My culminating project is about how society's negative views on neurodiversity can affect how families think and prevent young people from getting a professional diagnosis.
MY SMART GOAL
Specific : What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
My goal is to help change society's negative views on neurodiversity to become positive and normalized. I want parents to understand the issue and topic and hand, be supportive of their child, understand their child, and move away from what society thinks. Secondly, I want to help neurodivergent children and teens to get a professional diagnosis, and feel comfortable talking about their concerns and thoughts regarding the topic, to their parents. To do this, I've created an online campaign, through an Instagram account, where I posted various amounts of information on neurodiversity. Along with the account, I partnered with my friend, who had a similar idea, and worked together to conduct a bake sale. The fundings earned from the bake sale was split in half and donated to foundations that relates back to our respective topics.
Measurable : How will I know I have succeeded? What are the indicators?
If I have succeeded with my project, that means that it has reached the right people. Parent’s are listening and taking notes while children are getting comfortable and everyone is getting educated. Some indicators to this success would be for the account to get more than 50 followers, for people to be comfortable enough with sharing their concerns and stories, and for there to be some comments on the posts.
Attainable : How can I make this happen? Is it achievable?
Slightly based on the design taking process, these are the three steps that I’ll be following for my Culminating Project. However, there are a lot of sub-steps under these three steps mentioned.
Empathize, Define, and Ideate: Explore 1 chosen topic and try to understand the background behind it. Understand who the product will be for.
Ideate & Prototype: Explore the different possible products that I can make and start planning it. It’s when I try different things and start to write the content and make the posts.
Taking action: Start posting on the account while also posting on stories, create activities to do, etc.
Relevant : How is the goal relevant to your problem and interest?
In the past few years I have learned more about neurodiversity through social media than I ever have done in my whole life. I've started to take an interest in these different disorders and realized how normalized microaggressions and ableism towards these disorders are in our society. I also knew someone who had suspicions that they were neurodivergent and have told about their concerns to their parents once and was greeted with positive responses and yet they were never taken to get diagnosed nor was the topic brought up ever again, as if they were ashamed with the thought of their child being neurodivergent. Even with the constant tellings to "control it" (it being their symptoms) still wont make them take their child to the doctor. It made me want to do something about it because it bewildered me how uneducated a lot of people are and how one's reputation and "dignity" is more important than the wellbeing of their child.
Time based : When exactly do I want to accomplish my goal?
I'd like to complete my project and meet my goals during the Eid holiday as to leave some time to prepare for the CP exhibition after the holiday.
How do you gain empathy for your users?
What was your process when identifying your users?
How challenging has it been to get in touch with your users?
It was honestly quite challenging as only nine people answered my survey and so I wasn't able to get the maximum response
Or to decide which users to contact?
What is one unique insight that you learned from speaking to your users?
Did your survey change your perspective on the challenge?
Share your crazy eight ideas
I listed down 8 different product ideas and debated each product’s upsides and downsides.
1. Instagram Account 4. Podcast 7. Carrd
2. Seminar 5. Website 8. Booklet
3. Bake Sale 6. Brochure
At first I decided to only do the 1st idea, which was an Instagram account, because I feel that now, especially after quarantine and Covid, a lot of people use social media more often than before, so the account can reach a lot of people if done correctly. However, I got feedback from my teachers and the mentor visits that my project needs something more, so I decided to also do a bake sale and donate the funds earned to a chosen organization that can help with the cause.
What is one thing that is currently causing you to stress about your project?
The number one thing that continues to stress me out is the time. My time management for this project was terrible and I had to continuously revisit my plans as to adjust to the time. Back in October/November, I had missed 2 weeks of school because I got Covid and so I missed two vital weeks of time to create the prototype. This then affected the rest of my project. Because I didn't make a design for my posts from the start, I had to set aside time to do it after writing the content. Which is another thing I should've done differently, I should've start writing the content from the Defining stage, when I was doing my preliminary research. That way all I needed from my posts was to re-phrase and summarize my research done in the beginning.
Tell your testing phase and include your survey result
What improvement did you make based on your testing survey?
What are the challenges in creating your prototype?