Phase 2, continued: Exploratory Research and Synthesis

Team 16: Amrita Khoshoo, Diana Minji Chun, Hannah Koenig, Shambhavi Deshpande

This post chronicles our team’s progress as it happens for the second phase of our Interaction Design Studio 2 Project, taught by Peter Scupelli in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. You can find the full process publication here.

This week, we immersed ourselves in interviews and contextural inquiry engagements. We also conducted an initial round of research synthesis. This week’s facilitator was Shambhavi.

Getting into the grooves of Interviews

Envigorated by the site visit we did to the Amazon Fulfillment Center, we began reaching out to the people who had insights about our research questions. Using the excel sheet we made, each group member took ownership of the communication with different individuals.

• Hannah: Allen Norton (ED of Workforce) PA Chamber of Business and Industry, Pittsburgh Association of Tech Professionals
• Amrita: Kris Mamula, Post Gazette Journalist who broke the news about HCL Google contractor unionizing with United Steelworkers
• Diana: Connie Mabin (Director, New Media), United Steelworkers
• Shambhvi: Professors Parth Vaishnav, Carnegie Mellon University, Future of Work institute

Allen was the first person to respond and we scheduled a time to talk to him. A day before the interview, we talked about what are some of the questions we wanted to ask. In a shared document, we wrote some questions, structured them to be from narrow to broad. The idea was that we should start with easy introductory questions to the interviewees so that they have time to warm up to talking with us.

The discussion with Peter also helped us gear us for the research phase as well. Some of the points we should be thinking about:

• What is the problem you identified?
• What are key insights
• What is the direction moving forward
• How does this relate to project brief- diminish Quality of life? How does it improve life?

2/3 Phone Interview: Allen Norton, Education of Workforce, PA Chamber of Business and Industry

Hannah: lead interviewer, Amrita: lead note taker

The interview was very insightful in understanding what are business industry focusing in terms of hiring and reskilling. He was open in talking to all of us.

Some of the surprising insight we gathered was about how a 4-year college degree was becoming irrelevant to the business that are short on people. Not enough young people were looking at these technical/blue-collar jobs and there were old people who were staying in because the management could not find the right people.

When asked about what is meaningful work to Allen and people in the workforce, the theme of appreciation came up often. When workers feel like they are being valued, they are more likely to do a good job and stay at the same workplace longer.

As a group, we learned how to ask for consent (note-taking, using the interview content for research), ask questions to probe, keep the flow.

2/4 Phone Interview: Kris Mamula, Post Gazette Journalist

Amrita: lead Interviewer, Hannah: Lead note-taker

Going into the interview, we were skeptical about how much information we would get from Kris because he was humble in telling us that he might not be much help. However, talking with him yield totally different angle of work that we didn’t get from Allen.

Unlike Allen who talked about work from the perspective of the employers, Kris talked about work from a ground level and why the unionizing movement is happening. The big take away is that people want fairness and equity in the work force. When unionizing, one expert told him, “It’s’ not always money, it could be respect, healthcare costs, those costs get shifted to the employee”.

To him and his community, meaningful work was worker’s autonomy. Being able to make decisions for what he/she does is something that motivates good work.

2/5 ConflictU and Research Synthesis Methods

We were assigned to complete a Conflict U activity. In this activity, we were to simulate talking about something we might disagree with. We had a brilliant idea that we could use this simulation as a real opportunity to talk about our research synthesis process.

We started off by saying what we are interested and in need.

• Diana: Go through every engagement and do a one linear in order to see what people are thinking about and align.
• Shambhavi: set of questions/topic and summarize answers from all the different sources. I don’t want to be lost in so much content, I want to see the throughline with the research we are doing.
• Amrita: Take some time to go through the notes individually so that we can do a thorough comb through and synthesize it. I do not want to miss anything.
• Hannah: Write down your thoughts on post-its through a coding system, look for commonalities, and do affinity mapping. I want this process to be structured and efficiency is important.

From this, we talked about how we can come up with a process that could meet everyone’s needs.

