2013. A service design research project I co-led, through a fellowship with Public Policy Lab, investigating the successes and challenges of the NYC public high school choice process undertaken by 7th and 8th graders each year. I was recruited as the design fellow on the project (along with a strategy fellow and an ethnographer) but also contributed substantially to research, strategy, and synthesis of findings.
Each year more than 75,000 students navigate the admissions process to apply for seats at New York City’s 700+ public high school programs. The Public Policy Lab formed a partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and the Office of Student Enrollment to explore opportunities for improving this admissions experience.
Our team spoke with dozens of policymakers, school staff, parents, and 8th and 9th graders. We co-developed an interview guide for each stakeholder group which included asking guidance counselors to diagram their roles in the process and providing students with quick, vibe-check graphic cards to use in responding to prompts. We also conducted an online survey for guidance counselors. From this work, we identified four needs that everyone in the process shares and proposed more than 30 opportunities to design services that respond to those needs. Subsequent phases of work will focus particularly on helping students from high-need and non-English-speaking families make more informed and confident decisions.
Subsequent to the research project, I created graphics and animation for a video produced by Meerkat Media reporting on the the project and the subsequent App Challenge that the Department of Education undertook to begin addressing some of our recommendations.
Tags: Research, Strategy, Video, Animation, Graphic Design, Writing
Video documenting the service design research project. I also produced graphics and animation for the video.
View the full project storybook.
We used vibe-check cards with students to get their brief assessments of various parts of the application process.
2014-2016. The house I lived in was a cooperative: 20 of us shared a single household and the responsibilities for managing and growing as a residential community.
There were many commitments required by house membership: cooking, chores, committees, project oversight, workdays, even visioning sessions. It can be a challenge for 20 people to keep track of all of their responsibilities, to remain responsible to them, and to retain a sense of community and support with so many people and so much to do.
Research, Phase 1
Research began during an all-day group check-in during which all housemates had the opportunity to voice their concerns about house commitments. With so many commitments and irregular tracking or accountability on them, some housemates felt that they were always behind, and some speculated that others weren't pulling their weight. And in general, people did not feel supported in their house participation, whether they were on top of commitments or not—there wasn't enough time in large group meetings to affirm and support everyone.
To help cultivate a greater sense of clarity on what we were actually doing, I first created a digital tracking document for house commitments where each commitment bottom-liner or individual housemate could track completion of commitments. The document, itself, allowed for some degree of self-accountability for those who reviewed the regularly updated data, but not everyone did.
Implementation Case Study: Pit Crews
To increase the intimacy and feelings of support housemates could receive from each other in the context of such a large group, I proposed that we form 5 four-person groups of housemates called Pit Crews: groups whose job is to check in and do necessary maintenance on each other’s house membership. Pit crewmates could check in one-on-one with each other or as a group (say, over beers or out to dinner) about how they are feeling about the house, if there is support that one another need in the house, and if they are upholding the house commitments. Once a house member is behind in some house commitments by a requisite amount, a meeting facilitator could urge a Pit Crew to meet and, within a certain amount of time, come back with a Commitment Plan for the member in question. The Pit Crew (including the member in question) would then also be responsible for holding the member accountable for that plan. If no Commitment Plan was devised or the member was not successful in meeting the plan by a certain time, the Pit Crew could then be charged with conducting a Membership Review of the member and reporting back about its confidence in that membership, at which point the house could discuss it further.
The proposal was very well received, and we adopted the policy after a couple of months' discussion with housemates in various forums.
Research, Phase 2
After collecting ten months of data and trends in house commitment completion and Pit Crew operation, we held a series of workshops to assess how housemates felt about each commitment, its level and type of accountability, and the idea of accountability around commitments overall. Group temperature checks, feeedback sessions and individual surveys provided input on which to base some proposals for action or adjustment on each of the house commitments and its type and degree of accountability, now based in the reality-based input of all house members.
Implementation Case Study: Cook/Clean Sign-up Calendar
The calendar through which we signed up for our two regular cook and clean shifts had been a page from a spreadsheet printed every five weeks and taped to the wall. It was hard to read and harder to tell whether everyone was participating—an empty dinner table was often the only way to note a gap in participation.
In the workshops, housemates resoundingly affirmed a desire to continue dining together four times a week. They also expressed a desire to be reminded to sign up without feeling punished or policed for a lapse.
I designed a visual calendar that balances clarity and accountability with celebration of housemates and their contributions. More details on this project in the captions at right.
Implementation Case Study: Chore Board
Our chore accountability system had been a verbal report on chores we completed during each week's house meeting. Very few housemates reported liking this system, finding it to drag out the meeting, only hold those accountable who showed up, and lack the tangibility to allow no medium-term tracking for completion of chores or makeups.
I designed a chore board which allowed for self-monitored accountability around chores; a clear and judgment-neutral venue for feedback; and more flexibility in accounting for different ways of contributing to the house that might not be otherwise recognized. More details on this project in the captions at right.
Tags: Research, Strategy, Graphic Design, Programs, Community
The section of the house manual I wrote on Pit Crews; a loose check-in guide for Pit Crew meet-ups.
