PROYECTO PERRY & PROJECT PERRY
Bernard J Canniffe, Graphic Design, Iowa State University
Jeremy Swanston, Graphic Design, University of Iowa
Project Description
This five-day cultural immersive experience was conducted in Perry, IA for a six-day period (March 10 - Friday, March 15) over Spring Break 2018. This experience was also a collaborative one where a partnership between the University of Iowa (UI) and Iowa State University (ISU), and the community of Perry, IA.
This project focused on utilizing graphic design resources and methods to engage in and with the community of Perry, IA and to identify areas for improvements around specific economic and health challenges that were important to the community.
We capitalized on established relationships between two Graphic Design leaders in our State and the community of Perry, IA, in order to enable design students to meaningfully engage with the community and identify existing needs.
A total of 12 students, from both institutions worked together to engage community members on a variety of topics that were essential to community vitality, including, but not limited to, economic, environmental, cultural, and wellness subjects.
Students spent five days living in the community, reaching out and engaging with leaders and residents. They incorporated design thinking to impact community improvements, and this experience offered students an opportunity to experience a diverse geographical and socioeconomic community and create authentic interactions that furthered their understanding of their State. Furthermore, these students contributed to the community because they were equipped with enthusiasm, creativity, and design expertise, and they channeled design thinking to facilitate novel solutions around potential community concerns.
Initial Strategy to Create Community Participation
Examples of creative strategies included awareness campaigns to promote specific activities, alternative use of a space that were either physical or virtual. These designs facilitated community input as well as allowing for an exchange of ideas from community to student and from student to City officials. The revitalization of space utilized visual and design aesthetics, and prototypes provided the community with initial impressions of what the design concepts were and more importantly to generate ideas, solicit feedback, and determine design solutions. This was an integrative part of the design process that lead to ultimately creating the most successful and innovative solutions for the selected topics.
What was important about having students engage in a with the community about their prototypes, instead of presenting prototypes to only their design peers, which is the normal practice, is that students also elicited feedback from the community by displaying their prototypes throughout the town and engaging community members.
Each feedback reiteration of feedback and design prototyping will be presented to the entire group, with budgets for each prototype increasing as the week progresses, allowing for added complexity in terms of design aesthetics and function with each version. Final prototypes will be completed by day 5.
These community rapid response projects were facilitated by two theories that the faculty were testing.
These theories were:
- Can micro lending theories and principles be applied to graphic design projects that engage in and with communities, and how would utilizing micro-lending impact the quantity and quality of the student projects.
- Can the moonshot theory be applied to graphic design projects that engage in and with communities, and how would utilizing moonshot impact the quantity and quality of the student projects.
Assessment
The assessment process occurred in two phases:
In phase one the assessment occurred prior to initiating the design process. Students conducted informal needs assessment by interviewing Perry residents and community leaders to identify topics or areas of concern, the personal meaning this topic has to the interviewee, and improvements or solutions they envisioned. These interviews served as a launching point for students and were revisited at the end of the project.
Phase two took place during the concluding gallery exhibit showcasing the final projects and served as an open forum session where Perry residents and community leaders were invited to share their perspectives on this collaboration.
There were a series of brief qualitative semi-structured interviews that focus around the topics of design effectiveness, success of the engagement process, relevance of final project to community needs, as well as further recommendations regarding the project and how to best implement the design solutions in the community.
These initial needs assessment were reviewed during this phase and used to determine how closely-aligned the final projects were to the topics initially identified by the community, and to evaluate the extent that the design process was community-driven.
Reflections
When we traveled to Perry we had very little, if any, established community partners. This meant that the students had to understand how certain communities interacted, and communities that did not interact with others as well as understanding communities that were isolated and undeserved. Students had to navigate in and with communities, begin to establish community gatekeepers, and decide on which were the communities they wanted to engage with, as well as going through the process of understanding community needs,
The various design interventions and prompts were essential tools for the students to both understand and interact with the community. They were also able to re-engage with the communities by listening to the community feedback and improving and implementing the design project that was based on the community feedback. It should be noted that these back-and-forth community-to-student conversations that centered around design and community needs also empowered the community as well as the students. For example, the community felt empowered because their comments and suggestions had value, and that value could be measured in seeing the project that took their comments into account. The students felt empowered because they could see that design had value, their opinions had value and the community respected what they had to say. The community also respected what the potential for these projects and interacted with the students as professional designers. The students moved from being students to being professionals. There were also important peripheral communities that they engaged in, and with, outside of the interventions. For example, either through evening drinks with various community members, or through visiting local stores or businesses and through daily interactions with people on the streets.
Micro Lending Theory: The micro lending theory and principles were applied by giving each student group seed money to implement every community project. The amount of money was increased with each iteration and development of the project. For example, as the project scope increased then so did the amount of financial support. This meant that the student groups did not feel their creativity was being limited and were able to understand the relationships of design budgets to design creative strategies. Each student group was able to understand from mistakes made in one project and improve the quality of the project in the next iteration. Each project iteration provided another opportunity to engage with the community, and in four days there were a total of twelve actual projects that had been placed in the community.
There were some unforeseen positive results from using micro-lending principles in these projects. Students were spending money in the community to purchase either materials and/or services and the money they spent in the community in an indirect way improved the community.
Project Moonshot
The moonshot approach allowed us the opportunity to apply technology, context, and exploration in an ambitious, and groundbreaking way. These leapfrogs were undertaken without any expectation of near-term benefits and without any full investigation of potential risks and benefits. What we were able to achieve was to attain awesome, fantastic, and almost
impossible solutions as well as to achieving the best reasons for success, by reaching further than we could by following more traditional creative approaches.
The method of implementation of the moonshot approach was conducted in two different and interrelated ways:
- Conducting exercises that allowed students to catapult their ideas further and quicker in short time slots.
- Allowing students to develop, implement, and improve projects that were embedded into the fabric of the community within short time frames.
The final phase of the project (day 5) culminated in a reception that brought community members and leaders together with students to discuss the designs and the engagement process and to also present the final collaborative solutions.
Moderated discussions from a panel of community and university speakers generated recommendations on how to best implement the designs into the community, addressing the sustainability of these projects, and potential for continual collaboration.
Table Conversations:We would all gather for dinner at a local restaurant. Not only was this gathering important for us to be seen in and celebrating the community, but it was also important for the entire group to share what they had been up to. Many of the groups were dispersed in the community during the day. Some would have arranged community meetings and others would be working to implement another design response. We would all gather around the dinner table, eat food and discuss what we had learned and what we hoped to achieve in the next day.
It is also important to add that the money we spent at the local restaurants and supermarkets for our group meals as well as our accommodation, also indirectly Improved the community.
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