• Everyone read and prepare individually
• Post-its writing session together to check other’s thoughts early on
• Color-coding post-its for different research engagements
• Agree on the categories before the meeting so we can anchor the preparation, meeting discussion.

We also came up with post-its coding system.

Why am I always pointing?

The post-it template

2/7 Onsite Interview: Connie Mabin, Mariana Padias, Lisa Jordan, Maria Sommas, United Steelworkers

We were very excited to visit our first union, United Steelworkers (USW). The conversation we had was so honest, passionate and insightful.

We arrived at their office early morning after the heavy snowfall so downtown Pittsburgh was relatively quiet. We did check-in, got our name tags and off we went to the 7th floor.

From the first question of how they got to be involved in USW, all the ladies had stories of passion and deep personal connection to work and community. Big take-a-ways was that corporatization of the workplace and the growing periphery of company employee structure were prevalent in current society- even for the white worker jobs. This makes work condition poor, eliminate social security, and break apart communities. This is where the union can come in and provide bargaining power to the workers and rebuild the community.

We tried recording the interview for the first time and it well very well!

2/9 Group Check-in and Research synthesis: Phase 1

After a Saturday break, we met as a group to start the synthesis process. Before the official synthesis meeting, we took about 45minute to check-in on how we were feeling about workload, teamwork and the project. As a group, we were generally happy about the teamwork, appreciative of high standards we are expecting of each other. Some of us also felt a little worried about upcoming Confluence and we promised that we will try to be proactive on front-loading the work so people have time to prepare for Confluence.

We each went through all the engagement we had so far as well as some secondary research before the meeting. It took us about 3 hours to share all the post-it with each other. we loosely put them in the categories as we put it up on the wall.

Right away there were some emerging themes. After labeling those, we saw some sub-themes and relationships of different themes. As we name those sub-themes and relationships, a natural discussion happened.

Continuing with thematic categories, parsing out the subcategories.

• We want to break down the unionization section more.
• We want to look at the reskilling/upskilling -college section together.
• Hannah is interested in the purpose of education-career oriented or soft skill-oriented?
• Different approaches to preparing students for the workforce
• The gap between employers finding the right candidates vs. college graduate being underemployed
• Trends: White-collar jobs unionizing
• Tech/robots-union
• Small PGH tech sector is missing picture
• We are coming from outside-in.
• We are getting good landscape of our problem space.
• Themes: Union, education(career-focused? what does it mean to be educated?), reskilling
• Power dynamics and difference of privilege
• Who is our stakeholder?- where is pressing need? Could we use the impact diagrams to determine our research directions?
• S: don’t see bigger problem thread, this exercise was great for shared understanding. Is this the best activity to figure out the design principals?
• H: We drew the map, we can now decide where we want to go.
• Some of the areas we want to be for presentation?
• Community route? We have tones of resources

Feb 10: Interviews, synthesis, presentation prep

We’re a week away from our exploratory research presentation. To kick off class, Aadya shared her team’s research presentation last year about building empathy between citizens and refugees.

review with aadya

Then, we moved into a work session. Amrita and Shambhavi interviewed an SME from the Future of Work Initiative at CMU. Hannah and Diana tackled our research presentation outline. They took a look at research insights and key themes.

We also had a feedback meeting with Aadya. Key takeaways:

• Diagrams and visualizations stick better with people and are spatially more interesting. More things that come from visualizations.
• Convert insights to actionable insights
• Design principles provide a good foundation for the next steps (concept generation)
• Include next steps and also questions/here’s where we are having trouble
• Update/evolve research question
• Target audience and rationale behind why focusing on this group

Feb 11: Peer-review presentation Prep

This meeting, we hoped to develop research insights, design principles, and potentially a conceptual framework to guide the next phase of our project.

discussing insights from sythesis

We started by looking back at our synthesis map. We went over all of our green post-its, which we used to capture insights gathered during research. We all started discussing and capturing themes that jumped out to us. After some discussion, we started to group insights together and workshop them.

