Let Me Tell You Something

I am very interested in how people interact and communicate with each other. Cultures are either made or broken based on how their members interact. People create connections, interact with each other, and from these interactions memorable experiences are had. The idea of designing an experience that ushers in positive interactions for a community is one that I am extremely interested in. That is why I chose to do my BFA Thesis based around designing an experience for The Communication Design Department (CD) at The Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA).

By the end of this project I have been a member of this community for three years. At the beginning of my senior year I sat down an evaluated my own experiences in CD at CIA. I was able to make a list of the things I would change that I believe will be good for all. It was from this list that I was able to eventually identify key issues that lead me to my problem statement. Before we get to that good stuff, I’ll tell you the story of how I got there.

A Community In Need

My experience as a member in CD has been both positive and negative. I have worked on some great projects, learned many new skills, met some great people, and overall had a fun time.

The part that I wish would have been more prominent throughout my time in CD is a relationship with upperclassmen. I really never spoke with any upperclassmen throughout my entire time in CD—I never felt comfortable approaching them or asking questions about my work or their work. I never got to know them on a personal level because I was unable to know them on an academic level. I’ll never be sure of why I was unable to interact with upperclassmen, but I suspect it has to do with feelings of discomfort coming from both sides. For these reasons, I feel I did not get as much as I could have out of the department. I was unable to utilize the community to its fullest extent because I realized too late how important those interactions can be. I realized that I am a member of a community that does not function in a healthy, inspiring, or collaborative way.

So after taking a very in-depth look into my time in CD, I started to do the same by asking my classmates. I wanted to find out if my experience is unique, or if this is something common in CD. I mainly focused on seniors, as our time spent in this department is the longest compared to the rest of the students. Unfortunately it turns out that most of my senior classmates all had similar experiences to my own.

At this point I started to realize that this is both a good and bad thing. It is bad
because a community of 24-30 people (depending on current faculty) is not functioning in a way that best promotes the growth and advancement of its members. It is good because the opportunity to investigate and create some observable change to this community is present.

I am using the term community because it best represents what CD is and what its purpose is. The American Heritage science dictionary best describes what a community is in regards to my project:

Community | n.
A group of organisms or populations living and interacting with one another in a particular environment. The organisms in a community affect each other’s abundance, distribution, and evolutionary adaptation. Depending on how broadly one views the interaction between organisms, a community can be small and local, as in a pond or tree, or regional or global, as in a biome.

The Communication Design Department is definitely a small community, albeit a community that started the year being mostly dysfunctional. I feel that members of this community should interact with each other, critique each other’s work, and utilize the space provided to do so. Unfortunately from what I have found out, this is very far from the case.

The Ecosystem and The Community

Everyone is part of a community, whether they realize it or not. The only way you really could not be part of a community is if you were living in isolation from any people or institutions. Communities are all about symbiosis and integration. Sometimes communities exist within communities, and these communities can affect each other in both positive and negative ways.

I need to clarify something right here. The CD community at CIA is part of the larger CIA community (ecosystem). From my personal experiences I have witnessed interactions between the larger CIA community (ecosystem) and the CD community. The relationship between the two is stagnant but not abusive. They do not coexist in a way that they both gain a lot of positive experience, but they are also not vindictive towards each other.

This stagnancy is an issue that can be addressed in three alternate ways: 1. Alter the behavior of the larger community (ecosystem) to have a trickle down effect to the smaller; 2. Alter the smaller community within and promote change to the larger ecosystem through recognition and replication, 3. Do both!

The belief and strategy I have for my thesis project is inline with that second option. I believe that an inward approach to creating a healthy culture is immediately more important than changing the entire ecosystem of CIA. It is infinitely more difficult to change the ways of a larger ecosystem when compared to a localized community. There is way more to take into consideration, and way more to accomplish to provide any change of worth. One year is hardly enough time to do the project I have done, and I can’t imagine how long an ecosystem wide culture shift would take.

My thesis is for the members of the CD community. Their image in the larger ecosystem may not be the most important part of what they get out this process, but it does need to at least be taken into consideration. In regards to the larger CIA community, my process has been to cultivate from the inside out, so that the larger ecosystem can recognize the importance and values that CD at CIA is built on.
Our culture can change their culture if they believe in our values.

I've Got Issues, Man

At this point in the project I was starting to recognize things that I had never thought about that could be creating issues and problems. I sat down with many of my classmates and the majority of the CD department to ask them about their experiences in the department. It was uncanny as to how similar everyone’s answers were.

The next step in finding out where the problem truly lies was to put out surveys to the CD department. These surveys allowed me to figure out who my users are, and what issues they personally have with the way the CD community. I was as thorough as I could get in the Survey Monkey 10 question limit surveys.

The results to these surveys were as I expected: very concerning. Members of this community are essentially not interacting with each other outside of class time. They aren’t even going to their professors with questions they have about homework, or methods and techniques that they need help with. In addition to not interacting amongst the community, the majority of everyone was failing to utilize the studio space to work in. I obtained a fair amount of quantitative data from these surveys, which then put me in a great position to do some interviews.

