Greater Spaces
10 weeks
Duration
Greater Spaces, a blog of the Ingeniøren magazine
Stakeholders
Literature review, user research, surveys, design workshops, design probes, empathy map, self-education seminars, prototyping, testing
Methods
Anna Schröder
Ester Cinelli
Maria Nikoli
Miriam Pyttel
Raquel Cañete Yaque
Sanna Klefbom
Team
This co-design project developed a larger community around “Greater Spaces”, a Danish blog that highlights the work of women and non-binary people in tech. At the same time, the project helped expand the narrative about what technology is and who creates it. We conducted in-depth UX research that was structured around co-design activities and based on values such as empathy, respect, collaboration, and empowerment.
The outcome of our research was a community flow that used existing infrastructure (i.e. social media) to expand the community around the blog while fostering a collaborative, non-hierarchical community culture.
Project goals
Co-design for gender-diverse representation
Blog’s Goals
Broadening the idea of what tech is
Broadening the scope of who creates technology
Highlight the work of women and non-binary people in tech
Project goals
Establish contact with 2-3 media partners
A curated list of interesting new subjects to interview
An established infrastructure for the new community
A workflow to include the community in the blog’s development
Design Process & Model
A variation on Design Thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test). We restructured that design model to accommodate a more participatory, co-design approach.
More specifically, we scattered “empathizing” activities such as surveys, co-design workshops, and design probes in the first two phases of the project. We also merged prototyping & testing to make room for more research/ co-design activities.
We kept the rest and made the most out of the iterative, non-linear nature of this model, re-framing our methods when needed.
A short summary of our design process
Laying the foundations (established team alignment with self-education seminars & reaching a political consensus.)
Framing (identified project mission, vision, and goals, as well as all stakeholders/actors and their interests).
First steps: initial user research (questionnaire about tech communities - synthesis of 108 answers. )
Diving deeper: user research (co-design workshop I [7 participants], design probes [9 participants], synthesis)
Coming together: co-design (workshop II, 9 participants).
Ideation (2 ideation sessions: 1 internal, 1 with blog owners)
Implementation (prototyping & testing a community flow, reality check)
Laying the foundations
Building empathy and establishing a political consensus
Our first challenge was to ensure our team was aligned. Since the case touched a lot of sensitive subjects, such as gender, marginalization, feminism, and inclusivity, we had to ensure that as a team, we were all in agreement regarding all the political and potentially controversial aspects of this case.
How did we build empathy? How did we establish a consensus?
Self-education seminar on non-discriminatory language.
When it comes to sensitive subjects – especially gender-related ones – the language we use is of utmost importance. This is why one of the first activities we did as a team was to create a list of relevant terms.
Why? First of all, we built our project on a foundation of empathy and respect. Secondly, we were more effective, as the list of terms eliminated miscommunication.
Internal reading session on situated design and design justice (Haraway, Constanza-Chock).
We studied relevant literature to reach a consensus regarding what constitutes our community, and how we can serve the community as designers.Why? We needed to situate ourselves in our community’s shoes and look at the world from their perspective.
We learned we needed to work under the guidance of the group most harmed by gender marginalization.
Framing
Alignment with our stakeholders’ mission, vision, and goals
We used Dalsgaard et al’s (2014) concept of boundary zones to identify & visualize all stakeholders and their interests.
We then created a pyramid that visualized our project’s mission, vision, and goals.
First steps: initial user research
Making first contact with an online survey.
Aiming to find out:
How often and in which way is tech-related media consumed?
Which communities do people feel part of? How do they engage with them?
Scouting for participants for future activities
Results
Most people never or only rarely shared their own content with their network, even though participants were frequent users of certain platforms and were interested in a topic.
The majority of participants mentioned male role models in tech, even though slightly more women, non-binary and transgender people answered the survey than men.
Participants were more likely to share content if they felt part of a community or shared
interests. The most common communication channels were social media and websites like blogs.
Diving deeper into user research
Getting insight from all potential actors.
Workshop I (online)
7 participants, targeted to all genders, worked/ studied in tech-related fields
Aiming to find out:
which online platforms do people feel comfortable using, and why?
how comfortable did participants feel in various scenarios where they had to present their work?
Results
There was not one platform that the majority of the participants preferred, but most of them felt more comfortable sharing their work with familiar people
Women were more likely to feel uncomfortable when presenting their work to strangers, in fear of being judged
Design probes (digital)
Aiming to learn about:
people’s feelings of trust and judgment when it comes to sharing their work.
personal thoughts and experiences related to their gender identity.
9 participants, targeted to all genders, worked/ studied in tech-related fields
Probe Activities
Probe Results
Coming together: the co-design phase
We worked closely with people who are directly harmed by gender inequality (women, non-binary, and transgender people).
Workshop II (online)
Aim:
Get in touch with people’s sense of belonging, their role in the community, and the social dynamics in their community
Find out what they would like to see in the Greater Spaces community
Find out if gender can be the glue that holds the Greater Spaces community together
Wrapping up: the final concept
Synthesis & ideation activities that led to the prototype of our community flow
Empathy map
We visualized all these insights into an empathy map and then proceeded to create a list of virtues that we had to take into consideration when designing.
Ideation
We created a list of “how might we” questions based on the virtues in a group brainstorming session.
After that, we had two separate ideation sessions. One between team members, and one with the blog owners.
We gathered the best elements of every idea that came up and combined everything into a final concept.
The Final Concept
Building a collaborative, non-hierarchical community culture by using existing infrastructure.
The final concept builds on the goal to foster a collaborative, non-hierarchical community culture by using existing infrastructure. We decided that this existing infrastructure would be none other than a private Facebook group. We had several reasons for choosing a private group instead of a page on Facebook, Instagram, or any other online social networking service.
First of all, a page has a more hierarchical structure: an administrator uploads content that the followers passively consume. A private group, however, allows non-hierarchical structures, because all members are allowed to upload content. Moreover, according to our research, our users were more likely to share content with a community they felt safe in – thus the private Facebook group.
Reality Check
We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of our concept in a reality check that was the very first round of our community flow.
Testimonials
What the blog owners said about my work
Maria is a quick learner and has a distinct ability to interpret insights in a meaningful way to move projects forward and navigate direction changes in the scope of the project. She worked on our blog, Greater Spaces, and impressed me with the level of attention to detail and depth with which she approached the project. She brought in interesting examples and integrated them in relevant ways to our work. As part of the project, she conducted extensive user research and used those findings to drive a new community and design process forward. I was really impressed with her communication skills both within academia and for specific groups and a more general audience. I warmly recommend her as she'd be an asset to any team.
Vanessa Julia Carpenter, Chief Innovation Officer at Gagarin
I've had the pleasure of working with Maria in the spring 2021 and I can recommend everyone else to do so as well. Maria is very hard working and dedicated, during the project she demonstrated the ability to manage time effectively in an intensive 10-week case, she delivered results while sticking to the project timeline even in times of pressure. She brings a lot of interesting ideas forward and is able to carry them out. She displayed the ability to effectively collaborate with a team of 6 people, as well as the case stakeholders, she has a lot patience and is able to create space for everyone in a group. She efficiently organized and moderated co-design workshops with external stakeholders and took an active role in planning the design process from conception to implementation.
Majken Overgaard, former product director at CATCH