Your team's goal is to choose a community of people and design a product that helps them through any aspect of thinking, making, or creating, broadly construed. Importantly, 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.

Some broad directions:

• Creative accessibility
• Self expression and identity
• Cultural expression
• Skill learning and sharing
• Collaborative making
• Tools for thought
• Creative communities

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 why this need has not yet been addressed for this community while conducting user research with 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:

• 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 (for example, professional artists may be difficult to access, but student or local craft groups may be easier to find).
• Get creative! Don't default to apps, explore alternative systems.