Wicked Problems

Project Brief/Concept: 

Map the origin and evolution of a wicked societal problem while addressing the needs of a given audience (human-centered design). I worked in a team with Brenna Potter, Andrea Fredricksen, and Brooklin Bekolay to create a project that indirectly addressed the pollution issue in Wayne County, Michigan.

Audience: 

Population of Wayne County

Insight discovered during the process: 

Detroit is the city of cars, but what-if we could change that? We have many bus stops in Detroit, and we saw it as an underutilized resource that could be put to better use. What if we could make energy generators powered by the people using the bus stops? We used this as the jumping-off point for our project. I was in charge of designing the bus stop at the Detroit Science Center.


What I learned: 

Conducting interviews with organizations focusing on pollution helped us to see that public transportation is an underutilized and not well-maintained resource to tap into to combat pollution.


Role (if group project): 

Concept iterations, air and water quality research, ideation sketching, science center bus stop design, mockups


Specs/tech: 

Motion/Mockups; Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects




Process 


This first portion was all about targeting the right problem. We chose to focus on carbon emissions.



This next phase asked us to look at why the issues still exist, and we found that people with health issues were most affected.



This phase was the interview phase, and it helped us see where they were working on the issues.



This next phase, along with phase 5, Helped us determine the direction we were going into. We knew we waned to have people involved with creating energy, we just didn’t know what avenue to explore.  




We focused on bus stops, since we saw it as a lacking resource and decided to leverage it with games and activities to develop energy. This final phase is where we did all the branding, and logistics of what each of the stops experience was going to be. 



Detroit, MI