negative effects on education quality and the overall campus atmosphere. The goal for this project was to start conversation not only about the struggles that commuters have to deal with every day by looking for parking, but also about the issues students face by having overcrowded study spaces, lecture halls/classrooms, etc.
My Contributions
-
Online Research
-
Brainstorming and Ideation
-
Website Prototype
-
Flyer Design
Research
Before initiating any brainstorming and the design process, our team conducted research across several dimensions to ensure we had knowledge on the topic. As part of this effort, I focused on the movement dimensions and on what the parking fees funded.
After gathering research on all the dimensions, I created this knowledge map:
Prototypes
Before our pivot to the broader issue of overcrowding in universities, we did our brainstorming session to come up with possible interventions for the issue of parking. Our goal was to publicize the issue of the lack of parking spaces and the daily struggle of students searching for parking.
Our three main prototypes for our intervention included:​​​
1. A commuter's support club on campus.
2. Fake parking spaces in absurd places.
3. UCSD's Geisel Library redesigned with a new and "improved" seating system.
Feedback from First Crit Session
The feedback that we got from the first crit session was that the idea of the commuters anonymous could work as a stand alone intervention or it could be incorporated into another campaign. The strength of the idea was that it could allow us to collect and aggregate a lot of real testimonials about how the parking issue negatively impacts the students. But since we were not actually providing a lasting support space for commuters, we threw that idea away for ethical reasons. Our second prototype about the fake parking spaces was a good idea since it was a physical intervention and it could have been connected to other touchpoints of our campaign. The Geisel redesign prototype was the best one since it veered into speculative design.
The Pivot
After our first crit, we were struggling to make our prototypes into a campaign. We had all the pieces but didn’t quite know how to put them together. But after talking more about our issue, we decided that it wasn’t just parking that upset us, it was the broader issue of overcrowding. We all could relate to struggling to find housing, parking, a seat in a class, etc. And since parking was included in that, we wouldn’t have to completely abandon our prototypes. We liked the idea of having a seating system where you would have to pay in order to have a space in Geisel, because it was in that speculative realm. It was an almost dystopian concept but feasible enough that hopefully people would believe it. So we decided to go further with this idea and began brainstorming ideas for a campaign. We settled on social media posts, flyers, a banner, a website, and tabling.
Designing the Intervention
At this stage, we worked on designing the prototypes for the intervention. I developed the prototype for the webpage and my fellow teammates created the other prototypes.
I also gave feedback on the flyer prototype since my teammate violated design principles such as proximity and alignment. I was able to catch those errors and fixed the flyer.
Overview of prototyped touchpoints:
Flyers/banners
-
Showcasing the new seating system
-
QR code to website​
Website
-
Has more detailed information
-
Explains that it is not a real system
-
Flushes out how the proposed system might work​
Social Media
-
Create interest on social media​
Tabling
-
Ask for feedback on the proposed solution
Feedback from Second Crit Session
Some of the feedback we got from the second crit session included that our touchpoints and journey map connected nicely with each other. For the flyer prototype, we needed to start figuring out to what extent we could put out flyers and banners that look like official university materials. For the price tier breakdown, one of the teacher's assistant mentioned that the trick in this intervention was to actually find out where the points of overcrowding were at Geisel and allow that to guide our more speculative project of putting a price on it.
After the second crit session, we needed to finalize our intervention. So, our final brainstorming session was for the website, the price breakdown, and the overall user flow for the website.
The Final Intervention
Our final brainstorming session was for the website, the price breakdown, and the overall user flow for the website. For the website, we decided to utilize Wix since it was easy and intuitive to use. I proposed removing the banner and tabling prototypes from our final intervention since the banner was extra and tabling was not the best idea for collecting testimonials from the overcrowding issue given the short time period. Instead, we decided to add a Google form in our website to collect those stories and other feedback from our project.
Link to website:
https://geiselseatingsolut.wixstudio.io/ucsd
Final Flyer
Testimonials
We did not expect to receive that much feedback and stories but luckily we got many. Unfortunately, we did not receive the feedback and stories that we expected relating to the issue of overcrowding. Instead, students commented on how the project was.
Potential Improvements
We believe we could have improved the way in which we delivered the message that the project was satire and it should not have been taken seriously since many students felt it was unethical to be putting up these flyers containing this type of information. We also could have had more valuable feedback from students containing actual stories about how they have been affected by this overcrowding issue. Since we only had a Google form for them to share their thoughts, they wrote what they wanted. If we had used another type of collecting data like a survey, maybe we could have had more quantitative data on how many students have been affected by this issue. Overall, we thought our project went well since it provoked the students and got negative reactions as we thought it would, owing to the fact that having to give more money to the school is obviously not the greatest thing.
​
Some potential paths of improvement given more time on the project include: leaving some time before revealing the falsity of the campaign, supplementing the website with a url without wix.com, alternate flyers that cover more ground across campus, continuing the social media for more days, staging a Q&A (from the school’s perspective) or a protest (in the students’ perspective) for the campaign, or following the campaigns with interviews with participants.
​
If we had more time to work on the project, we could have made the campaign a little longer, maybe with different designs for the flyers. Since UCSD usually has different flyers for the same announcement, it could have made it more believable. The website could have also been even longer and detailed with more in depth information about the system itself. Another idea we had but did not implement was the idea of a social media account that was announcing the system. However, we decided against it because it wouldn’t be coming from the social UCSD account and would probably not work. Maybe with more time to design the account and posts it could be believable.​​​
Reflections
Overall, it was so exciting to get to carry out our campaign after working on it all quarter. I learned so much about the design process, critiques and feedback, prototyping, and so much more. Getting to see the number of views go up to 1000 on the SnapChat story was shocking because I didn’t realize we would be able to reach that many people. Reading all the comments, from the amused to the angry ones was also fascinating because we really did get a reaction out of people. Overcrowding is such a big issue and the fact that people believed our flyer, even for a moment, says a lot about UCSD and how they handle issues. Our hope was to get people talking about overcrowding at UCSD, and we think we were able to accomplish that.