Team profile by members of project team

The Open Design Studio at Duke is a collective of educators, students, and community partners interested in creating solutions to promote human flourishing across social sectors. Open design is an equity-focused research and development process inspired by open-source principles. In both its methodology and its solutions, the Open Design Studio is committed to cultivating a desired world: actively inclusive, transparent and collaborative. 

Using open design practices, members of this project team listened to community members to inform their understanding of the communities’ needs and desires. Rather than creating solutions in an isolated way, students co-designed and collaborated with stakeholders throughout each stage of the project. The team was divided into four subteams, each of which followed the four phases of design (understand, create, evaluate, share) to tackle a societal challenge. Subteams included:

1. Education Subteam: This team co-created ethics-centered, project-based computer science curricula for high school students.
2. Community Tech Subteam: This team co-created an undergraduate house course plan to provide a structured, easily-accessible method of interacting with tech volunteerism in Durham. 
3. Necessity-Driven Entrepreneurship Subteam: This team co-created inclusive and easily accessible story maps for early-stage entrepreneurs in Durham.
4. Climate Resilience Subteam: This team co-created resources to engage community members on climate change issues they might be facing.

Education Subteam

Introduction

What if high school educators could intuitively integrate ethical decision-making into technical project work in existing computer science curricula? The education subteam for the 2022-2023 academic year oriented our work around this research question. By conducting 20 interviews, we found that students want ways to explore ethical CS because they feel disconnected from traditional curriculum and teachers want to integrate ethics into their curriculum but face challenges due to curricular requirements from schools/districts. 

We organized our subteam into two focused workflows: the platform team built lesson plans and a Notion platform for sharing the open-access curricula and the research and community team built prototype testing protocols and conducted outreach with educators. Both workflows were driven by insights from interviews and experiments. The Notion platform contains lessons filterable by computer science and ethical subjects. We were also able to create testing packets to be used to test in classrooms.

Results and Discussion 

We aimed to shift away from lessons/methodologies we have experienced in the past and toward what we imagine education should look like, requiring personal reflection upon our identity as both students and educators. From this, we brainstormed lesson plans that are culturally competent and reimagined modern education. Through iterative testing, we got to confront the ethical backbone of our lessons, allowing us to better understand the efficacy of our project prototype. 

While ethical thinking is a difficult subject to understand, by creatively brainstorming questions that capture students’ understanding of ethics within computer science within the span of a couple of questions, we believe that we successfully created research questions to measure our project's impact. A major challenge was being bound by testing regulations which prevented us from directly surveying students, leading us to survey teachers about their views on the efficacy of the lessons on their students, instead.

Our main challenge throughout this project was designing a platform that aligned with high school educators’ needs. For example, we didn’t want our product to be aligned with any existing curriculum but ended up de facto aligning our prototype with College Board’s AP Computer Science A curriculum. For many educators, ensuring our prototype's compatibility was the only way our lessons could be integrated into existing computer science curricula. We did discover, however, that being constrained by feasibility in implementation forced us to continuously revise and improve upon our lesson prototypes. While our ideal prototype would have looked very different without the constraints of what teachers align with, these limitations led to further development to create a better, more practical prototype. 

Reflection

Moving forward, we will pilot a study testing the effectiveness of our lesson prototypes in encouraging ethical thinking when designing and creating computer algorithms. By working with high school educators to test our lesson plans in real classrooms, we hope to glean insight into how our lessons can be adapted to more effectively spur ethical thinking in students. We aim to implement UI/UX & lesson testing feedback by continuously updating our Notion platform. 

Community Tech Subteam

Introduction 

Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives, transforming the way we communicate, work, and access information. As such, the demand for skilled tech professionals has increased significantly in recent years, particularly in the nonprofit sector, where organizations are seeking to leverage technology to achieve their goals more efficiently and effectively. Tech volunteerism, which involves providing technical assistance to nonprofit organizations and community initiatives, has emerged as a valuable way to bridge the gap between the demand for tech skills and the limited resources of organizations. 

Many college students, such as those at Duke University, possess the necessary skills to provide technical assistance to nonprofit organizations and community initiatives. Despite this, students are still failing to engage in tech volunteerism as much as they could. Using the open design principles, our research aims to identify barriers, perspectives, and solutions to the tech volunteerism drought at Duke. The guiding question in our year-long project was the following: “What if there were established, easily accessible models for engaging Duke students in technology volunteerism?” 

Results and Discussion 

Following qualitative interviews with 14 undergraduates, six graduate students and 11 campus/community partners, our team identified three primary barriers to tech volunteerism on Duke’s campus. These include the lack of knowledge, the lack of time and the increased enticement/culture of big tech. 

To best address these issues on a feasible scale, our project group decided to plan a university house course. House courses are student-taught, faculty sponsored pass/fail courses that allow students to pursue interests in a low-stress and low-commitment form. With many students voicing their desire for structured learning opportunities in the field, a house course allows for students to engage with tech volunteerism education in a pre-established and organized manner. The house course we developed is split into three primary phases: education, information dispersion and community engagement. 

Following course structure development our team conducted two testing/evaluation phases with low-touch and high-touch prototypes. The first evaluation phase consisted of a survey of how students engage with campus advertising efforts as well as feedback on a preliminary house course poster we developed. Following an iteration phase, a higher-touch evaluation phase was conducted in which a “day-1” lecture was presented to a small group of students. Detailed qualitative results were collected and utilized for a final iteration phase. 

