Indiana Ag Connection - Design Research Students Help South Bend Visualize Center

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Design Research Students Help South Bend Visualize Center
Indiana Ag Connection - 03/22/2018

When the city of South Bend needed ideas for a new community technology center, it turned to Ann-Marie Conrado's design research practices class at the University of Notre Dame for help.

Part of the collaborative innovation minor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design, the class brings together students from multiple disciplines, from design and engineering to business and anthropology, to solve complex design problems.

In this case, the city wanted to create what it called an "inclusive technology resource center" to help residents on the wrong side of the digital divide take advantage of technology for personal and professional growth.

"We've been thinking for a while about what type of investment we can make and how we can position ourselves to become a thriving city in the 21st-century economy," said Santiago Garces, the city's chief innovation officer. "We want to be able to enhance the capabilities of the community and make South Bend a tech hub, but we have to think about how to do that in an inclusive way."

The design thinking process seeks to identify innovative solutions to design problems through rigorous research, beginning with discovery or inspiration, then ideation and implementation.

First offered in 2016, Conrado's class tackles a single real-world design problem each semester, using qualitative research to inform and visualize potential solutions to the problem and drive future decision making.

To that end, the students spent the fall semester scoping the problem and then interviewing residents, community leaders and business owners -- more than six dozen in total -- to better understand the issues, needs, gaps and areas for opportunity and intervention around it.

They then incorporated that information into a proposal for a decentralized resource center, dubbed "South Bend Spark," composed of a primary center for volunteer and educator training, partner-run satellite centers for residents and an RV-based mobile center for community outreach and on-site job training.

They presented their work to the South Bend Department of Innovation and Technology, led by Garces, a Notre Dame alumnus and a graduate of the University's ESTEEM graduate program, in December.

In addition to questioning, the students used observation and other techniques to better understand residents' relationship to technology, helping the students to "see past assumptions" and "inspire new and different ways of looking" at the problem, Conrado said.

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