PrattConnect: Enhancing professional community for Pratt graduate students
The project began when our team personally experienced a sense of detachment within the graduate student community at Pratt Institute. As designers, we proactively sought to uncover the underlying reasons behind our alienation and assess its effects on community cohesion.
With 36 graduate programs and 1,392 graduate students from over 50 countries, Pratt Institute represents a diverse and vibrant community of professionals building their skills, why did we feel isolated?
Identifying gaps in community building among graduate groups.
We set out to investigate the challenges faced by students in connecting with peers outside their immediate program and circle. While I conducted a visual study, my teammates focused on tactile research and interviews. For the visual study, I visited both the Manhattan and Brooklyn campuses of Pratt Institute to conduct an environmental mapping documenting the target user’s physical context through an awareness walk. The goal was to study the environment of students in the Pratt Manhattan and Brooklyn campus, focusing on ways communities gather and publish information pertaining to opportunities and interests.
Flyers and Posters
Paper postings target students for calls and opportunities.
Location: Hallways and bulletin boards throughout campus.
Observation: Site-specificity of this content leads to serendipitous finds and limits exposure to people within their own building, leading to mono-disciplinary community opportunities
Work Showcase
Student and faculty work showcased throughout campus.
Location: Library and offices/halls of each school.
Observation: Exemplary work is a potential point of inspiration for interdisciplinary collaboration. Yet site-specificity bias similar to flyers and poster.
QR Codes
Posters include QR codes for easy access to the call’s site.
Location:On physical material throughout campus.
Observation: Blending and dependability between the physical and digital environments.
Gathering my visual insights with the user interviews and the tactile study, we saw:
-Students expressed a strong desire to connect with peers across different programs for collaboration.
-There is an underutilized opportunities for collaboration and professional growth, limited to physical posters in specific areas of campus.
-There is a need for both digital and physical mediums to ensure accessibility to collaboration opportunities both on and off-campus.
The Pratt graduate community lacks effective channels for students to connect, collaborate, and discover professional opportunities beyond their immediate circles. The existing system hindered visibility and limited awareness of potential collaborations and opportunities.
The issue with the case above is 1) it is reliant on a site-specific encounter with the poster 2) social sharing will be limited to the immediate circle of the "poster finder"
Goal
Students want to realize their creative and career potential through experiences and connections
Existing
Students are unable to establish professional connections outside of class
Opportunity
Pratt's graduate community represents a diverse range of perspectives and working methods
Defining the scope of our solution
PrattConnect
We proposed the creation of a dedicated space for professional community-building, aiming to bridge the gap between students across different programs and campuses. The initiative sought to facilitate exposure to diverse perspectives, fostering collaboration and enhancing career development.
Our design solution will be:
-Tailored to suit the graduate student community at Pratt
-Allowing students to collaborate, seek inspiration, and develop professional connections
-Acting as a means to receive important information related to opportunities at Pratt
-Differentiable from social media channels that are lack focus
Ideation took place over the course of 3 workshops attempting to bridge the analysis-synthesis gap. We conducted the Elito method, plotted ten "How Might We"s and did quick sketch solutions, from which we chose three models. Our final solution encompasses our three final solutions.
Features of our prototype
Reflection
The envisioned platform aims to empower Pratt graduate students to connect, collaborate, and thrive both creatively and professionally. By addressing the identified disconnects, the platform enhances the sense of community and provides students with the tools they need to succeed in their academic and professional journeys.
Moving forward, we would love to test this product further and conduct more extensive research to learn exactly what types of projects students are interested in collaborating on and how the app can facilitate a wider range of opportunities. Our system is currently built for competitions, group assignments and project helps; yet it does not allow for recurring project engagements, seeing that we focused on igniting the one-offs. In order to understand the range, we could conduct a research project to understand the specifics of graduate student needs throughout different programs. This can also be studies with user feedback with the product live.
I am personally curious to building a smart tagging system that will utilize ML models to sort, group and tag the projects. I am interested in exploring further the system that links interests and project tags, thinking about how new technologies might allow for more responsive recommendations that require less effort (or maybe funner effort).
Overall, there are many directions this project can go, yet it is an exciting opportunity that can grow its user base and be replicated in different campuses and within different student masses. For me, it was a wonderful experience, especially the visual study. Having a strong suit for visual analysis, I enjoyed greatly finding the patterns in our environment. In addition, it was my first opportunity drafting illustrations for a product story plot, not only was it very fun, it provided the team with a visual storyline that helped share our understanding on the project and explain it to our audience.