An early concept for the Cook/Clean Calendar.
A second iteration of the Cook/Clean calendar concept, which gained enough favor to move toward implementation.
The installed calendar strikes a balance between holding housemates accountable and celebrating their contributions and their lives—their artful portraits are featured in the magnetic photo frames during their birthday months. When a housemate has signed up for their shifts in a given cycle, they flip over the magnets beside their name label from red to green (the name label is itself a whiteboard magnet, to accommodate a shifting house population). The vibrant visual indicator helps remind housemates to sign up and makes them more accountable to the rest of the house. At the start of the next five week cycle, the magnets are reset, and those who did not sign up the last time carry no debt into the future.
I mocked up a chore board, to mirror the cook/clean board, which allowed for transparent but self-monitored accountability around chores and makeups; a clear and judgment-neutral venue for feedback around particular chores; and more flexibility in accounting for different ways of contributing to the house that might not be otherwise recognized.
After soliciting input via conversation and online discussion, I revised the design to feature more clearly what chores each housemate had actually committed to doing.
We worked with a paper prototype of the final board for 2 months, to assess its effectiveness and viability.
The final, installed chore board.
2011. A smartphone-based augmented-reality app developed for Freshkills Park, the 2,200-acre former landfill site on Staten Island.
One of the pivotal ways in which we were able to convince visitors of the Freshkills Park site's value as a public amenity was through the views afforded from its massive, grassy hills. Visitors were always enthralled by the 360-degree visual access to New York City and New Jersey and tended to ask many questions about what they were seeing. On individual and even group tours, we were happy to answer these questions, but our answers were not always as thorough as they could be—visitors wanted more information—and there were not enough staff to answer all questions when we began to host larger public events.
We tried printing poster boards of panoramas annotating all the points of interest, but these could only hold so much information, and they also tended to blow away, since they couldn't be easily secured or staked in the ground because of a need to protect the vast network of underground landfill infrastructure. Plus visitors tended to ignore them in favor of looking at the actual view.
Responding to these needs and constraints, I conceived and developed Freshkills Park+ in collaboration with Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena of media architecture studio Med44. The experience was constructed using the Layar browser, which makes use of a phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to enhance what is seen with a layer of digital information. Users were able to view the landscape through their phone, and Freshkills Park+ provided relevant information, audio, video, links and downloads in real time.
The app made its debut during the Freshkills Park preview event Sneak Peak in September 2011.
Tags: Mobile, Urban Planning
2014-2016. The house I lived in was a cooperative: 20 of us shared a single household and the responsibilities for managing and growing as a residential community.
The bedrooms in our house varied widely in size, noise, privacy and various amenities. Room pricing had initially been spitballed, with rooms of similar size grouped in rental tiers. Two years later, various housemates voiced complaints about the prices of their rooms relative to other people's. Concern for equity prompted me to design a process through which we could more democratically arrive at rents for individual spaces in the house.
Details on each step of the process at right, in the captions.
The process began with a couple of months of discussion around our existing approaches to determining rent on our online discussion and decision-making platform.
The discussion helped to identify primary criteria by which housemates were interested in evaluating and comparing bedrooms. Using these criteria, I designed a survey for a house-wide audit—allowing all housemates to evaluate each bedroom along a set of common, vetted criteria. On the day of the audit, along with their audit forms, housemates filled out a form indicating the weight they wished to give each of these criteria.
I averaged all housemates' inputs for weighted priority of criteria and used these relative weights to divide up the monthly rent proportionally, to understand how much we should be paying in total for each criterion.
I tabulated average ratings for each person's bedroom on the various criteria, and used these average ratings and the weighted priorities to calculate a rent for each bedroom based on the survey data.
Working from this data, I facilitated a committee of interested housemates in small group meetings, exploring a variety of ways to interpret the survey data and to calculate rent. We brought our findings to the house, walking through the data over several house meetings and soliciting feedback on our interpretations. Considering this feedback, we framed an initial proposal for rents that was accepted by all but one housemate. By several months later, the committee worked out a solution to address the initial objection, and through another facilitated house meeting, the proposed rates were adopted.
2014-2015. The house I lived in was a cooperative: 20 of us shared a single household and the responsibilities for managing and growing as a residential community. We shared four communal dinners per week and hold weekly meetings for consensus-based decision-making.
A challenge we faced was the dining table. The table we shared when I moved in sat 10 people at an absolute maximum—half the residents of the house. Housemates were eating in shifts or in separate rooms and were wary of bringing friends to dinner for fear of crowding. There had been rumblings of desire for a new table, but not necessarily a bigger one, and there wasn't a clear way to achieve collective buy-in on a new purchase.
After some initial crowd-sourcing of concerns through an online discussion platform for the house, I surveyed the space and reviewed the needs and constraints for the table—meetings, meals, projects, parties, daily clean-up. I proposed some concept designs for a new, custom table. More conversation followed, in addition to the formation of a committee to work on the proposal and iterate through feedback.
