Thomas's UX Portfolio

OVERVIEW

Taking community-centered design to a larger scale

Stories Unsheltered is the only student-led project under the World Design Capital-endorsed initiative known as Bay to Park Paseo. The Bay to Park Paseo aims to renovate the pedestrian experience in downtown San Diego through inviting local artists, urban planners, architects and designers to populate the 1.7-mile route with a series of interactive art installations.

As students who have witnessed housing overflow, housing instability and houselessness within our neighborhood, we wanted to create a local change through community-centered design.

As you approach our installation, you'll be greeted by a mural depicting various housing experiences, spanning the size of a building’s window. Moving forward, immerse yourself in the authentic and captivating stories shared by individuals who have been impacted by the housing crisis. These stories are conveyed through human-sized silhouette statues (shown on the right), each equipped with recordings that give voice to personal experiences. To delve deeper into our project, simply scan the QR code on the statue to access our online platform, allowing you to share your own stories and take an active role in our efforts.

The installation will be on site in April 2024 until the end of year with events aiming to raise awareness to different topics surrounding the housing crisis.

*The display of the installation shown below:

Introduction

My Role

Crafting stories with empathy

The Stories Unsheltered team consists of 18 members, split into 4 integral sub-teams––Narrative, Digital, Visual and Build. I am a UX researcher under the Narrative Team which is in charge of collecting and crafting the essence of our project––stories.

My responsibilities include secondary research, qualitative data synthesis, rapport establishment, onsite on zoom interviewing, narrative design and audio clipping.

The Problem

San Diego has a housing problem

As San Diego sky-rockets to become the most expensive place to live in the States, more people start to lay eyes on the severity of the housing situation in San Diego. However, long before this issue started to gain recognition, thousands of people have already been affected by housing instability.

Citations:

U.S. News Report

Zillow, June 2023 Rent Report

United Way, The Real Cost Measure in California 2023

TBD

San Diego Continuum of Care 2023 WeAllCount Region Totals

❓How Might We Statement

How might we mobilize community members to enact changes towards San Diego’s housing crisis through authentic storytelling?

Solution Overview

Discovering unsheltered stories

Over a span of 6 months, the Narrative Team has reached out and connected with over 100 local non-profit organizations related to addressing houselessness in San Diego. From several orgs, we were able to get in touch with some individuals who were willing to participate in our project.

After getting approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), we have 15 individuals signed the consent form and media release form. Our team had the privilege of interviewing these individuals and sharing the stories anonymously through our installation.

100+

Non-Profit

Org Contacts

Individual’s

Stories

Final Design

Embed: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ro_8VUCdPXCWX8jdWEUtb69BHb49AMkE26mjSw-4C44/edit?usp=sharing

^Project showcase in San Diego downtown on 4/13, 2024

Ideation & Primary Research

Am I qualified to do research yet?

Before contacting any non-profit orgs, I want to make sure I am approaching this sensitive topic with utmost delicacy and awareness. The following is my personal checklist before any outreach endeavors:

Self-Education

Educate myself with the housing crisis through secondary research

Final Product Knowledge + Interfacing with Stakeholders

Gain a comprehensive understanding of our envisioned final product & practice explaining the concept eloquently to different stakeholders.

These are some of the articles and organizations that I familiarized myself during that period:

Ideation

Interviewing Non Profit Orgs

🔰 Moving at the speed of trust

At this point in our project timeline, we were behind our schedule already due to several moving variable parts of reaching out and establishing a relationship with non-profit orgs. However, the whole project is waiting on Narrative Team’s stories before getting started on designing the silhouettes and mobile app.

However, we know how crucial it is to build meaningful relationships with these community partners so we hosted a discussion with the team in which we emphasized on the importance of “moving at the speed of trust”. Forcing and pressing on our partners not only dilutes the credibility of our project but also depreciates the authenticity of stories & relationships.

Speaking with the experts

Though I personally did a fair amount of research beforehand, the first hand information I received from these housing experts still gave me a reality check on how severe and close the housing crisis is, to every single one of us.

I had the privilege of speaking with these following organizations: HEAL Network under SDHF, Urban Street Angels, San Diego Police Department, Dreams For Change *From left to right.

My team and I visited the police department and Urban Street Angels in person where we got to witness the reality of houselessness on the street and also chat with some currently unhoused youths:

^ I connected with police officer Larry Turner, who is now running for San Diego’s Mayor through East Village Residents Group, a civic organization.

^ The founder of Urban Street Angels invited our team to visit the facility where we conducted interviews with the youths.

^Our team visited the safety parking lot to understand the regulations, mechanisms, and also services that safety parking lots provide to individuals in need.

🌟 Learning, analyzing, & expanding our search

Through talking to these professionals, I learned about numerous amount of unthinkable circumstances and situations that force people down the road of houselessness.

I compiled some reoccurring themes discovered through the interviews with the organizations and experts. I took this opportunity to immerse myself in the problem and understanding the reality of the situation from these experts.

I realized how important it was not to narrow down on a single facet of experience when serving as a researcher and a narrative designer. We made pivotal changes towards the course of our project directions based on this realization: we want to cover a wide ranges of experiences surrounding the housing crisis, aiming to raise public awareness towards various forms of houselessness, urging the public to recognize their own biases & unrealized stereotypes on the subject matter.