Reflection

This semester’s opportunity to learn the open design principles was immensely valuable to the personal growth and development of our group members. The various lectures and guest lectures throughout the semester provided us with a unique and transformative learning experience, unlike anything else experienced at Duke. While challenges such as meeting times and stakeholder interview methods did arise, we are proud of our team’s final deliverables and are excited to see and carry out the eventual implementation of our house course for many years to come.

Necessity-Driven Entrepreneurship Subteam

Introduction

Throughout the year, our team has worked with ECHO/Helius, a Durham-based entrepreneurship-supporting organization, to explore the following question: What if ECHO could help small business owners navigate the ecosystem and lower the feeling of risk associated with starting a business?

Through speaking with individuals at ECHO and in the general Durham community, our subteam recognized that 1) entrepreneurial resources are not in one place, contextually relevant or easy to navigate for small business owners; 2) there are limited resources for historically marginalized entrepreneurs; and 3) the biggest challenge of starting a business was the feeling of risk.

Results and Discussion 

The team conducted 18 interviews (five entrepreneurs, 10 supporting organizations, and three mentors) to identify four key stakeholders, including small business owners, support organizations, mentors and ECHO. Each stakeholder has unique needs and wants: small business owners want to nurture their passions, support organizations want to address historical inequities, mentors want to see entrepreneurs achieve their goals and ECHO wishes to expand the number and type of entrepreneurs they serve. By addressing the needs of each stakeholder, the team hopes to make entrepreneurship more accessible and inclusive for everyone.

Based on the understanding of stakeholders’ needs, our team designed the entrepreneur’s story map aiming to lower potential business starters’ feeling of risk and inspire them launch their business. 

Reflection 

As a team, we have been working collaboratively and have established a good team vibe. Our subteam has had some notable successes, particularly in the quality of the work we have produced so far. Our codesigner ECHO has actively participated in our research process and continuously provided us insightful feedback. However, we have faced some challenges, particularly in reaching out to people and conducting interviews. We have noticed a high no-show rate from our interviewees, which has made it difficult to gather the information we need. Moving forward, we plan to tackle this challenge by exploring alternative communication channels and optimizing our outreach strategies. 

We have left ECHO with one or two journey map templates for their future usage. These templates are replicable and allow for the ECHO team to develop their own profiles based on the audiences they wish to capture and what they find the most helpful to showcase.

Climate Resilience Subteam

Introduction

The Climate Resilience in Durham team’s efforts were guided by the following question: What if Durham community members, local organizations and policymakers collaboratively develop inclusive and actionable climate resiliency solutions that incorporate the community’s wants and needs?

To inform the team’s understanding of being resilient to climate change’s impacts of extreme heat and flooding in Durham, the team conducted an ecosystem analysis and identified three key stakeholder groups: citizens, government staff and local organizations focused on climate change and sustainability. The team researched leaders in each of these stakeholder groups and conducted interviews with 17 individuals (see Figure 1). Each interviewee was asked about their experience with climate change locally, how they define climate resilience and what their most pressing priorities are today within their work or community. Throughout the year, it was important for the team to continue gathering feedback from these leaders, so some individuals were interviewed multiple times.

Key Research Findings and Results

The interviewees and project co-designers emboldened the team to develop a variety of resources to help educate and empower members of the Durham community to take action. The primary resulting products were two brochures on extreme heat and flooding with tips to activate community members by providing information, resources and a place to share their stories of the impacts of climate change in Durham. 

To help refine the brochures, the team printed pamphlets and paper surveys for people to share their input. Based on the feedback received, the overall design and layout were clear and done well according to 100% of survey respondents. However, the main comment and piece of feedback were that the pamphlets were too technology savvy. This feedback is critical since we want the climate action pamphlets to be usable to everyone. 

Lessons Learned and Reflections

Throughout the project, the team navigated multiple hurdles both in developing actionable and easy-to-understand content about climate resilience and also with connecting with community members and organizations. 

In order to overcome the first challenge, we researched how cities and municipalities, including Durham, approached conversations around climate resilience since not everyone will define it in the same way. The team decided to focus more on the manifestations of climate change, including extreme heat and flooding, to make it more tangible for community members. Also given the variety of stakeholder groups, the team designed multiple types of documents based on the audience type. 

In order to overcome the second challenge, we worked with our interviewees and project co-designers to identify others who may be interested in this type of work to expand our reach. This “snowball” approach, combined with conducting in-person interviews with Durham citizens at the Durham Bus Station, yielded some potential long-term partners in this effort including the Museum of Life and Science. However, there are still some key stakeholders that did not respond to the requests and the team is encouraging Sustainable Duke to reach out to them again this summer.

As a team, we have experienced the difficulty of community engagement, but have also seen the value of gathering community input. Our hope is for our prototype to be a continued living document that will make a small impact on the Durham Community.

Open Design Studio: Participatory Solutions for Human Flourishing

Poster by Amanda Booth, Aria Chernik, Ariel Hekier, Ashwin Gadaraju, Diane Sanchez, Durga Sreenivasan, Ellen Zeng, Emilio Abelmann, Ishaan Mehotra, Jason Elliott, Kartik Chamarti, Kevin Hoch, Matthew Rui, Michael Gustafson, Rachael Granger, Rachel Gordon, Rebecca Simmons, Ritvik Janamsetty, Sara Diamond, Sophia Masciarelli, Tanya Manocha and Yuxuan Tian