Design for America

Student Organization
Fall 2024 Project

Design Research
Facilitation
Rapid Prototyping

Design for America is a national organization that uses a 6-step design
thinking sprint to address systemic social issues in communities and college campuses. I have been apart of UC’s chapter of DFA since fall 2022, and am in my 2nd semester of being our studio lead.

Through DFA, I have collaborated on projects addressing campus safety, food inequity in Cincinnati, quality of life for Cincinnati’s aging population, and led a sprint on student voter engagement.

Here is a showcase of work from our project on student voter engagement, in collaboration with democracy matters.

Design Sprint

A design sprint is a condensed version of the design thinking process. In a 5 week sprint, we quickly move through a problem space, immersing ourselves in research, ideating on solutions, and building prototypes, all with the end goal of tackling social issues in our community.

Step 1: Identify

We spent the semester focused in the area of college student voter engagement.

While voter turnout among college students is on the rise, they are still showing
up to the polls in low numbers compared to their older counterparts.

Step 2: Immerse

We immersed ourselves in the problem space by collecting research via online sources,
as well as by interviewing UC students. We identified these key insights:

Step 3: Reframe

With these insights in mind, my team was curious about how we could increase overall dialogue and awareness of the voter process on campus, as well as prompt students to explore their own political beliefs, outside of influences such as parents or social media. This led us to the following How Might We question.

Step 4: Ideate

We spent some time ideating on solutions with this How Might We question in mind.
As we ideated, a common theme that arose was immersive experiences that prompted
political dialogue.

Final Idea:
Thought Box

After our ideation process, we arrived at our final idea: The Thought Box

The Thought Box is an immersive installation where UC students can anonymously share their thoughts on elections, candidates, and politics. Inside a phone booth-like space, they write on a tablet, and after a delay, their messages are projected outside for the campus to see. This creates a space for reflection on personal beliefs and peer perspectives.

What’s next?

We culiminated this sprint with a presentation to democracy matters members as well as UC students and faculty. In this sprint, the thought box remained a conceptual idea that could be adopted by democracy matters. As a team, we were able to pass along our research, insights, and ideas to further their work.

What’s DFA up
to now?

This semester, Design for America UC is a tackling a project with local organization, Africa Fire Mission, focusing on their volunteer recruitment and fundraising. Stay tuned!