Interviewing Individuals

Peeking into stories about resilience, dreams, and human

dignity

The Narrative team collected a total of 15 individuals’ stories. I took part of conducting 3 in-person interviews and 1 zoom interview.

Being face to face with an individual who has walked through so many forms of life, the best thing I could do is sit in silence and be a great listener. At times I had to hold back my emotions, whether it was while listening to their reflections on their struggles and hardships, or witnessing their joy and sense of achievement as they shared their passions and aspirations. Every single interview solidified my determination of passing this sentiment onto a wider audience.

These are several quotes I noted down during the interviews:

“Like my daddy said, ‘It's not over till it's over.’ That’s his motto. I gotta live by that, no matter what.”

“I…turned towards survival mode–a mode that most of society isn’t aware of in themselves, but, you know, I think is in all of us.”

Impact

^analyzing each individual we interviewed & identifying themes and the message we want to deliver through their stories.

✍️ Forming a narrative

Our goal is to find the perfect audio length that best captures passerby’s attention elicit interest in understanding our project more without sacrificing the stories’ authenticity.

For me, this is the most difficult part of the project. We have to condense hour-long-interviews to digestible 2-minute-long audios for passerby’s on the streets. As a narrative designer, I have the sole responsibility of:

Crafting a comprehensive story arch that has an introduction, a hook and ending with a message that prompts a call to action (Ex: scanning the QR code and accessing our website)

Representing individuals’ stories in the most authentic and powerful way

The audio clipping work was done through both iMovie & Audacity

Digital Team Handoff

The resource repository facilitates collaboration and bridges resource gaps

Early on in the stage of this project, we brainstormed what impact we want to create through this project. I suggested utilizing our connections and relationships with non profit organizations to create a platform that serves as a repository of resources surrounding houselessness.

Since I was in charge of interviewing many non profit organizations during that time, I realized how there were both many gaps between resources and lack of accessibility for a lot of great local San Diego resources. By leveraging the large pool of audience brought on by the Bay to Park Paseo initiative along with the World Design Capital, this platform will be an ideal pathway to connect members of the city to vital resources and facilitate collaboration between existing non profit orgs.

Towards the end of our research, I collaborated with the Digital Team Lead by compiling a list of meaningful and active resources. Here is the result:

Impact of Storytelling

Serving respect & recognition to all human experiences

Though the installation is still in the works of being implemented, we can already see glimpses of the tremendous impact this operation has on the San Diego community. In the span of 6 months, our team gave 15 remarkable stories their deserved respect and dignifying roles of inspiring, moving and transforming human perspectives on this controversial topic.

I felt the significant impact of the project as early as when I started interviewing non-profit organizations, where they spoke vehemently about the reality of houselessness and how misconception always plays a part within the matter. The realization of the impact strengthened as I spoke with individuals about their lived experience being unhoused. I was struck by a remarkable encounter that truly showed the profound impact of the initiative –– one of my interviewees exclaimed with excitement,

"I think in the end, getting my story out there is the most important, because it helps you guys create this awesome platform; that’s going to help people later in life."

Their stories spoke directly to my core and stirred up a surge of desire to make a difference and be an active member of the change. This initiation has long passed being a project, it has become something bigger than any one of us; it has become a mission to create change and serve justice.

Serving these individuals’ stories with its deserved respect and recognition is what we will continue to strive for. This initiative alone is not going to solve the problem, but it is a step forward of creating conversations and transform the perspective towards San Diego’s housing crisis.

Reflections & Next Steps

Impact of Storytelling

Being purposeful with your design

I always found myself most passionate when I am designing for a specific cause. As a UX designer/ researcher, I am fuel my designs and products with user needs. Without a purpose, your designs do not mark an impression.

When designing the narrative, I had clear purposes of raising awareness, addressing stereotypes, and creating authentic stories that move people. Having this vision in mind, I became relentless to bring my ideals to life. I am thankful to be a part of the research part of the project early on because every part of it contributes to a reservoir from which I can consistently draw, ensuring that my product stays relevant and creates the desirable impact. As a result, we have created something that not only remains true to our visions of our project, but also transformed into something that way exceeded our expectations.

In the future, I will continue to tell stories with purposeful designs. In order to do so, I shall strive to stay patient, observant, and curious as these are ways to practice empathy that eventually leads to good UX designs.

^My teammates and I explaining our project to the rest of Bay to Park Paseo team.

Next Steps

Implementation + Monitor

The project is going to be implemented by the end of April, 2024. We will have silhouettes and graphic arts in the UCSD Park and Market building in downtown San Diego.

As we expect more stories to be shared through the mobile app, the Narrative Team and I are continuing to monitor the content being put out there. On top of that, we are planning on hosting events that invite our community partners and potentially individuals that we interviewed to participate in a community activity.

We want the community to utilize this space to share perspectives about different housing experiences utilizing the design process approach of ideate --> prototype --> implement. We envision this space to develop into a innovative space that workshops future solutions to the housing crisis.

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