Design Better

Team: Hannah Jones, Stephy Mathews, Nava Teja Tummalapalli and Sean Warsaw

Timeframe: Two weeks

Design Challenge: (Inspired by the 2016 CHI Student Design Competition) Design an assistive technology that addresses a real problem in the world. A unique constraint added by our instructor was to focus on the "un-exotic underclass" or groups of people that are typically overlooked and ignored for socioeconomic reasons.

Design Direction: After several rounds of brainstorming and voting, we decided to focus on designing for Elementary School Teachers in Violent, Urban Areas.

Predispositions: Once our design direction was determined, we used affinity diagrams and SWOT analysis to identify the best direction for this project. Through this process, we not only uncovered our own assumptions, beliefs and biases, both about public education, but also the issues that teachers and students experience in these environments. 

Research: The results from our analysis pointed in two distinct directions: design around the emotional aspects that affect performance in the classroom or the general needs of teachers. After a series of interviews with inner-city teachers, education consultants and PhD students, we were able to determine what issue we would address. 

Insights: What we discovered was that the emotional state of students can have dramatic effects on both their behavior and their academic performance. As we started to think about how we could use that information to assist teachers, we began to realize that the integrity and the effectiveness of our solution would only be fully realized when students provide genuine feedback about their emotional state. Although we understood that students might falsify their responses initially, we were encouraged by the number of students that defied the notion that students would not share their feelings with their teachers. The odds weighed heavily in our favor that once trust had been established between the student and the teacher, the floodgates of communication would open. 

Concepts: Our design concept was pretty straightforward. Each student would be assigned a clicker to ensure that responses from Student A, were actually being submitted by that student. At any point of the day, the teacher could ask his/her students to report how they felt about a particular lesson, their homework or even how they felt at the beginning or end of the day. These responses would then be recorded by the receiver and this information would populate within the system under this teacher's unique view, which he/she can access at their convenience. Given that our challenge was to design an assistive technology for teachers in urban environments, a clicker-based system seemed like an appropriate choice, because clickers are already used in some teaching environments and they are a relatively low-cost device. 

Prototype: