Post by Michael Lindenberger

Thirty-four years ago Joan Didion opened a famous essay about life in a California she no longer recognized, or even fully trusted, by writing, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I am finishing up my first year as a resident here in California and it’s important to note that much has changed here since the 1979 publication of The White Album, but the importance of storytelling hasn’t.

We can debate whether storytelling is necessary, as Didion wrote, to our lives, but it certainly is one powerful tool for making sense of the lives we do lead, and for communicating that sense to others.

What flushed these thoughts on a sunny Tuesday morning was reflections on the five weeks my team – Chelsea, Tate and Ryan — and I have just spent working in East Palo Alto. We were on task for the city manager and her executive team to design a way to boost the sense of community among residents of the west side of East Palo Alto.

We began our task, as is recorded earlier on the blog, by a different kind of storytelling: We asked residents there to tell us their stories, and we listened. If we have been successful, and we all four feel good about our project, that was the moment our success began: When we asked about the stories of the residents there, and listened to their answers.

I won’t recount the whole process of nearly five weeks here, since much of it has been detailed on the blog by teammates, but I will that we went down several paths that we later abandoned before deciding on our final design.

We thought perhaps what was needed was a way for young people to better understand older residents, many of whom came to EPA when it was a very different place, or for black residents to understand Latino residents and for Pacific Islanders to tell their stories. We devised a way that young people would, instead of telling their own stories through writing and artistic programs designed to teach them self-expression, interview each other and end up telling the stories of their parents, or their friends and of people they don’t know and normally wouldn’t talk to.

We thought that by doing that we might put a face on the East Palo Alto residents, so many of whom we heard anecdotally work in service positions in companies that have made Silicon Valley famous. Indeed, we thought even that we could use those stories to help brand the EPA as a backbone of Silicon Valley and approach companies with an appeal to get more directly involved in housing and other touch-and-go issues that make for many in EPA their hold on their lives so tenuous.

But as we kept asking questions, we lost faith in the ability of those stories to apply real leverage against companies, who we feared would not be persuaded that a healthy EPA was a business necessity for them, not when this particular job market is so tilted in their favor.

So the glory of the design thinking process was just this: We easily abandoned storytelling as central part of our solution, and turned instead to other levers. We ended up proposing the Park Knights of the Westside, as a solution to a very pressing and immediate need for safer and simpler parking choices for residents of the Woodland Park Apartments.

In short, the solution is to recruit a host of volunteers who would be willing to be on call once a month or so to respond to texted requests for parking escorts for residents who arrive home late at night and sometimes must park a mile away or more.

But we weren’t done with storytelling. Even after developing the solution, and testing it through prototypes and improving it right up until the last minute, we had to present the idea to city manager Magda Gonzolez and her executive team. We would be one of four teams presenting and the task was simple, but not easy: Communicate to her team our idea in a way that would both arouse their curiosity and satisfy their experience-born skepticism powerfully enough that they would take the idea and put it in play.

That’s no small task, given the wealth of ideas and paucity of resources available to people in their position.

In our run-through on Tuesday, two days before the presentations, we demonstrated just how much work we had to do. One problem, the opening was too long and failed to adequately set the stage for what we were about to present. Our solution, taken from a member of the teaching team, was to use a piece of visualization that had ended the talk previously as part of the ramp.

I simply asked the managers to close their eyes and imaging coming home late at night in a dark and distant parking space and then walking 20 minutes back home. With eyes closed, it was easy to see how vulnerable that daily routine would make anyone feel.

That was but one example of how each of the three of us who were presenting focused our remarks first on the storytelling, and second on the importance of the ideas and methods we were discussing. And I think it is one reason why, when we ended, Magda responded so enthusiastically to our proposal.

A few simple rules we followed:

• Whenever possible we substituted natural language for d.School jargon. This was harder than it seems since so much of the process is defined by its own terms, from empathy work to ideation to prototyping … we tried to get rid of them all, or if we kept them to explain the words in context.
• We included signposts – little verbal clues as to where we were in the story, such as (now that we’ve told you who we met, we’ll talk about what we learned from them), and finally:
• We weren’t afraid of repetition. Relying on the old preacher’s formula, we told them what we were going to say, said it, then told them what we had just told them.

I will just close by saying that seeing the reaction on the faces of the city manager and her team made this class project seem very worthwhile. We don’t know whether they will encourage the formation of the Park Knights or not, but I am certain that elements of our proposal will live on in the policy discussions among her team and the city council.

That’s five weeks well spent, and a story we can all be proud to tell.

