Social Design Pathways

        My team’s SDP design was about improving public transportation in the city of Golden. As a group, it took us a while to find a topic that we were all happy about tackling together. Once we chose the HMW question we were working with, it was a lot easier to brainstorm ideas together and add on to the ideas of our other group members for more cohesive thoughts and concepts. I will admit that it took us far too much deliberation before we finally decided to vote on our choices and that I would like to jump to voting much sooner in the process if I were to do this project again.

        Our design process mostly consisted of tossing up any ideas we thought of the moment we thought of them. When we heard a suggestion from a teammate, we either agreed with their concept, or countered it with either drawbacks or improvements that would help the solution be more cohesive. We did this over and over until we had filled out the entire S&I matrix and then some with our ideas. Our collective mindset was ‘no idea is a bad idea’ and so we did our best not to outright shoot down the ideas of others and instead we tried to build upon them until they were at a point we were satisfied with.

        Most of our team’s work was done together in meetings (usually once or twice a week) that lasted about an hour or two. As the team leader, I decided when and where we would meet, as well as what our goals were for each meeting. The rest of the group worked well so long as I gave them a very specific task to get done by the end of the meeting. We had time to joke around and take things easy but we still got all of our work done when we needed to. I feel like this is what made us a healthy and high performing team. Although we didn’t see each other much outside of our meetings and class, we were always clarifying with questions and communicating frequently about our duties and goals.

        My one suggestion would be specifying early that we will be working on the sustainable development goals as a team. Initially I thought we were just doing a project on being a team and working with project management, so it took me a while before I figured out that we were actually going to be tackling a sustainable development goal together.

        I learned how to be more assertive in my team leading, and I also learned that while it’s good to cycle ideas its equally important to riff on and improve ideas as they come. Leaving ideas where they are without trying to improve on them is only going to leave you with a bunch of half-cooked concepts where none of them are particularly easy to execute or the best versions of themselves.

        I’m most proud of our S&I matrix because I feel like all of our ideas in all of the squares are well thought-out and manageable for actual implementation in the real world. We discussed and debated all of our ideas thoroughly until we were happy with them. Then we compared our ideas to each other and made sure there wasn’t much overlap but also just enough in common so that every idea could be implemented in tandem with another from the chart. I’ve attached a copy of our matrix below.