Make Do— Facilitating Activism

A Collaborative Playbook for Civically Engaged Students

The Team—

For this project, I chose to work alone due to funky semester schedules. I have a background in graphic design and am an avid social justice advocate. This project has slowly evolved into a passion project.

Identifying the Opportunity Area—

Students in student organizations have high aspirations at the beginning of the school year but classes and other obligations pile up and progress on initiatives falls behind. Time and efficiency are at stake but students often don’t know how to approach the issue at hand. There aren’t any collaborative tools for student organizations to plan, facilitate, and document workshops that consider the realities of school life. Therefore, the barrier to getting further is very high — stunting the growth and learning opportunities that progress affords.

[Bridging Gaps Pic]

In a world that’s evolving quickly, how might we teach student activists to adapt to new obstacles quickly, effectively, creatively, and collaboratively? In a way that is engaging their audience but also exciting for them?

The Audience & Context—

For this project, I specifically worked with civically engaged CMU student organizations like CMU for Bernie and Students for a Democratic Society. I chose these groups because I was interested in activating those with positive attitudes but didn’t particularly know how or where to start. Given the current political climate, I also wanted to work with those who are losing hope and feel at a loss about what to do next.

The Significance

Through my initial research, I saw it fit to investigate the use of workshops and the act of facilitating as a helpful tool to utilize in the context of student organizations. Based on the identified barriers, it felt like those tools and methods would potentially allow for student organizations to be more effective and efficient.

Workshops are intensive collaborative sessions that can utilize collaborative tools and methods used to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge throughout the organization timeline. They enable team members to come together for a concentrated time of idea generation and hands-on activities that allow them to achieve an actionable goal.

A Note about Online → Offline Tools;
Tools that can be accessed online should be available to some or full capacity offline and vice-versa. But, oftentimes digital devices or tools can become a communication barrier, especially when working with groups. Although, from an accessibility standpoint, I would like to eventually investigate online and offline collaboration in efforts to bridge gaps between those that aren’t able to attend in-person sessions. For the time being, an online investigation felt appropriate given that many interventions require setting up and developing an extensive platform. With an offline intervention, students are able to download files and make their own tools.

The Process

At first I was interested in this idea of making for learning — thinkering as activism. I wanted to utilize ambient technology to potentially conjure new ways of politically participating. I found that this step or assumption might be too big and that an offline investigation was more appropriate — especially given the time and scope of the class.

During my initial research I found many facilitation resources — but what I found was that the tools weren’t inherently interactive and they weren’t built for more than one person to co-create with at one time unless it was a game. Everyone had their own ‘set’. It felt appropriate to investigate a tool that would allow all to be the author of the booklet or tool. There was also a lack of a documentation or capturing process — which I eventually investigated at the end with creating a poster where students could capture all of their decisions.

Building Out a Structured Flow of Goals → Narrowing Down

I used the structured flow of goals to layout and imagine the entirety of the experience. Through this building, I identified 4 longer-term goals→ Be able to identify the need for a workshop, identify components needed for a workshop, and collaboratively plan a workshop → Facilitate said workshop → Document & Share the workshop → Then become a node (which I’ll touch on later). Because I was a one-man team and a semester is surprisingly short I scope the area of focus down to the first medium-term goal Identify Components & Plan Workshop. Even within that chunk, there was a lot to work through. I then utilized the 4MAT system to further flesh out the content and design needs for each layer of the learning experience.

Cycling Through the 4MAT System

[4MAT system explanation]

I haven’t been able to evaluate this but I struggled with balancing the appropriate amount of text and image. An image can be too vague and feel like frills rather than contextual and necessary. Text can also feel overwhelming, but too much and the page becomes a page of crowded dark spots.

I also made the decision to move forward with an offline version of my prototype. COVID-19 presented many issues that I felt like warranted its own design brief. Although — an online investigation of this project is definitely appropriate for something like this.

The Approach

Each toolkit comes equipped with a Make Do — booklet which houses the materials you need to fill out and instructions to guide you through the agenda building process.

The booklet is structured in such a way that on the left-hand pages users are given the ‘what’ of the content. Introducing them to the task at hand via formatted storytelling. The right-hand pages house the ‘how’ -> which is where the booklet guides them through how to of the what. (shown below)

Lastly is the poster. The poster is where students can capture all of their decisions and the poster is large enough for all to see and can also serve as a North Star during the day of workshops.

Empty → Slightly Less Empty

Evaluation

Covid-19 and the impending doom of finals month creeping up quickly did not help me with gathering enough stakeholders to provide feedback through testing. But! We have a class! I was able to get feedback from peers on the functionality, flow, and design of the learning experience.

During class we were able to do ‘speed dating’— basically pitching our project and then allowing peers to play around with the prototype. For these classes, my tactic was to watch them play with the prototype and also ask questions. Nothing fancy. Ideally, there would have also been usability testing involved and roleplaying to get a better sense of how others would use it with others since it is a collaborative tool.

[Testing Highlight 1 → Entry Points] One aspect of the experience that I hadn’t worked on where the entry points of the experience. Were the playbooks going to just magically appear on student org desks? Nope. This question came up and it forced me to reconsider who would initially have access to these tools and how it would get to them. I looked at SLICE — CMU’s Student Leadership, Involvement, and Civic Engagement to see if I could gather enough intel on how student orgs are formed or resurrected at the beginning of the school year. Turns out many student organizations continue to well into the summer and well before the next semester starts. [Testing Highlight 3 → Online & Offline] Most students go back home for the summer or jet off to their internship not in Pittsburgh so this also made me rethink the offline and online capabilities of the tool. Anyways, I thought about how this tool could be a secondary layer to a whole ‘nother learning experience. I came up with the facilitator ‘nodes’. Now, this part doesn’t come until the end of the structured flow of goals but the idea is that this playbook helps kickstart students who have a knack for or are interested in facilitation. [Testing Highlight 4 → A Broader Application & Malleability] Once they successfully are able to handle creating and facilitating workshops with their teams, they could join other teams and work with them through this process—rather than going at it alone with just the playbook. This would allow for cross-pollination of ideas and tactics and allow the tool to evolve on its own.

Testing Highlight 2 → Tone of Voice One other aspect of the experience that I was struggling with was the tone of voice. I had two options; Direct and simple or fun and motivating—almost like clippy 2.0. I am not a fan of gender stereotypes but the boys in our class preferred the more direct and simply guidance and the girls enjoyed and preferred the more quirky and uplifting voice. In the end I made the decision to go with ‘clippy 2.0’ because the direct and simple tone began to come off as dry and lacked the engagement I thought would help retain the attention of participants.

Outcomes

Through this, I identified that movement is great! Students were interested in the aspect of physical movement and creating more of a “collaboration station” to get their hands dirty.

As mentioned multiple times and brought up many times from others, investigating an online version of this tool is warranted. This may help resolve access to tools and further collaboration. This could also allow for better documentation and sharing not just within groups but help communicate with other student organizations working to understand how to facilitate workshops.

Beyond the use within student organizations, I can imagine this tool being used with different campus organizations and groups such as the RA council. This could be useful to understand how to, for example, mitigate roommate conflict in dorms. This tool could also be reframed to facilitate conversations with oneself — it could be used to identify and walk through what the student is interested in, what their goals are, and help guide them through how to operate in larger groups and teams. Facilitation and organization is often a skill not taught in high school.