Tackling Digital Equity in Just 11 Weeks
A blog post by Addison Pann
Our Problem
On our first day of instruction as a new cohort in the Interactive Media Design program at the University of Washington Bothell, our group of 23 design students was introduced to the topic of Digital Equity by finding out we would be building a website dedicated to the subject. As one can guess, that was a bit of a bombshell. How could we be expected to learn the intricacies of such a complex topic in an 11-week term, let alone publish a website dedicated to the subject?
In what was, for many of us, our first-ever design sprint, we tackled a topic that requires a level of care many of us were not used to. We learned the principles of design as we went, leaning on community members and each other to accomplish a project most of us were initially afraid was impossible. Here’s a breakdown of how we learned about the Digital Equity field, from knowing nothing to delivering content approved by practitioners.
Our Approach
The first five-and-a-half weeks of the term (half of our project time) was spent anchoring our design around an understanding of the problem space. By giving plenty of time to learn about the unfamiliar space we were entering, we were better prepared to create media that spoke to the needs identified by Digital Equity practitioners. Each exploratory activity we undertook further solidified our understanding of the Digital Equity field – a field that is both newly culturally relevant and also new to us.
The second half of the term was spent developing and delivering content to include on this website, Dear Digital Equity, including profiles of Digital Advocates and Explainers that highlight important and interesting facts and stories about Digital Equity that were uncovered during the “discover and define” phase of our course. In this way, our approach aligns with the UK Design Council’s “Double Diamond” design process.
The UK Design Council’s Double Diamond, recreated by Addison Pann
The visual representation of the Double Diamond gives equal space to the “Discovery” and “Defining” phases of design as it does to “Developing” and “Delivering.” This spatial representation for the Double Diamond quite accurately reflects how we spent our time design time. The UK Design Council has a long history of public sector design (going back to 1944) and it is more than mere coincidence that our educators choose to model our design process upon it when tackling a complicated topic like Digital Equity.
Co-Designing with Community Advisors
Before our class came on to the project, our Community Advisors, Sabrina Roach and Nancy Chang, and educators met to shape the project together: To address a gap in awareness around Digital Equity Work in Washington State, tailoring the project to learning objectives around our upcoming course work.
Then, in the second week of the project, our cohort met with Roach and Chang for the first time. As a group, we discussed and refined our understanding of Digital Equity and how it is pursued in Washington State. Most importantly, we began to understand what it means to the people of Washington State.
In that initial meeting, our Community Advisors also helped us to brainstorm media content and engagement strategies for our project. This helped to steer us toward a final product that could provide greater service to our community. This was the first time that I had experienced brainstorming with a Community Advisor and believe that was the case for most of the design students working on this project.
In subsequent meetings and online interactions, our Community Advisors helped us recruit interviewees for Digital Advocate profiles. Sabrina and Nancy answered ad hoc questions and gave us feedback on works in progress. Having access to our Community Advisors for the duration of the project enabled us to deepen our understanding of what we could provide that would be helpful to them and their peers.
Learning first from the experts
I was initially surprised that we focused on Digital Equity practitioners rather than those who are experiencing digital inequity directly. However, we did this so we could responsibly learn about Digital Equity in the short 11-week time frame we dedicated to the project. We focused on learning from people directly immersed in Digital Equity work because that gave us a better introduction to the field and state of the art. This better prepared us for responsible design addressing Digital Equity ourselves in the future by helping us to understand multiple avenues of intervention and by introducing us to those already immersed in this important work.
Our first introduction to Digital Equity advocates and practitioners came by watching some 13+ hours of recorded public meetings that took place within the last two years.
We reviewed several Digital Equity Forum meetings convened by the Washington State Office of Equity and the Washington State Broadband Office. The Digital Equity Forum meetings were a venue for discussion among telecommunications providers, educators, state, municipal and tribal governments, and many non-governmental organizations representing underserved and unserved local communities, as well as state legislators and agencies to plan the future of Digital Equity in Washington State. We also reviewed several recorded meetings of the Digital Equity Learning Network of Seattle & King County, a self-organized practitioner learning network that has been meeting since 2020 to share better practices and resources among Digital Equity practitioners. From watching these meetings we learned about local, collaborative efforts to address Digital Equity in our state, as well as the struggles of those who are most in need of support and funding.
A word cloud compiled from our notes on the Washington State Department of Commerce Digital Equity Forum meetings which we watched, tooks notes on, and collectively analyzed.
We then worked in pairs to review meeting transcripts, writing up observations for each meeting. The word cloud above is derived from the individual observation notes of twenty three design students after watching the meetings. After we captured our individual insights about each meeting, we conducted an “affinity analysis” as a cohort to identify what we found most salient as a group. This helped us to refine our shared understanding of the field and our project’s goals and direction. From this collective reflection, we created a series of questions to ask the Digital Equity practitioners and advocates that we profiled.
Deepening our Learning through Interviews with Digital Equity Advocates
We reached out to local advocates that were recommended by our Community Advisors. They selected these interviewees to represent the breadth of work taking place in the state, though, since each student only interviewed one advocate, the entirety of this work is not represented in our Advocate Profiles. We asked each interviewee to respond to five prompts that our cohort determined would best address the questions we have about the field and these advocates’ role in addressing Digital Equity in Washington State. We then did selective transcription of the interviews to create a public profile of each advocate. In compiling responses from all the advocates in one place, we hope to give visitors to the website a holistic sense of some of the work being done in our state, as well as what else needs to be addressed, just as conducting the interviews gave us a more thorough understanding of this field.
For many of us, these interviews unearthed questions we weren’t aware we should be asking. The interviewees directly or indirectly informed many of the Stories and Explainers that we chose to make to share what we had learned about Digital Equity in Washington State with the public.
Preparing ourselves for our next design project
For most of our cohort, this was the first time we participated in stakeholder-engaged design. We paid close attention to spiraling toward a goal and course-correcting as necessary. By involving stakeholders from the onset of the project and relying on their expertise in a space we had all just learned about, we found we could more effectively identify a richly crafted and purposeful end goal.
