Speculative Urban Futures - PUXD
In the summer after my sophomore year of college, I had the incredible opportunity to be a part of the UK UX Design Study Abroad Maymester experience. My team worked on-site at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, solving the problem of misinformation spreading offline. This project encouraged us to be exploratory in our thinking, and challenged us to consider possible concerns with information tracking methods. Working off of a co-design our sponsors ran with Newcastle citizens, we were tasked to refine their storyboards and expand upon their research into the topic.
See Project Plan for more details on what this project entailed. For a simplified version of the project, check out our Final Presentation. For a comprehensive view of all materials relating to this project, check out our Transition Document and the links within it. As I was one of the main collaborators on this project with the most experience in UX work, the majority of the information gathered I directly led or I conducted myself. For the purposes of this portfolio, I will only be showing information that I worked on directly.
Design Process
Our final deliverables for this design sprint included:
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5 refined storyboards from the original co-design stories
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A Literature Review detailing concerns with the speculative solutions
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A Microsoft Forms survey based on the storyboard information and possible concerns
Refining Storyboards
At the start of this design sprint, our sponsors had previously conducted a co-design workshop with 5 participants, having them draw out and create their own storyboards for their idea of a speculative technology to help solve the problem of misinformation spreading in-person and offline. They were asked to be as exploratory as possible, not worrying about any constraints of feasibility or legality. The five participants were named as follows for anonymity: CatGoose, HorseDuckDinosaur, KoalaDog, OctopusJellyfish, and RabbitTiger.
Goal
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Refine the storyboards to make them more legible and comprehensive to then show more participants for their opinions.
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​Process
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Starting with sketching, we created our own ideas for the higher developed storyboards
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We translated these sketches, along with relevant prompts, into ChatGPT to get the higher fidelity images for the storyboards.
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Repeated this process for the "story" and "solution" respectively for all 5 stories.
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Insights
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​Learned more about the storyboards and what the participants meant in their drawings and descriptions
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Canva slideshow professionally showcasing these storyboards.
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Exploring Ethics & Policy
Since the co-design participants were told to be very exploratory in their solutions, the following storyboards did not take into consideration ethics or policies that could make the implementation of them problematic. To understand the policies and cultural norms of the UK better, we conducted a literature review, reviewed the original storyboards, and then affinity diagramed our findings based on 5 main key points of emphasis from the participants.
Goals
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Understand Policy and Ethics in the UK as American students​
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Refine storyboards to make the ideas less extreme
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Remain exploratory in technology, while also keeping in mind legality and implementability.
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Process
We researched articles on the following topics:
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Ethical Concerns
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Policy
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Psychological Consequences
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Cultural Differences
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Current Models
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Surveillance
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Privacy
After analyzing these results, we then reviewed the solutions again, highlighted the pain points, and creating an affinity diagram of the co-design participants needs displayed in their story ideas.
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Insights
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​Ideated new solution ideas and learned that the participants may be willing to sacrifice some privacy to stop the spread of misinformation.
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Learned participants would want intentional spreaders to be punished and reeducated.
Reimagining Solutions & Storyboarding
Goals
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Construct refined versions of the storyboards taking into consideration all of the policies and participant wishes.
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Ideate solutions for ethical issues and visualize these in a comprehensive format.​​​​​​
Process
Conducting a design workshop based on each of the existing storybaords, we were able to ideate new solutions taking into account the issues surrounding privacy and leagality. For each storyboard, we reimagined the solutions allowing for:
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​Consent when recording conversations
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Lawful consequences to intentional spreading of misinformation
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Insights
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From this workshop, we were able to ask ChatGPT to generate us another storyboard for the updated version of the story, and in some instances edit them by hand using canva and illustrator tools.
Concept Testing
Goals
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​Assess the clarity of the storyboards with participants
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Determine the willingness to adopt the solutions
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Process
Testing Protocol can be found in the Transition Document
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Tested each solution with 2 participants each (10 tests in total)
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Went through each storyboard slide deck and asked questions about clarity, ethics, and useful suggestions
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Insights
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​Confirmed our research that the original storyboards were too scary or felt unethical
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Highlighted that concerns were alleviated with the reimagined storyboard versions. ​
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Limitation: Since we did not have access to Newcastle citizen participants, our testing was done with other American study abroad students, impacting our results. Because of this, we created a Microsoft Form of testing questions that we handed off to our sponsors to further test with their previous participants as well as other Newcastle citizens.
Final Storyboards
Our final storyboards included the reimagined problem and solution for each of the 5 original user stories, edited based on Concept Testing feedback and our secondary research. These solutions are in the process of being tested with Newcastle citizens to get a better understanding on the type of speculative futures England can enact to prevent misinformation spreading.