Post by Chi Hung Chong

One of the most interesting sessions of the class throughout the quarter occurred last Tuesday. Each group wrote their POVs on their board before a 15-minute ‘feedback’ session. During this session, we walked around the room, inspecting POVs of other teams, and posting comments on colorful post-its. The solitary and fluid nature of it was inspiring – we were given the time to stand in front of each board, take in the silence to gather our thoughts and mull over the masterpiece in front of us, write down our own individual notes on colorful post-its and tacking them on (akin to art-gazing at a art museum).

 We then went back to our own boards, read through the notes by the other class members and came together as a group to talk about the issues. It was interesting when many similar points were brought forth – for e.g. one of our users was a VA who formed the fringe community in a predominantly Latino community. We inferred his need through our conversations for his need for purpose and meaning. The same comments echoed throughout – the phrase was too vague and did not contain much meaning in and of itself. When we later presented our POVs to the teaching team and a different group, we were able to unearth richer insights through the stories we shared, and buffed up these insights and needs. It is always easy to get caught up in the world of vagueness and abstraction, and finding a concrete need that paints an immediate picture to anyone reading the POV was crucial.

Another important but easily overlooked aspect was the importance of good descriptive words of the user. When you do not have pictures, being able to eloquently capture the ‘soul’ of the user through descriptive words was important. For example, one of the composite set of users were users disgruntled about the insecurity in EPA. When we started describing them in further detail through the descriptive adjectives, we realized that they were all busy parents, and had this natural family-instinct (or as Jenny says best, Momma-bear gut feel) to protect their family when push comes to shove. Being able to capture the ‘busy-ness’ of this set of users added an important element when we later proceeded to the How Might We (HMW) statement phase, but more importantly, allowed us to understand better the rich dynamics within the user group.

Nadine came in a couple of days later. Explaining to someone so deeply involved in the EPA issues that we had only been working on for the past few weeks was intimidating, but it was helpful that she was able to lend her experience to deepen our insights. She redirected our attention to certain POVs (vs the rest) which seem to be prevalent issues to her during her time at EPA. While these ‘more prevalent’ POVs might or might not offer the most interesting solution space, to vet these POVs through Nadine offered us a sense of priority on which area to start first.

We later brainstormed on the HMW statements for the 2 main POVs that contained these insights – disgruntled users who were willing to act but whose responses have been previously ignored, and the commonality of projecting a positive image that cuts through a wide strata of society.

For the 1^st brainstorming, we took on an approach that was very similar to what we had previously done for the DP#1 project. We set a time limit, individually came up with ideas on post-its before coming together at the end of it all to cluster the ideas and build on the ideas. One of the interesting ideas that came up was a smartphone app that would allow users to report crime happening around them. We were cognizant that the main goal of the project was to build a sense of community amongst, but were equally aware that the main complaint that kept coming forth was the lack of police presence and security. 

The app was interesting as allowing users to report crime issues seem to hit at the security layer, but there was this inherent unspoken need of being able to monitor the crimes going on and have been reported to by your neighbors. There were definitely many key assumptions surrounding this idea, the most basic premise of which is – would people actually use it? Jenny was awesome in this regard – she helped us to develop a full storyboard for the different users.

Key questions that came up during this phase – think of the flow of the story, what happens at each point in time (what type of app interface should the user expect to see). Drawing it up on the board ala d.school style definitely crystallized our thinking, and we were able to fill in the gaps with some hypotheses which would be later tested.

We were also enthralled by the possibilities that this app unfolds – could this be a seed upon which dissemination of information (community events to increase sense of pride etc) could be done, could the ease of dissemination of information incentivize Equity Residential (the property landowner) to participate? Could the app be crowdsourced or developed by EPA residents, akin to the Palo Alto Online article detailing how a group of EPA girls came up with a graffiti monitoring app that hit at a pressing community issue despite all the odds. But it was important to test just the first part – the part that deals with security.

For the 2^nd brainstorming session, we decided to jazz it up by putting in place 2 extremely diametrically opposed scenarios. For Julian, the HMW statement was to increase the pride in the community. We set 2 different constraints for the solutions, one chunk has to be free (or incur a very small amount of financial investment), and the other chunk involved unlimited resources at your disposal. The solutions for both were wide-ranged, and potentially gave us interesting ideas to talk about and build off on.

As for today’s class (21^st May), we took a step back and did some group reflection. Almost halfway through the project, team alignment is important. We wrote about the aspects that we liked (‘I like ..’) and minor changes that could have been done (‘I wish …’) for each person. Personally, considering that my group has been great, it was a challenge to try to think of places that each person could improve on. As always, I realized that I had much to learn and improve myself. 

Stay tuned to our next post on prototyping in EPA!