Champion call & Reframe the HMW questions

February 15 – Joined the DFC USA’s Champion meeting
February 19 – Met with project supervisor, Becky!
Jade Shih

February 15th was our second time to join the Design for Change USA‘s Champion online meeting. The conversation was led by Sanjli, the founder of DFC USA, and participated by other regional leaders, the “DFC champions”. Other than us representing Baltimore, we have champions from California, Colorado, St. Louis, North Carolina, and Texas on board. Sanjli kicked-off the meeting with sharing the updated mission statement of Design for Change USA: “We Turn Empathy Into Action.” And announced the finding of middle school students as the sweet spot of doing DFC project, so this year DFC is going to focus on working with middle school opportunities nationally.
The conversation was valuable that we got to learn from other champions’ experiences. Interestingly, every region turned out to build their own way of running Design for Change, while having similar challenges and achievements at the same time. Other champions’ experiences really helped us identify the possible approaches of our project. 

February 19th was our regular meeting with the project supervisor, Becky. We went through the design challenge that we identified for this project work, recognizing that the goal of this project is to fill the gap between the current Design for Change materials/messages and Baltimore youth’s need/access.

After almost 4 weeks of research and discussion, we finally came up with this design question:
“How might we equip Baltimore youth with a process that strengthens their capacity to navigate personal and community challenges?”

This project has been moving back and forth from “Frame & Plan” and “Research” stages for the past month, we almost twisted the frame and direction in every past meeting. I guess this is one of the nature of the design process, embracing the ambiguity.
And we are also in the process of fighting with the designer’s hubris, challenging ourselves to be flexible and to dance with the flow. There have been new research insights emerging, so we tried to incorporate those new concerns into our process instead of insisting to work on what we claimed to do.

But anyhow, now I feel so ready to dive into working on this design challenge!