Personal Tasks:

• Interviewed 4 professors and 3 working professionals

• Constructed low-fidelity prototypes for initial user testing

• Mapped user journey and highlighted key tensions

• Presented final service pitch to clients

Skills:

• Stakeholder Ethnography

• Synthesis and tension-finding

• Blueprinting

• Storytelling

STAKEHOLDER MAPPING

Our group of four looked at in-person professional stakeholders in the lives of LGBTQ+ youth. We mapped the relationships of professors, doctors, and coaches with the youth. From this, we highlighted some initial opportunity areas for us to design in.

RESEARCH & ETHNOGRAPHY

From our stakeholder mapping, we decided the area of college professionals was a fruitful one. We then browsed different resources at Northwestern University pertaining to LGBTQ+ youth. Through different mediums, such as an online directory of ally professors teaching at Northwestern, we reached out to and interviewed several allies on campus.

PROTOTYPING & USER TESTING

We designed prototype ‘ally kits’ - boxes containing different LGBTQ+ themed resources and artifacts - and presented them to professors at McCormick college of Engineering at Northwestern University. We got generally positive feedback on the usefulness of these resources, and how easy they were to implement. However, a completely new insight changed our design direction.

DEFINING A NEW USER

Our new insight, from user testing, was that some professors wanted to support the LGBTQ+ community, but not be overt in their allyship. Since allyship also required a certain amount of training, professors were concerned they couldn’t be an ally because they didn’t have the time commit to do the training. We thus hypothesized that allyship is a spectrum, and those professors who identify in the grey area between neutrality and allyship are in need of resources catered to them. We called these professors, Supporters.

PROJECT SPECTRUM is an in-person resource for supporters to engage in low-stakes, peer-to-peer interactions facilitated by self-selected physical artifacts.

We found a need to design a service that provides resources for supporters. Using our insights, we designed the service to be a more relaxed time-commitment, employing some more obscure artifacts to engage the professor, and a colleague to converse with them.

STEP 1: A colleague is present at a staff lounge table with several artifacts and resources

STEP 2: The professor approaches the table, converses with the colleague, and chooses which artifacts they want to take back with them

STEP 3: A student notices their professor’s artifacts, and a conversation sparks between the two