Since the proposal was for a much larger table than before, I made a paper prototype and placed it on the ground for housemates to maneuver around and weigh in on. The final design we developed—built by a carpenter friend—can be separated into two halves to add additional table space, and easily bolted back together. The inside legs of both halves are inset so as to allow comfortable seating at either of the short ends. At maximum capacity, the table can seat 22 people.
The original six-seat table, which could squeeze a maximum of ten people around it.
Concept design options for the split table.
Joined, the new table seats up to 16 housemates.
Split, it seats up to 22 people—all housemates can now have a seat at the table together.
2007. My master’s thesis (PDF, 10MB) in urban planning focused on mobile user-generated and location-accessed digital annotation of physical places with text and media, and how this emerging field can be useful to urban planners and designers. The thesis establishes a taxonomy of modes of spatial annotation (both physical and virtual); catalogues annotations made in two neighborhoods each for the projects Yellow Arrow (in New York City) and [murmur] (in Toronto); and develops a preliminary methodology to analyze and compare trends in distribution, placement and content of annotations. So-called ‘placelogging’ content is found to distinguish itself from other forms of spatial annotation by its application a wide range of public and private places with predominantly subjective, first-person content.
Participant interviews and research on related technologies are used to support claims that placelogging could be used to identify sites of shared meaning in the city as well as to foster place attachment, claim to space and social connections among participants. Uses in community development are considered through three case studies of implementation. Uses for revealed meanings are proposed in preservation, identification of development priorities and sensitivity of response in urban development.
Tags: Research, Graphic Design, Writing, Mobile, Community, Urban Planning, Urban Design
2009. Our development team at the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation gave hundreds of tours per year of the Freshkills Park site. Visitors had so many questions, and while we could speak to their questions, we found that answers really landed better if they were printed and could be read and absorbed at the visitor's own pace. There were many common questions: about the plans and timeline for park development, but also about landfill infrastructure and environmental protections, about wildlife and plant life on site, about precedents for transforming landfills into parks. We found ourselves distributing several handouts on every tour. But then we would see these handouts crumpled in people's pockets, or flying across the landscape, or stuffed into a garbage can. These images of waste ran counter to the identity we were trying to develop for the site of a reclaimed landfill.
I condensed and synthesized the content of all of the handouts and designed a more comprehensive Site Tour Guide that could fit comfortably in hands and coat pockets. It was made of recycled paper stock thick enough to withstand light weather and some mistreatment during the tour. The guide was a single, accordion-folded sheet that ensured no pages came loose and flew away while providing a continuous sense of guidance and explanation to site visitors.
Tags: Strategy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Writing, Urban Planning
2010. ResilientCity.org held a design ideas competition to solicit new strategies from urban practitioners in planning and designing cities to be resilient to large-scale shocks like climate change and peak oil. Urban designer Michael Haggerty and I prepared a response to the prompt of designing for food self-sufficiency in an urban neighborhood.
Through study of the struggling West Side neighborhood in Newark, NJ, we developed a strategy that created a hierarchy of food production and processing facilities capitalizing on existing neighborhood assets, vacant properties, community history and workforce mobilization. Facilities were connected by a green corridor system designed to be a safe public space permitting distribution and exchange. We proposed networks of social and physical infrastructure to allow the neighborhood to generate and manage its own energy, water and heating and waste systems. The proposal won the competition’s grand prize.
Concept development and writing was a shared enterprise; I laid out and developed design language for the proposal and produced photo-illustrations and diagrams.
Tags: Research, Strategy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Writing, Urban Planning, Urban Design
2013-present. A 5-week course I teach to graduate students in the Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development at Pratt Institute. The course introduces students to methods and principles of visual representation and reasoning and coaches them through thinking strategically and comprehensively about how information could and should be communicated in the context of presenting information to the public as well as to other decision-makers.
The course focuses on:
1) developing critical capacities in order to evaluate and discuss the effectiveness and suitability of different approaches to representing information;
2) using information graphics to synthesize various sources of information and to formulate argumentative narratives about the built environment; and
3) initiating in a design process that employs some advanced methods and tools for making graphics, while integrating common software tools.
I have taught the course ten times since 2013. Each semester, I review the students' course evaluations and speak with the graduate assistant to assess what lessons, approaches and assignments worked, what didn't, and what might simply be changed up to improve students' experience of the course and the degree to which they derive value from it.
Tags: Strategy, Graphic Design, Urban Planning
Course blog. Not just a place for syllabus and resources—also the major site of peer critique and feedback on work in progress, a course component I added to offset the limited amount of in-class time available for discussion and critique.
I am a public interest designer and design researcher drawing from experience in urban planning, service design, filmmaking, and graphic design. Taking a variety of forms, my work focuses largely on public engagement, citizen empowerment and social equity. Partners and clients have included The New York Times, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Public Policy Lab, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, The Participatory Budgeting Project, The Architectural League of New York, and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. I hold a Master of City Planning degree with an Urban Design Certificate from MIT and teach in the Programs for Sustainable Planning & Development at Pratt Institute. I live and work in Brooklyn. E-mail me at raj@rajworks.com.
