BACKGROUND
Scout Labs, the civic and service design arm of Scout, Northeastern’s student-led design organization, partners with larger organizations to affect change in the surrounding community. For three semesters, the Office of Food Justice and the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics has tasked the Labs team with ideating creative interventions to food insecurity in Boston.
The OFJ asked the Labs team the following questions:
“What would it look like if Boston prioritized dignity and celebration
in the design of our food access programs?”
“Can we reimagine our food pantries to better align with our
goals of food justice and sovereignty?”
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM SPACE
The Labs team contextualized the problem space in terms of the larger systemic issues that inform the food-insecure experience, drawing on months of research and resource aggregation.
INTERVIEWING COMMUNITY ACTORS
EXPERIMENTING WITH MAPPING TECHNIQUES
To spatially visualize the problem, the Labs team hosted participatory mapping sessions with Northeastern students and relevant stakeholders, learning how mental models and emotional relationships with the layout of the city’s resources informed access.
YMCA: NEW PROBLEM STATEMENT
During the new semester, the Labs team formed an additional partnership with the YMCA as an continuation of the research and ideation into creative interventions to food insecurity in Boston.
After discussing the YMCA’s proposal, the Labs team narrowed down the our problem statement:
“How can the YMCA create an engaging physical tool to both better understand participants at food pantry sites and distribute critical resources?”
Using the previous semester’s research as context, the team moved on to ideating what a physically engaging tool could look like at YMCA food distribution sites that took empathy and replicability into consideration, mapping existing systems and interactions for context.
BEHAVIORAL AND SERVICE MAPPING
During discussions with users at the site, many had qualms with the existing system. They were either not aware of the services available to them or did not recieve what was promised when interacting with these services:
“People don’t recieve the food that is culturally meaningful
to them... everyone gets the same food and people can’t
make the recipes they grew up with”
“These kids need after school programs, a place to be that
teaches them values and feeds them... we just don’t know of any
programs that can do that for us”
The team took to brainstorming what solutions could provide a platform to relay to the YMCA exactly what users needed and what they felt was missing. The aim was to create a model that was both celebratory and inviting, yet provided the YMCA with valuable information that they were not getting otherwise due to issues with identification and canvassing.
METHODS EVALUATION
After ideating on possible solutions that may satisfy the constraints that the YMCA had provided, we developed an evaluation system to compare each of our proposed ideas, measuring each by impact, scalability, replicability, engagement, pre-existing models, and visual strength.
FINAL SOLUTION PROPOSAL
After evaluating our options and discussing solutions with our mentors at the YMCA, the team decided to deisgn an engagement voting system, a physical, visually engaging tool to engage with communities at food pantry sites while collecting critical data to better serve families in need.
The team presented some of our findings at Northeastern University’s 2024 RISE Research Expo, outlining our process and emphasis on data for design.