As terrible as all of these results were, they started to point me in a clear direction. I now found myself asking “why?” a lot. I needed to get more personal information from individual people to figure this out, so I started to interview people and observe how they interact with each other.

I interviewed around 15 people (more than half of the department) and got some great feedback as to why people weren’t interacting or using the studio. A lot of the answers ended up being about comfort. People simply did not feel comfortable working around others they hadn’t established any rules for engagement with, as well as in a space they were uncomfortable in. I also discovered while interviewing the sophomores that many of them didn’t understand fully what communication design is and all that it encompasses. They are unable to make an emotional bond to what they are learning because they do not fully understand. I believe that this misunderstanding of communication design was much more prevalent at the beginning of the year for the entire CD community, as well as the larger CIA community (more on that in a bit).

But why? Why were all of these interactions lacking? To be completely honest, it took me most of the school year to actually figure it out. I went through what feels like a million different reasons, but most of them just didn’t connect with what I was observing. There are so many facets that make even the smallest community complex, and CD is one of them (surprise!). I went through phases where I thought it was an issue of purely engagement, comfort, and character. These things can be considered sub-issues that stem from more fundamental issues, but their merit isn’t worthy of discussing beyond that right now.

I kept up the search the entire year, uncovering new issues that seemed to make more and more sense. The more I started to trust my gut and not take everything I was being told by certain people as fact, the more I was able to move forward in my discovery of what had broken down the CD culture. It truly was a year long process that has lead up to the final problem statement.

Initially I thought the problem had more to do with just getting members of this community to communicate and interact with each other. Those are both great things to strive for, but they cannot fix a much larger problem on their own. There are other types of interactions that needed to be addressed too. Once I shifted my mind-set to this, things rapidly started to become more clear. I went through five or six iterations before I finally narrowed my problem down to what it actually is: a problem based around the culture CD was built on. A problem that had kept the community from thriving and meeting its full potential.

The current experience the CD community is built on is one in which the importance of fostering leadership and nurturing personal relationships is overlooked. The absence of these qualities has developed a culture that is lacking in fundamental communication, collaboration, and passion for the community and its purposes. The CD community cannot rise to its full potential and maximize its overlying purpose with this stagnant and ineffective culture. It is missing a core experience in which members of the community all interact with and contribute to.

The most important thing to take away from this problem statement is that the CD community is unable to “rise to its full potential and maximize its overlying purpose.” Because honestly, why would anyone want to be part of a community that is not doing everything it possibly can for you?

(Hypo)thesis

Getting to the correct problem statement was hard enough, but getting to the thesis was surprisingly easy and also enjoyable. Regardless of whatever (wrong) version of the problem statement I was working with, I always had some strategy to implement into my project. Designing things that helped me discover the right course of action is how I attribute a big chunk of getting to the final version of everything. Because I was working with the community I interact with the most, I was able to see what was working and what was failing and retool from there.

My hypothesis changed as frequently as my problem statement did, allowing for a proper strategy to be in place for each different iteration. At mid-years it was all about establishing comfort between members of the community and also their studio environment. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not enough right. From the midyear point to the end of this project the hypothesis has evolved and matured into a thesis that really addresses the problem with a great strategy to provide change.

The problem ended up not being rooted in purely engagement of people to people, so why would my (hypo)thesis? The spring semester opened up my eyes to see that the problems occur in all of the interactions that go on in this community. There are person-to-person interactions, person-to-interface interactions, and person-to-environment interactions that all needed to be reevaluated and planned for. Getting these interactions to integrate naturally is where my solution will come from. Here is my thesis.

By designing things to influence and integrate person to person interactions, person to interface interactions, and person to environment (system) interactions, a “CD Experience” can be designed [for] to provide a starting point for a new culture to develop. This new culture will be fueled by communication, collaboration, and passion. It emphasizes the importance of strong leadership roles and personal relationships. When embraced, this experience can provide the opportunity for the community to reach its fullest potential.

Integration!

How do you integrate these three types of interactions? That has been my favorite part of working on this project. Since I am a designer I have the ability to create the things (physical artifacts) that influence the interactions I’m after. The ways I’m
dealing with integrating these interactions is by aesthetics, purpose, and most
importantly emotion. Aesthetics is pretty straight forward, make the things appeal to the senses in similar ways. Purpose, also straight forward; make the things influence interactions that promote communication and engagement. The emotional hook is the tricky one. Evoking a consistently positive reaction to all of the things that ties all interactions together can be difficult because everybody reacts in a different way based on previous experiences. I can plan for these interactions to take place a particular way, but a lot of it will be based on the user.

The following chapters will focus on what I’ve made to influence these interactions, and how I’ve planned for them to integrate.

Ready for some users? It's Chapter Three: You Sir, Are A User.