For the final deliverable of this course, I am designing a digital learning resource to meet the needs of faculty at the college I teach at. While the resource will be online and open (using wordpress and mattermost) the learners are from within my organization, a predictable environment to me. This has allowed me to easily know who to talk to in the ideation and empathy stages of the work. Recruitment was simple as I know the players, and those I didn’t know well were introduced to me by the Centre of Learning Transformation. Recruitment was not a step I needed to truly consider in this particular problem of practice and this is something I have wrestled to understand when applying design to potential projects outside my organization.

One thing I have considered is how the design process needs to be modified in different contexts or how this design process could be replicated in a different context, for a different type of problem and in terms of community justice and local environmental issues. How does a designer engage a broader community where the users are possibly unknown. This stemmed from spending time at a local lake with my son this summer and thinking about using learning technologies can be used in community projects, namely to teach about local environments we find ourselves in. My son and I swim at what we call “goldfish lake” which has an infestation of goldfish in it. Spending time there got me thinking about how we can design solutions to this particular challenge of an invasive species taking over this body of water.
When I think about how the design process might be different than my experience in designing the E-portfolio course I really needed to understand how to recruit participants because in this context the people to consult and co-design are not clear to me. If I don’t know the experts and the people most concerned with the issue how does the information get captured and how do I know who to recruit?

Looking through the case studies in the Design Kit (2015) it became clear that many of the cases were looking at broader communities and social justice issues and that recruitment, the factor I was most baffled by, and had not had a chance to undertake deeply in my current project was approached in strategic ways to ensure the information gathered was well considered. In the Recruiting Tools Resource the advice is to ensure we “have the right balance of laymen, women and men, people of different ethnicities and classes, as well as a full range of behaviors, beliefs and perspectives” (2015). The Voices for Birth Justice Case Study (2015) laid out an example as they interviewed and involved participants in the design from “mothers, fathers, grandparents, caregivers, preconception women, doctors, nurses, doulas, lactation consultants, community leaders, organizers, educators and experts”.
When I considered their recruitment strategy and then apply a similar strategy to the problem of proliferating invasive species in our community I created my own potential list of people who could contribute a wide range of perspectives about our goldfish lake problem including lake users, neighbours homeowners, biologists, conservation officers, science educators, local environmental NGO’s and fishers. What I know now about designing for communities is that we need to have a wide range of perspectives influencing the design so we can capture all the potential solutions in the design process and even the recruitment needs some strategic consideration.

How might a designer go about connecting with unknown users who could provide insight, influence and co-design solutions? In the case of gold fish lake I think about the users we have seen there and while I don’t want to approach any of them with my clipboard and pen in hand I could see something like a QR code posted on the only signage at the access point inviting users to engage with the project as one way to get the users of the lake to become aware, engaged and invite them to participate.

References:

IDEO Design Kit. (2015). What is Human Centred Design? https://www.designkit.org/methods

Bogstie, B. (July 16, 2021) Terrace Standard. Province looking into possible ‘chemical treatment’ of goldfish in Terrace area lake. https://www.terracestandard.com/news/province-looking-into-possible-chemical-treatment-of-goldfish-in-terrace-area-lake/