Your team’s goal is to choose a local community that faces challenges reconnecting with its members and the broader community, and then design a product that influences their behavior to help them meet their goals. You may target any relevant user groups, such as volunteer organizations, people living in a specific community, or parents! However, we encourage you to try to stretch yourselves and pick a user group that you all do not consider yourself a member of; this is so that you will not rely too much on your own experiences during user research as personal biases can potentially affect your research findings. Over the course of the quarter, your team will work on designing a system to help this group of people make decisions that let them live more sustainably on a daily basis.

It will be important to define the following:

• Who are the members of this community?
• What is the context that define this community? Where is the community located?
• What type of engagement do you hope to achieve? Who should they be engaging with?
• What are some assumed problems and challenges that you might address?

Some broad directions:

• Civic engagement / Activism (for example; voter rights, voter engagement, participating in town hall and city council meetings, etc.)
• Neighborhood Engagement (for example; park clean up, starting and maintaining a community garden, block parties, etc.)
• Community Programs (for example; tool libraries, volunteer programs - local food bank, animal shelter, etc.)
• General (Advocating for others, creating support groups in the community)

During this course, you will work with a team of students to narrow down on a community to focus on, learn about their needs, and design an intervention. In order to do this you will need to do secondary research to learn more about this community and conduct qualitative research to find first hand opportunities and problems that you might address this quarter.

As part of your project, you will need to define what a specific community’s needs are that your project can help support, and what activity you would like to design to help address this need. While your design may not be able to address this head on, it may be useful to consider the conditions that have made engaging with this community challenging while conducting user research and learning from your target group. Think about how the activity you chose is currently supported via technology (or not), what doesn’t work about current ways of supporting it, and how your solution will do this better. Finally, be specific in the community and specific target users you select! The specificity of addressing a particular group of people allows you to deeply think about what makes the group unique and how you would best want to support them. So, dive in and see what you can come up with!

Critical Considerations:

• Choose a community that you would be excited to learn about and from.
• It is critical that you keep an open mind to learning about potential problems and challenges for your chosen community.
• Be sure to choose a community that you are either not a direct part of or one in which you can remain neutral to their needs and stories.
• You need to consider a local community that you have access to throughout this course. This will require you to reach out to and interview members of this community.
• Don't make another NextDoor app!