“I like shapes.” — Diana // a helpful hobby to have when building conceptual models

After some discussion and workshopping our insights, we came up with the following working list:

1. The narrative that a four-year degree is the one true path to success is a myth. (Allen)
2. There is a connection between workers with dignity and healthy, functioning communities. (USW, Secondary research)
3. The core of the global economy is powered by vulnerability on the periphery. (Secondary research, USW)
4. Automation is challenging people to find new ways of contributing value to the workplace. (Amazon, Allen, Secondary research )
5. Automation is raising the floor (minimum requirements) for many jobs across the economy.
6. Automation is reducing the need for human intelligence and thus making some jobs more replaceable.
7. Having a say in how work is done is equally, if not more important, than compensation. (Kris)
8. Definitions of meaningful work shift as one’s basic needs are met.
9. Unions, apprenticeships, and vocational training are potential pathways to a more just and equitable future of work. (USW, Allen, Secondary research)
10. White-collar workers do not have as much power and control over jobs as they would like. (USW, Kris)
11. People define meaning at work in relational terms of appreciation, fairness, and equity. (Kris)

We also discussed potential target audiences and potential design principles.

Feb 12: Peer Review

Peer review was great! We met with three groups and were able to present twice. We also had a chance to present to Hajira and Sophia, and hear their feedback.

presenting to team after life

Key takeaways:

• Shorten number and length of insights. Really aim for impactful statements that you can then further explain verbally.
• This topic is political and it’s okay if it is.
• The core-periphery model is very interesting but can be better explained
• Make a distinction between learnings and insights — learnings are something interesting, but insights are actionable and will guide the rest of the research.
• What does “just and equitable future of work” mean to us as a group?
• Worth mentioning that we designed our own tool for research synthesis in our presentation

Feb 14: Research Synthesis Meeting

We led an interview, refined our research insights, came up with a conceptual framework, and developed a working set of design principles. Go team!

workshopping insights + conceptual frameworks

We interviewed a remote work expert who shared a ton of insight about the future of remote work. He discussed the importance of workplace trust and work that’s based on ideals of communication, collaboration, and discipline.

We then moved into workshopping our insights, distilling them down into short, quick statements. We discussed unions, the core-periphery model, and meaningful work at length. We also each shared a little bit about our family histories.

As we developed our insights, we started to notice a pattern emerging. This turned into our conceptual framework. In the past, we might once have expected a linear progression from school to work to retirement, we saw instead a more dynamic cycle of learning and working happening continuously today. This might mean people having multiple employers, multiple careers, and different forms of education. We put workers at the center of this to describe how we understand the present. Some of our insights describe how we got to where we are today (past), and potential ways forward (future).

We also took a stab at thinking about design principles. We drew from our insights, flipping them into actionable statements that might help guide our process. At this stage, we listed out all possibilities. In our next meeting, we hope to refine our principles, solidify our conceptual model, and put together our research presentation.

Feb 16: Research Presentation Meeting

Today was a marathon day! We defined our design principles, considered the meaning of decent work, and put together our research presentation.

Insights + Principles

We first workshopped our design principles. We listed out our own key takeaways from each sight, discussed, then synthesized. Here’s our working list:

1 The gig economy is not new.

Principle of Context: Situate local interventions in the bigger picture of the global economy.

Description: Many of us are familiar with the narrative of tech companies like Uber and Lyft as new agents disrupting the economic status quo. However, through our research, we discovered that forms of contingent work, like driving for Uber, are the latest developments in a historical shift towards alternative work arrangements, such as outsourcing in the 1990s.

Specifically, we are continuing to learn about a core-periphery model of the economy. The core is made up of full-time employees the enjoy the highest benefits and social services that a company can offer. The periphery includes temp, contingent, or contract workers that don’t enjoy the same range of benefits.

2 A four-year degree does not equal success.

Principle of Narrative: Encourage stories that highlight other pathways to improved standards of living.

Description: Many of our sources describe the myth of the four-year education as the one true pathway to workforce success. One source talked about how many college graduates are entering the workforce without the relevant skills that employers are looking for during the hiring process. These graduates are returning to community colleges and trade schools to train for jobs that did not require them to go to a four-year college in the first place.

