designing for engagement

DESIGNING FOR ENGAGE MENTGULRAIZKHAN DESIGNPORTFOLIO

How might we design for better engagement?

My work over the last two years of graduate school has largely been shaped by my work prior to joining Parsons Transdisciplinary Program.

As a journalist, and a teahouse owner in Karachi, I was working in two distinct spaces for public engagement. The former was engagement between individuals and the public discourse; the latter amongst individuals, leading to the development of that very discourse. Journalism, and media, add to the public conversation, and public spaces, like cafes, teahouses, or barber shops, allow for that conversation to physically happen. Of course, now theres also an online space, but inasmuch as it is complementary to physical public spaces.

But why does engagement even matter?

Sherry Arnstein, in her seminal paper titled Ladder of Citizen Participation, argues that civic engagement, or participation of the governed in their govern-ment is, in theory, the cornerstone of democracy. Engagement is crucial for empowerment, but my experience with five years of a Muslim Jewish inter-faith dialogue taught me that it goes a step further: it is also imperative for empathy. Recent conflict resolution models emphasize the primacy and effectiveness of one-on-one citizen engagements over grand gestures by political leaders.

The portfolio lists projects that aimed to facilitate engagement - between citizens and civic agencies, as well as amongst citizens; online and in physical spaces; across boundaries, interests and themes - so that individuals are informed, empathetic, involved, and empowered to take action. To achieve this goal, we need to make our spaces, platforms and communities work harder for us. Designing for better engagement is one way to do that.

FOREWORD

How might we design a public agency that is lean, well-informed, and responsive to citizens?

The New York City Office of Public Imagination was a hypothetical agency, created under the NYC Planning Departnment, in response to this question. The fictional agency created a space for citizen participation in the East River Water-front Access debate through three components: a fellowship, a visioning exercise and a two-day exhibition. All three components were live-proto-typed during the course of the studio, including a visioning activity in the park using plexiglass Imagination Boards, and a two-day interactive exhibit at a storefront in the Lower East Side. The fictional agency inspired two real organizations - Partnership for Parks and No Longer Empty - to use our strategies for their subsequent projects that involved citizen participation. MY ROLES Design Researcher / Product Designer / Service Designer DESIGN CAPACITIES Service Design, Human-Centered Design, Product Design PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN | FALL 2014 WITH ELIZABETH BLASI, TAYLOR KUHN & COLLEEN DOYLE

NEW YORK CITY OFFICE OF PUBLIC IMAGINATION

The Imagination Boards designed for the Fall 2014 studio were iterated upon, and tested in the field two more times in Spring 2015, with the assistance of Part-nership for Parks.

The aim was to hone the tool, and formalize it as part of the Partnership for Parks civic engagement toolkit - People Make Parks - designed in collaboration with the Hester Street Collaborative.

The iterative process also helped derive the principles of engagement from this simple, yet engaging tool.

The boards, with their clear surfaces, neon markers and transparent prompt stickers worked particularly well in gathering insights from children, who are amongst primary users of parks, but are mostly left out of any formal civic engagement process.

IMAGINATION BOARDSMY ROLES Design Strategist / Product Designer / Interaction Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Human-Centered Design, Product Design, Design Strategy, Experiential Design

PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN | SPRING 2015

The Community Visioning and Strategy Framework is an engagement tool that helps civic engagement in low-income, contested communities and spaces., designed during the course of my thesis project. Its a participatory design tool that largely draws from principles of community development and placemaking, but is enhanced by principles from conflict transformation and design futuring. It was prototyped with the community around Thomas Jefferson Park in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

VISIONING & STRATEGY FRAMEWORKMY ROLES Design Strategist

DESIGN CAPACITIES Design Strategy, Human-Centered Design, Futuring


Its underlying principle is to not just involve commu-nities in co-creating their space, but also help them negotiate their contested visions, and empower them through long-term visioning. Its singular aim is to bring transparency to the planning process, and build trust between multiple stake-holders.

Unlike other planning tools, it embraces the politics of the process: it is not just concerned with what is created, but how it is created. The first complete prototype of the framework was developed in response to the need for a way to formalize community visioning, and translate it into a workable strategy.

How might we create a vibrant community around building rehabilitation in Detroit?

Brick & Beam Detroit is a rehabilitation ecosystem, centered around community building, designed in response to a Knight Foundation challenge for ideas about improving cities through retaining talent, enhancing economic opportunity and spurring civic involvement. A team of students from Parsons worked with the Detroit-based Brick & Beam team to prototype and test components of their proposed service ecosystem as part of the Urban Prototyping Lab set up by IDEO, Knigh Foundation and Parsons.

