A method to understand the complex relationships and diverse points-of-view of people involved in a system.
Teachers
We took a moment to reflect on what challenges we were facing in the middle of our projects. We asked ourselves, “What makes the gun space we’re working with so wicked?” “What are the challenges we’re facing?”. Here is a collection of our answers:
Our challenges • It’s hard to get access to people who are involved in such a diverse and dispersed space. • There are a range of perspectives and biases to work with. • Conversations related to guns often lead to severely polarized arguments. • Isolating an aspect of the problem is impossible because of the interrelations. Finding a manageable amount of information to work with, without losing the essence of the data, is also a challenge. • As a designer, building empathy for the issue and the stakeholders involved is a challenge. • The gun space deals with political and racial issues which stirs tension. The taboo nature of some of these topics can inhibit informative insights. • The intangible and abstract nature of emotional, behavioral, and social aspects forces us to think critically about the methods, analysis, and synthesis we conduct.
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Parents
educates, mentors, & supports
supports & disciplines
Student provides entertainment & support
Friends
Complex problems are sometimes referred to as “wicked” problems 1 because of to the interdependencies involved at hand. Wicked problems are contradictory and difficult because finding a “solution” to one aspect of the problem might reveal or create problems for another. The presence of guns is a wide topic that deals with a range of people, places, historical and cultural contexts, perceptions, behaviors, motivations, and policies. The components that make up complex problems cannot be seen in black or white.
reports on student, supplements education
healthy lifestyle, support & competition
A persona brings tangibility to a complex problem by looking at a specific story.
Understanding Stakeholders
Understanding Stakeholders
A simple stakeholder map visualization that depicts relationships and interactions.
Alexis high school student Alexis is a high school junior who aspires to study biology in college and, at some point, go to medical school. She sometimes get overwhelmed trying to balance her schedule between homework, soccer practice, and spending time with friends.
Soccer Team
One way to break down a wicked problem is to look at the different people who are involved in the issue. We chose to analyze guns in Pittsburgh through people, because it adds a human quality to the issue. It also has helped our class understand the complexities that are characteristic of a wicked problem, and showcase some of the common or particularly moving experiences from community members. For this task, we utilized elements from stakeholder mapping and personas — two methods used by designers to bring a human element to a problem space.
Stakeholder mapping 2 is a method used by design teams in order to identify different people working within a problem space as well as the connections between those people or groups of people. Quite literally, the people identified in the map are those who affect or will be affected by the designed solutions. The people represented in the map may not be an exhaustive list of every person who is affected, but it’s important to hit the key constituents at the very least. Designers often use hierarchy, color, and other visual elements to easily represent these relationships. A stakeholder map is useful throughout the entire design process, not just the beginning. It can be easily referred back to when things get particularly complex as a reminder of how the people in the problem space are connected and as a
measure of how successful an idea is at solving the problem.
Personas 3 are a method in which observations and patterns of human behavior are consolidated into descriptive, fictional profiles. They’re often used to identify commonalities among attitudes, behaviors, and motivations of people or customers rather than typical demographic information like age, gender, and location. Personas are created through design ethnography techniques like interviews, surveys, and behavior observation. Data from these methods is then analyzed into vignettes of different people types, which are considered in the designed outcomes.
What we did: We used the stakeholder map format to showcase the connectivity between people in the gun ecosystem of Pittsburgh, but added narrative persona information to show the human qualities of the issue. Our data was sourced from phone or in-person interviews conducted by our class with several Pittsburgh community members. The insights from the interviews served as a jumping off point for us to narrow our focus when executing our individual projects. A few of the stakeholders don’t have a persona because we were not able to interview everyone working in this problem space, and we didn’t want to make assumptions about them. The next page shows our resulting combined stakeholder map and personas.
1. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences, no 4. (1973): 155-169, http:// www.uctc.net/mwebber/ Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf. 2. Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design (Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2012), 166-167. 3. Bella Martin, Bruce Hanington, Universal Methods of Design (Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2012), 132-133.
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