3 There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to prepare workers for the future.

Principle of Partnership: Nurture connections across stakeholders in different sectors (including education, business, government, and community organizations).

Principle of Plurality: enable multiple viable options.

Description: Education, businesses, governments, and different components of civil society need to work together to prepare workers for the future. They cannot work in silos. A growing number of these stakeholders are calling for stronger partnerships to create a stronger workforce. Additionally, there are many pathways that enable success in the workforce. For example, the apprenticeship model allows people to earn and learn at the same time.

4 Meaning at work comes from each other.

Principle of Appreciation: Design for mutual respect, trust, and growth at work.

Description: We heard a lot about how meaningful work is a shared project between coworkers, based on equity, appreciation, and trust between people.

• One example is HCL contract workers wanting the same benefits as Googlers.
• Another contrasting example is a librarian seeking unionization wanting her coworkers and supporting staff to be paid fairly.

5 It’s not always about money.

Principle of Autonomy: Enable people to participate in decisions that affect their work.

Description: Meaningful work is not just about money. It includes having control over how work is done, feeling valued and appreciated, and being trusted. But also, sometimes it is about money if basic needs are not being met. For example, we looked at Max Neef’s need for subsistence, which includes shelter and food.

6 There is power in the collective.

Principle of Decentralization: Watch for where and how power is concentrated and find ways to redistribute it.

Description: We are seeing a trend of increasing unionization in unexpected sectors — specifically, white-collar work. This includes people in the professions of management, tech, and education, just to name a few. As we developed these insights, we had many conversations that revolved around the core idea that we need to be skeptical of power and its intentions. The power in the collective can be used for good or bad.

7 Being human is the new differentiator.

Principle of Decentralization: watch for where and how power is concentrated and find ways to redistribute it.

Description: Automation is challenging people to find new ways of contributing value to the workplace.

• On one hand, automation is raising the floor (minimum requirements) for many jobs across the economy. Eg. Car mechanics need to know computers.
• Also, automation is reducing the need for human intelligence in some jobs and making people more replaceable. Eg. In an Amazon warehouse, the training period is 48 hours.

In many future of work reports, companies and experts describe soft skills as the most important set of skills needed looking forward. Paired with digital literacy, soft skills like judgment calls, emotional intelligence, and creative problem solving will distinguish humans from machines.

Defining Decent Work

We then defined decent work. We looked back at SDG 8 targets and also the International Labor Organization’s definition of decent work. After some discussion, we all gravitated toward’s the ILO’s definition:

Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives.

01 Opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income

02 Security in the workplace and social protection for families

03 Better prospects for personal development and social integration

04 Freedom for people to express concerns, organize and participate in decisions that affect them

05 Equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men

Reworking our Problem Frame

We then headed into workshopping our new problem frame (drafts):

• What happened for white-collar groups to seek unionization?
• What failed for white-collar groups to seek unionization?
• HMW works with white-collar workers to imagine and design equitable pathways/interventions to a decent future of work?
• *HMW work with WCW to imagine and design interventions that make the future of work in Pittsburgh decent for all?
• *HMW work with WCW to imagine and design interventions that aspire to make the future of work in Pittsburgh decent for all?
• How might we build better pathways to a decent future of work for white-collar workers seeking unionization?
• HMW design for decent futures of work for white-collar workers in Pittsburgh?

And then we started stitching together and polishing our presentation!

Feb 17: Phase 2 Presentations

On Monday, we gave our Phase 2 presentation to our peers, professors, and Arnold and Mariano at INDEX.

Presentation Feedback

Overall, we felt our presentation was well-received. We specifically asked for feedback on our target audience. We heard that our audience was well-defined and specific enough to begin working on Phase 3, while still being linked to our overall territory and topic. Our insights and design principles were commented upon favorably. Sofia mentioned some resources for us to be aware of in the next phase, including Donella Meadows’s piece on places to intervene in a system and a network of Maintainers.

Thanks for reading! Follow along on our Phase 3: Generative Research journey here.