Out of several initial ideas, including social networking, a process guide, neighborhood tours, an online forum, hard skill classes, a resource directory, story mapping, a welcome kit, and a professional directory of contractors, the team chose two that would be pivotal to kickstarting Brick + Beam, and feasible to prototype during a weekend in Detroit: the welcome kit (launch box) and story mapping. MY ROLES Design Researcher / Product Designer DESIGN CAPACITIES Service Design, Product Design, Human-Centered Design

PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN | SPRING 2015 WITH ALIX GERBER, AMY ELLIOTT BRAGG, CHRISTO-PHER EDWARDS, EMILIE EVANS, ISABELLA BRANDALISE, KELLY ANDERSON, REHANNA AZIMI AND VICTORIA BYRD OLIVIER

BRICK & BEAM DETROIT

For our weekend together in Detroit, we hosted a prototyping pvent that brought together 120 Detroiters interested in building rehab. Partici-pants mapped their projects along with quanti-tative descriptions, told stories, composed their own launch box kits, engaged in conversation and gathered around food. Nametags and prompts on the wall sparked discussions and helped our partici-pants build connections with like-minded individ-uals.

The team also visited two rehabbed homes to learn about the processes they followed, resources they used, and how our proto-types could be most useful for them. Finally, thorugh site visit immersions, team members took on the role of someone interested in buying a property to rehab,

and used a checklist from the launch box to inspect homes on the market through the Detroit Land Bank.

My work on this project showed the value of using meaningfully designed artifacts and spaces to raise questions and test critical assumptions.

In a city with a scarce public space, how might we create venues for interaction, engagement and dialogue?

Clues to that question were littered in Karachis history, in the form of long-shuttered and almost-forgotten teahouses run by Iranian immigrants. The answer had to

I prototyped a functional teahouse, at a new semi-public space created in the city, Port Grand, and iterated it every day for 15 months, not just with varied food offerings, but also books, magazines, boardgames, artworks, acoustic jamming sessions and other programming.

Samovar brought together students, artists, poli-ticians and families, and sparked conversations about the need for such spaces in Karachi. Since Samovar, a number of teahouses, as opposed to simply cafes, have popped up over the city. MY ROLES Service Designer / Product Designer / Experiential Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Service Design, Product Design, Graphic Design

KARACHI | JUNE 2011 - SEPTEMBER 2012

SAMOVAR TEA & COFFEE HOUSE

How might we change perceptions of communities, through information optimized for social media?

Legacy of Islamic Civilization was a campaign designed to encounter perceptions of Muslims as a regressive people, opposed to modernity and progress, in the United States and Europe. The project was commissioned by a New York based NGO that works on counter-radicalization and combating Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The campaign was required to be visually appealing, succinct, and modular, so that its easily shared on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets.

The campaign had two components - the education legacy, and the science legacy. It was designed not just to be shared on social media, but to also be incorporated into childrens curriculum.

MY ROLES Design Strategist / Graphic Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Storytelling / Design Strategy / Graphic Design

NEW YORK | SUMMER 2014

LEGACY OF ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

How might we build an online space and community that inspires and equips individuals to take action in times of crises?

In response to a rising number of hate crimes against minorities across the world, and the heroic stories of individuals who stood up to protect the vulner-able groups in their communities, I was commis-sioned to design an online space that would inspire individuals, and equip them with tools, to protect their vulnerable minorities.

The I Am Your Protector campaign shares stories of individuals and groups that stand up for the vulnerable, while the website provides a toolkit of actions, strategies and resources to those willing to take action. The campaign and the corre-sponding website will be launched in Fall 2015. MY ROLES Design Strategist / Graphic Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Design Strategy / Graphic Design

NEW YORK | SUMMER 2015

I AM YOUR PROTECTOR

How might we translate academic research into a format that is publicly accessible, not just available?

A large amount of academic research is locked up in journals and institutions of higher learning. While the research may be publicly available, the language usually bars it from being publicly accessible. What Keeps Israel Safe? Conciliation/Retaliation? was an attempt to translate a dense research paper into a format that is easier to understand. Not everything can be turned into an infographic, but this design translation was an attempt to see to what extent can design help demystify high-brow academic research, and bring it to the public sphere for discus-sion? Does the introduction of academic research into public discourse influence popular opinion? MY ROLES Graphic DesignerDESIGN CAPACITIES Storytelling / Graphic Design

NEW YORK | WINTER 2014

ISRAEL FACTS FOR THOUGHT

How might we employ visuals to communicate a story more effectively?

The Real Threat visualizes casualties from two different types of attacks drone strikes and attacks by local extremist groups in Pakistan over the years 2011 2014.

It attempts to add perspective to the polarized political debate in Pakistan, where the right blames American drone strikes for fueling insurgency in the country, and the left refuses to acknowledge their role at all. By juxtaposing casualties by both, drone strikes and local terrorist attacks, the visualization aims to put context into the polarizing debate. MY ROLES Coder / Graphic Designer DESIGN CAPACITIES Data Visualization using Processing, Graphic Design, Storytelling

PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN | SPRING 2014 FOR DATA VISUALIZATION

THE REAL THREAT

How might we employ visuals to communicate a complex system easily?

