Community Weekend reviews

It was a mixed bag of news this week on both the Bloomington Startup Weekend and CHI fronts, but the good far outweighed the bad.

After we passed New York City in the number of participants registered to attend, the Herald-Times published a front-page story on our BSW event at City Hall next weekend. Thanks to the generosity of Richie, I have my name attached to both a Work-In-Progress and a Workshop for CHI, avoiding the shutout for my trip to Italy in April. Overall, estimates are 33 students and faculty will participate in the CHI 2008 program.

The sad news for my design team came in the form of mixed reviews on our own submission, one of just 40 international submissions by students willing to take on the wicked problem of designing for people experiencing homelessness. More than 1/4 of those submissions came from Indiana, which is one of the reasons we were able to put five teams into the second round.

Community Weekend: Facilitating Social and Economic Opportunity

Abstract:
For people experiencing severe poverty in the United States, homelessness can be an involuntary symptom of a complex social ill. The cost of being homeless is the vicious cycle of deteriorating social support and increasing barriers to economic opportunity. A proposed local intervention—Community Weekend (CW)—presents people experiencing homelessness with a viable exit strategy based on human connection and in situ exposure to practical skills. Participation in the shared task of developing a new local business decreases stigma and establishes authentic ties between the homeless and the homed. A web-based visualization of each participant’s evolving social network is generated effortlessly with sociometric badges. The CW connection manager provides a persistent means of contact even for those with transitory lifestyles.

While the overall scores were lower than we would have liked (and needed, to advance), we have a nice rebuttal for the critiques. Our mPath entry that won it all in 2005, I recall, had equally mediocre reviews in the contest’s second year. I include oiur reviews below to (a) solicit more feedback, and (b) help give future student teams some insight into the review process for the competition.

Review 1
Design Process Quality: 2 (Poor)
Design Solution Concept: 3 (Average)
Feasability of Design Solution: 2 (Poor)
Clarity of Writing & Presentation: 3 (Average)
Overall Rating: 3 (Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.)

Review Comments:
The authors review appropriate literature on economic and social determinants of homelessness. Additional factors are also discussed. Benefits of job training padded with other holistic support and training are discussed, with focus on the example of the Startup Weekend initiative where participants from different backgrounds spend a weekend together to develop start up businesses and nurture social connections. The authors propose a derivative solution: Community Weekend, where members of a community spend a weekend with homeless persons on community projects. Smart badges are proposed to track conversations over the course of the weekend, and visualize these connections over time.

The authors propose a sound approach to helping the homeless on multiple fronts: skills-wise through holistic training, and socially through prolonged contact with homed individuals. The authors’ proposal was apparently informed by blogs, however the vague mention of online artifact analysis or user involvement (bottom of p3) is not clear. The number of users and/or websites are not specified and the analysis methods are not described. The proposal of badges and communication visualization do not seem useful for the homeless because it is unclear how they would benefit considering the common lack of computer access. Also, it would be helpful to see a prototype of the visualization. The authors need to explore barriers to this proposal, such as finding willing homed and homeless participants, and connecting them with realistic, integrative tasks and goals.

Of the three reviews, this is the most constructive and informative. The ratings of “2” are harsh, but understandable given the emphasis on showing process. In a short-form six-page paper, however, we made a decision to emphasize the rationale for the argument at the sacrifice of some of the things mentioned (screen shots, detailed discussion of web sites reviews, etc).

There were two primary reasons for this decision, one practical and one philosophical. The practical one is that our three-member team only formed in mid-December, without an HSC-approved study we could use as a foundation. Relevant inquiries were conducted, and we did manage to push through two studies before the paper was submitted (only benefiting from one). We met only once in the same room, as one member was moving as the other was becoming available, and worked over the holiday season. A steep hill to climb, man-hours-wise. Our process was designerly, but decidedly informal.

Philosophically, our design required buy-in to two key notions. First, homelessness is a byproduct of economic disadvantage, not simply an absence of home. Second, developing positive social networks outside of the peer group is vital to infusing resources into that community. Spending two pages explaining which web sites we analyzed and how we iterated web screens wasn’t going to get those points into the foundation.

Eight pages and two more weeks, we would have been golden.

Review 2
Design Process Quality: 5 (Very good)
Design Solution Concept: 4 (Good)
Feasability of Design Solution: 4 (Good)
Clarity of Writing & Presentation: 5 (Very good)
Overall Rating: 5 (Definite accept: I would argue strongly for accepting this paper.)

Review Comments:
This is an impressive submission from start to finish. Secondary literature is used sensitively and effectively. Both social care literature, existing designs such as StartUp weekend, and emerging technologies such as MIT’s smart badges are used as a source of ideas and inspiration. This has been shaped, deepened and grounded by collaboration with local domain experts (Acknowledgements). Although the design is at an initial conceptual stage here, there is a rich enough feature set under consideration for iteration towards worthwhile outcomes to be possible. Although I am not absolutely confident on feasiblity, I do feel that the proposed design can be scaled back and still be effective if some design options turn out to be too costly or challenging. Note that technical feasibility isn’t an issue, it’s the effectiveness of a design synthesis with all the envisaged features that is an issue at this point. This is a consequence of an ambitious design, but I do not feel that it is overly ambitious. The breadth of generated options (49) is very impressive, and gives the group many opportunities to steer through the design space to an effective outcome.

I’m very impressed by this front end to a design process. The team should definitely advance to the next stage. Figure 4 and its caption provides reassuring evidence of how far the group have thought ahead.

PS There’s typo on p.6 col 1, form should be from, first line of first new paragraph.

Clearly, this reviewer got the rationale. This was the kind of reaction we were hoping for when we structured the paper, including the use of margins to address the process and technical gaps that our more extensive literature review would not permit. This reviewer accepted our argument, was OK with the high level of concept, and gave us the benefit of doubt that we would be able to iterate sufficiently by April. Check, check and check.

Review 3
Design Process Quality: 3 (Average)
Design Solution Concept: 4 (Good)
Feasability of Design Solution: 3 (Average)
Clarity of Writing & Presentation: 4 (Good)
Overall Rating: 3 (Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.)

Review Comments:
The proponents have not done extensive enough research into the “pathways” to homelessness and, as a result, cast their proposal too narrowly. Economic development opportunities are clearly important, but they are not sufficient to address the fundamental questions of shelter, food and income (to name just three). The central role of housing (both as a factor in causing homelessness and a solution to homelessness) is mostly absent from the discussion, and therefore sets in place a fundamental flaw. I’m not clear how the community weekend model would work without the fundamental stability of housing. That said, the proponents do a credible job of matching their proposal to the stated goals. However, due to the fundamental flaw that I have outlined, I would not recommend that this paper be accepted.

This review was the sink in our sunk.

Although technically scored higher than the first reviewer, this critique is based largely on a literal definition of homelessness as one who is without home. We explored the meaning of the term deeply, drawing different affinity diagrams and relational charts to figure out what it meant to experience homelessness. In the end, all roads led to economics, not physical shelter. To design for “shelter, food and income” offers a band-aid to a much more complex dynamic. Those problems involve a short-term necessity; we were attempting to address homelessness as a symptom of a greater social ill.

It’s the fish vs. fishing. Clearly, even addressing the credible weaknesses of the first reviewer would not have been enough for this critic. In order to pass muster, we would have needed to revert to a more tangible and limiting definition of the problem that we rejected after a lengthy exploration and deliberation of the options.

What do you think?