Student Health Leaders
Our service encourages students to engage with health interests, form connections, and get excited about SHL before the program begins.
SKILLS
Service Design, Remote-Facilitation, Flyer Design, Mural, Canva
Project
DSGN 382: Service Design Studio
TEAMMATES
Bella Zhan, Will Deschler
TIMELINE
24 weeks (Two-quarter project
The Student Health Leaders program strives to unite and empower CPS high school students to engage with health issues and enact change in their communities. As a former CPS student, I found the project particularly meaningful as a way to help others like myself find their own career direction and ways of giving back.
Design Research and Service Design Tools
As the studio began the early stages of design research to better understand the existing Student Health Leaders program and the needs of its stakeholders, I worked in groups of 4-5 students to design peer-to-peer presentations on interviewing methods and service design tools. The experience challenged me to brainstorm ways to engage my peers through a series of activities that draws on their personal experience as designers and introduces them to novel concepts within service design. Overall, this preliminary task in remote facilitation gave the studio a glimpse of strategies like card sort interviews and service blueprints that would become useful as we develop our understanding and refine the SHL program.
Ideation and Prototyping Plan
Using the insights, themes, and stories from past Student Heath Leaders student participants and stakeholders, our team identified four main aspects essential to the Orientation and Onboarding service:
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informing students of program logistics (including program timeline, goals, and action items)
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building connections among students
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encouraging connections with program organizers and stakeholders
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generating excitement before the program starts
Welcome Kit
SHL Welcome Kits provides students with a physical artifact from the program that they can use throughout their experience to stay informed and reflect on activitities. The SHL handbook and branded merchandise serve to generate excitement when students get their package in the mail and is something that students can takeaway from the program as a reminder of what they've done and learned.
Student Spotlights
Student spotlights distributed via the Student Health Leaders email list helps incoming participants learn more from experiences of students in the past. Additionally, student spotlights on social media for the incoming participants can help program participants learn more about each other before the first workshop and throughout the program.
Pre-program Meeting
About a week before the program, Student Health Leaders participants are given the opportunity to meeting the SHL team and others in the program in a Zoom meeting where they'll be given a program preview and participate in icebreaker and collaborative activities. The goal of the meeting is to give students a chance to ask questions and meet peers before the first workshop begins!
Remote Testing and Feedback
To help orient and facilitate past participants through the testing process, the following MURAL board clearly shows each of the three artifacts to support the Orientation and Onboarding service alongside questions and testing points. By specifying for students the kinds of feedback the team was hoping to receive, we were able to get targeted responses about different aspects of the prototypes including student motivation, feasibility, and changes to make.
Service Artifacts
Design Takeaways
Through this experience, I developed my skills in remote facilitation using tools like Mural and Zoom breakout rooms. Working on a project that focused on improving and refining a service in response to pandemic imposed restrictions also challenged by ability to use service design as a medium to build community in a virtual world. In addition to designing remote experiences for stakeholders of the service, I also took part in creating comfortable and engaging sessions with those involved in helping our team understand the existing service and test prototyped ideas.