United Rescue, originally from Israel, was intro-ducing their innovative approach to crowd-sourcing trained emergency responders to Jersey City, and wanted to condense their entire process into a simple graphic.

The commission translates the United Rescue system into a simple visualization with six easy-to-follow steps.

MY ROLES Communication Designer / Graphic Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Communication Design / Graphic Design, Data Visualization

NEW YORK | FALL 2014

UNITED RESCUE

QAMBAR SHAHDADKOT

0 105 KM

THE FLOODSCAPEFLOODING AND CAMP SUITABILITY IN NORTH-WESTERN SINDH, PAKISTAN

1 INCH = 10 KM

SUITABLE CAMP SITES WITH FLOODING FOOTPRINT

POSSIBLE CAMP SITESRIVERS & STREAMSWATER BODIESDISTRICT ROADSREC FLOOD MAX FLOOD

CLASSIFIED DEMELEVATION (M)

1 - 344345 - 858859 - 1,5451,546 - 2,3342,335 - 3,1583,159 - 3,9133,914 - 4,4964,497 - 4,9424,943 - 5,4235,424 - 8,752

SOURCE: WEBGIC.COM TERRAIN DATA, EARTHEXPLORER (USGS, NAGA); UNOCHA PAKISTAN

How might we employ cartography to make maps, and the stories they tell, publicly accessible?

The Floodscape - Flooding & Camp Suitability in North-Western Sindh, Pakistan is a GIS project that explores the impact of major floods, in 2010 and 2012, on five selected districts of the country, and deter-mines suitable sites for refugee camps in the region.

The project is also a design project, one that builds a visual language that is publicly accessible, in contrast to similar work done by multilateral disaster-related organizations over the past.

MY ROLES Cartographer / Communication Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Cartography using ArcGIS, Communication Design / Graphic Design, Data Visu-alization

THE FLOODSCAPE

The project aims to answer three questions: Given three years of data and information on floods, what does the countrys floodscape look like? Where should future refugee campsites be? Can design and cartogrophy make publicly available but inaccessible data accessible?

PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN | FALL 2014

FLOODS 2010

FLOODS 2011

FLOODS 2012

CAMPSITES IN QAMBAR SHAHDADKOT

CAMPSITES ON LANSCAPE RASTER

QAMBAR SHAHDADKOT FEATURES & CAMPSITES ON GOOGLE EARTH

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QAMBAR SHAHDADKOT

0 105 KM


1 INCH = 10 KM

SUITABLE CAMP SITES WITH GRADUATED SYMBOLOGY, ROADS AND RIVERS, ZOOMED IN

POSSIBLE CAMP SITESCAPACITY! 10,000 - 12,500! 12,501 - 15,000! 15,001 - 17,500! 17,501 - 20,000

RIVERS & STREAMSWATER BODIESDISTRICT ROADS

SOURCE: EARTHEXPLORER (USGS, NAGA); UNOCHA PAKISTAN

QAMBAR SHAHDADKOT

0 105 KM


1 INCH = 10 KM

SUITABLE CAMP SITES WITH FLOODING FOOTPRINT

POSSIBLE CAMP SITES

RIVERS & STREAMSWATER BODIES

DISTRICT ROADSREC FLOOD

MAX FLOOD

CLASSIFIED DEMELEVATION (M)

1 - 344345 - 858859 - 1,545

1,546 - 2,3342,335 - 3,158

3,159 - 3,9133,914 - 4,496

4,497 - 4,9424,943 - 5,4235,424 - 8,752

SOURCE: WEBGIC.COM TERRAIN DATA, EARTHEXPLORER (USGS, NAGA); UNOCHA PAKISTAN

SUITABLE CAMPSITES IN GOOGLE EARTH IN NOV 2010, AFTER THE FIRST FLOOD


UNIVERSAL GESTURE CONTROL TRAINING PROGRAM

How might we use speculative and critical design to raise critical questions about the present?

The fictional Universal Gesture Control Training Program (UGCTP) is set in the near future - a world where technology has exacerbated existing global inequalities, leading to a volatile, dangerous world, where techno-illiterate citizens of failed states are clamouring for refuge in the techno-havens of the developed world.

The artefacts - a study carrell, a manual, and a training video - point to a State Department sanc-tioned global re-literacy program that aims to spread techno-literacy, especially in most unstable states.

The project raises questions about imperialism - historical, present and prospective - and was selected to be a part of an exhibition titled How Things Dont Work, based on socialy critical design work of Victor Papanek.

MY ROLES Videographer / Communication Designer / Speculative Designer

DESIGN CAPACITIES Speculative & Critical Design / Filmmaking / Communication Design / Product Design


designing for engagement

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