The challenge is to work with and along Emergent Savannah to empower the people of Savannah to spark greater civic engagement and foster community resilience.

We were 14 team members of multidisciplinary SCAD students. I helped with research, conducting interviews with locals, analyzing the data, and brainstorming. I worked specifically on the development of the People’s Tour solution. I also helped organize the final event and come up with ideas to engage stakeholders and encourage them to adopt the solutions and take them forward.

The project happened during 10 weeks in spring 2017. The team hosted a midterm and a final presentation with representatives of stakeholders and locals of Savannah.

Our design process was structured using the double diamond framework for research and design. Starting with the discovery phase, we began researching what we could about Savannah’s community through secondary and primary research. We started by studying Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities to learn about the different strategies different cities follows to build resiliency. We participated in Savannah Earth Day festival in which we set a cultural probe and asked participants to tell us when they felt close to their community. We also observed and attended several events of Emergent Savannah like Monday Means Community and Government 101 course. We then conducted 33 interviews with locals in Savannah involved in the community. We then regrouped and synthesized this data in what we called a scrum. We were then able to define the design problem that we would address in this class. Halfway through the quarter, we reconvened with another scrum as we shifted to the second diamond and began to develop ideas for final concepts. From there, we gathered feedback from our stakeholders and scrummed again to improve our ideas. Finally, we moved into the delivery phase with the planning and implementation of our concepts.

Check the following blog posts for more information:

To help ignite conversations and collaboration we brainstormed 100 ideas from which we selected four and tested them in the city. Our solutions included a People’s Tour with a tour guide that introduces locals to different communities in Savannah. This would increase understanding and appreciation among groups that might not otherwise hear from one another. Another solution, we called Friend-O-Matic is an installation that brings strangers together to engage in meaningful conversations. A third one, Factivate, is a community board that displays public information about events and stories of locals to help activate the community. And finally, we started social media pages for Humans of Savannah, a concept iterated from Humans of New York. 

Check the final event and solutions in this blog post: http://www.designethos.org/wp/2017/06/02/resiliency-in-savannah-moving-forward/

After prototyping, testing and iterating these designs, we created instruction manuals for parties in the future that wish to carry out the concepts themselves. We want the benefits of our research to extend beyond our project and last long into the future. In a final event, held in Juliette Low Park, we invited community members and we presented them our four solutions with the instruction manuals. We asked of every couple of participants to write their names, their favorite concept and how they would take it forward on a Promise Board.