Engaging with the Community

Engaging communities is, in my opinion, by far the most fun and challenging part of the projects we do at Quicksand. Due to this, we were both nervous and excited about returning to the field after creating a guide and toolkit to elicit and record community responses during feedback sessions.

Ensuring Diversity & Representation

The first step was screening participants. Our on-field partners, CFAR, accomplished this by screening potential participants that fell into one of several profiles we defined. These profiles ranged from recently married couples with newborn infants to elderly or disabled individuals who might use a crutch, staff, or wheelchair.

Rikta and I were lead researchers on this project. As such, we conducted sessions with both individuals and groups to gain a better understanding of their sanitation habits. We walked participants through various activities ranging from describing a typical day in their lives to building their own toilets.

Engaging the Users in Home & Community

Even though the screeners provided basic information about each participant, we wanted to gain a more textured understanding of their lives. We did this by spending time in their homes and communities, observing their daily lives to understand what material objects were available, and important, to them.

 

Life Map

A tool we created charted the places participants’ lived in, allowing us to compare amenities and experiences in each place. We found that participants preferred living in a place they owned, irrespective of available amenities, because of a sense of ownership that it instilled.

Co-design Activities

Timeline

We used illustrations by artist Fahad Faizal to discuss participant’s typical day, recording details on post-it notes along the way. This allowed us to establish patterns and to build a foundation for understanding the daily lives of community members.

 

DIY Community Toilet

Users designed their own community sanitation facilities and we used that framework to validate the user flow in our designs.

Gathering cues around postures & ergonomics

A session around postures and behaviors around defecation, bathing, and menstrual hygiene gave us insights into ergonomics, helping direct us as we move into Sketch Design 2.

We had apprehensions about asking participants to demonstrate how they clean themselves, as well as discuss their bathing postures and movements. We countered this by using a set of cards we designed that illustrate different scenarios. These cards were especially handy when talking about preferred behavior, and hand-washing and menstrual hygiene practices.

Aesthetic Preferences & Purchase Decisions

We examined artifacts, appliances or high-value items in users’ homes and probed their motivations behind acquiring those. We learned that participants often made decisions after consulting a more knowledgeable source.

Users prioritized images of items, spaces and structures representing something they would like in their community or homes. This turned out to be a very informative exercise as we gained valuable insight into the user decision-making process and aesthetics’ role in purchases.

All in all, the week spent in the field was extremely fruitful. We developed a feasible, impactful process to solicit end-user feedback on architectural plans and activities around postures, ergonomics, and behavior. This has provided a solid starting point for future activities.