Chalk Talk

Context: The G-Street corridor is a small section at the end of G-Street in Davis that is blocked off to traffic. It was originally blocked off during COVID to allow for outdoor social distanced interactions, but has become loved by the city and has stayed. This allows the businesses in this part of the street to open up their outdoor spaces to customers for activities and seating. Since then, the city has been wanting to renovate the space to emulate similar things other cities have, as well as create a more lively and inviting space. We were lucky enough to have the first phase of renovations open just as we were beginning our project, and we even got to attend the grand opening as a class!

We were tasked with finding a way to make the G-Street corridor a community hub for the City of Davis.

We used design thinking throughout our project because we were faced with an ambiguous problem. We also needed to find a solution that addressed real user needs

Our design process consisted of understanding, empathizing , and defining user problems; then we went through a process of ideation and developed a prototype which we tested in Downtown Davis. 

We began our research by conducting 7 user interviews with a total of 10 community members. This includes Students, Business Owners, City Managers, and Senior Residents. We wanted to interview a wide variety of users to really understand Davis residents, and to figure out who we could help.

• We opted to do in-depth interviews rather than a more general survey in order to get a more nuanced perspective on specific issues regarding G-Street.

• <Overview of the type of questions asked!, maybe add link to full list>

We decided to focus on M & J, who are a married couple who have been living in Davis for over 20 years. They offered us an incredibly compelling story, and we saw longevity in the potential solutions we could create using what we learned from them.

• They fell in love with Downtown Davis for the colorful energy that locally owned businesses provided

• However, as it’s evolved over the years, their experience in Downtown Davis has changed. 

Locally owned businesses have been replaced by ones that cater more towards students — and as a result, there are currently few shared spaces for all residents in Davis to congregate and interact.

Many of our other interviewees pointed out that Downtown Davis has grown divided into 3 communities: families, seniors, & students.

So, how did we tackle this problem? WELLLL … 

We decided that we wanted to design something to make people like M & J feel more connected to other groups in Davis

<Watch our initial proposal video!>

After analyzing our users’ problems, we asked ourselves how we could go about making G Street a community hub, while also addressing people like M & J. We decided that the best way to do this was to find a way to bridge the intergenerational gap between the seniors, students, and families in Davis.

With this goal in place, we started brainstorming different ways to address our problem.

• Initially, we had trouble brainstorming solutions that didn’t just cater to our personal wants for the space, and ideas that weren’t too simple or too complex (a permanent and public stage, an interactive board game)

• We had to take a step back and refocus ourselves on the issue at hand. How do we go about bridging the intergenerational gap between the groups in Davis? What will spark interaction between these groups in a shared space, and awareness that isn’t normally present in the community? We took a risk of setting ourselves behind the rest of the class in terms of timeline/progress in order to find a suitable idea.

• It started with the idea for a community shelf where people could exchange items with one another…(prompted by a walk one team member took, and seeing a community exchange shelf)...

After brainstorming a wide range of ideas, we narrowed them to a few concepts that we further explored through detailed sketches.

We decided to simplify our original concepts, and finalized a community chalkboard. Ideally, there would be a prompt that would change weekly. Users would interact by answering the prompt, and/or stopping by the board to read others’ stories. Our goal with this chalkboard is to promote indirect interaction between Davis residents of all ages through storytelling. 

The prompt we chose to use for the purposes of testing was “What made you smile today?”

As you can see, we did a lot of testing to check if our prototype actually worked.

We did three major rounds of testing, all at different times and locations downtown. With each round of testing, we were able to collect more messages in a shorter amount of time. 

In total, we conducted about 15.5 hours of testing.

After the first one or two rounds of testing, we went back to make some small accessibility changes to our board (height, readability, chalk stuff), The purpose of the board is to encourage interaction between generations and groups of people, so we have to prioritize making it better for all.

And with our testing, we received responses that ranged from heartwarming, funny, and relatable. 

So you might be asking yourself…so how did the testing go? I’m going to highlight 2 user stories that I feel speak to the success of our prototype.

The first one is about a troop of girl scouts that came to write on our board. 

It was cute, They were kinda talking about what they wanted to write with each other

their parents even took pictures of them with the board

While they were still hovering around, we actually had to pack up for the day

They were REALLY sad when they saw us doing this

One of them asked “Why are you taking the board?”

This shows…

People have a sense of attachment to their responses, and want to know that their thoughts will be shared to others

People are invested in the board, they want to be able to come back to see what others have to say, or if there’s a new prompt

This second story is about a middle-aged couple.

They passed by the board, but didn't actually stop to write or read the messages.

Instead, they turned to each other and asked, “So, what made you smile today?”

This shows…

People don’t have to interact with the board by writing on it for it to serve a purpose.

And that… indirect interactions (like reading the messages, or…like in this story…prompting a conversation) can be just as impactful as writing on the board would

<Highlight more key observations, we took notes and covert pictures>

• People stopping by to just read (indirect interaction)

• People writing something and wanting to come back later to check for more responses (investment in the product)

• People pointing out specific responses they found funny, endearing, etc (you can tell about what age range a response is from based on context clues, like handwriting, grammar, if its a sloppy picture, humor, etc.)

Going off of that…. We had 2 key takeaways from the project

These were the suggestions we gave to the city if they were to implement the Chalkboard idea:

Creating weekly prompts

Having a large board with chalk at varying heights so both kids and adults have access to it

But regardless of whether or not a chalkboard is made, we think that bridging the intergenerational gap involves designing products that support both passive and active forms of exchange. 

Expecting people to always want to interact in ways that are always direct is simply unrealistic. I think it’s important to give people the opportunity to connect in ways both direct and indirect, and that this would be the most effective step in building community naturally over time, and this chalkboard can be a small step in the right direction.

<Pictures of us presenting to the city>
<VIEW OUR PRESENTATION, which made the main design system for>

Challenges

• Working through our ideation troubles, coming up with a product that truly solved our problem

• The script and presentation. Getting across to the audience all the work we put in, our thought process, to non-designers, under the allotted time.

Next Steps

• Working with the city to implement our idea! There has been some back and forth, but nothing super set in stone.

Personal Reflection

• This was one of my favorite design projects I’ve worked on thus far in my career. I had kind of been in a mental rut after working on so many purely UI/UX projects for a while, slaving over Figma and wireframes. It was incredibly refreshing using the design thinking techniques I had been learning in a context I never had before, especially in a community based one (and for a community I had grown to care so deeply about, Davis). I felt like using design thinking in a different context really helped broaden my view/perspective, and has made me much more confident in my soft skills (user research, ideation, etc). I am super proud of this project and my team for being so diligent and hard working throughout the process. I really think we put forward the best product we could have given the constraints in time and money. We thought through every step incredibly thoroughly, and presented everything in a digestible way that really showcased our talents!