Grace Moore, a second-year candidate for Master of Integrated Product Design (IPD), reports on the fifth annual Integrated Design Innovation (IDI) Challenge, a design “sprint” that brought students from Penn, Northwestern, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon to Northwestern last month. Students had 24 hours to produce design prototypes to help those with permanent or situational disabilities plan and navigate discrete urban areas with greater ease, efficiency, and confidence. IPD is a collaboration between PennDesign, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Wharton.
I’m an able-bodied transit rider, and I’m lucky. As a traveller, my biggest struggle has been lugging my suitcase up and down crowded subway stairs. I’ve never rushed to catch a train in a wheelchair only to discover the handicap accessible entrance is out of order. I’ve never struggled to see my path, the sidewalk, or oncoming cars because my vision is impaired by cataracts. Challenges can appear straightforward when we observe our fellow city dwellers traversing the city, but the experience feels quite different when you have a disability.
So for this year’s IDI Challenge, my peers and I were tasked with improving the first and last mile of travel for people experiencing a disability.
As designers, we’re often called on to think empathetically, and in Penn’s IPD program, we use ethnographic research methods to understand the individuals we create for. In the case of this challenge, we went out into the world and experienced “pain points” just as users do: We travelled around Chicago with crutches, we wore earmuffs to simulate deafness, and we put on dark, clouded glasses to impair our vision. It wasn’t enough to fully appreciate their experiences, but our teams quickly uncovered small moments that have a big impact on everyday experiences.
The challenge also gave us the opportunity to collaborate with our peers across disciplines and institutions. In teams, we synthesized our experiences and, predictably, broke out Sharpies and Post Its to begin creating. Over the course of a 24-hour exercise, we quickly discovered how to communicate our ideas with prototypes built from commonplace materials — paper, pen, cardboard, and felt. Though imperfect, these quick and dirty prototypes allowed us to push our ideas to the next level, and they helped us identify new opportunities to support our fellow travelers along the way.
Twenty-four hours may seem short, but the experience [at Northwestern] has provoked my classmates and me to more thoughtfully consider the needs of all users in our capstone project [for the IPD degree]. For my team, it means noticing more and testing often as we aim to improve urban mobility by helping people rethink how they use their time.
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