2019 Summer Deep Dive

What is a "deep dive"?

A deep dive is an effort to exhaustively explore the breadth and depth of a situation or challenge to understand the root elements at play for the purpose of designing the best solution.

First, it identifies problems or needs by engaging the people most relevant and impacted in deep conversations about their experiences. It then makes use of that richly descriptive information by analyzing similarities and differences. As a result, both unique and prominent trends are synthesized and serve as the basis for designing solutions that address the real problems at hand.

How did we use a deep dive for MI Drinking Water?

Seeing this as a multifaceted challenge encompassing social, political, economic, environmental, and technical elements, the Blue Sky team recruited a group of interns through the Center for Socially Engaged Design (C-SED) to conduct a deep dive over the course of 12 weeks following the Innovation Salon.

The summer work was kicked off by the Drinking Water Innovation Salon in May, facilitated by C-SED's strategic director Ann Verhey-Henke and the summer intern team. Then the student team used the information collected from the salon along with the network of participants (and their networks) to dive deeper into the experiences of the many different stakeholders relevant to the drinking water industry in Michigan. Over the course of 12 weeks, the team interviewed 70 individuals from across 11 stakeholder groups. Analysis of that information led to the creation of 10 primary insights into the challenges and needs of the drinking water industry in Michigan.

The central focus

Specific focus: How might we foster proactive, reliable partnerships between researchers and utilities?

Broader industry focus: How might we highlight the gaps in the process that support the safe, equitable and trusted delivery of drinking water in Michigan?

Interview Process

The team conducted 70 interviews of various drinking water stakeholders from across the state. Starting with those who attended the salon and within the immediate network of Prof. Raskin and Mr. Steglitz, initial participants helped expand the interviews into much broader networks.

Analyzing the data

Using creative design process methods, the team took notes from interviews and transferred unique and prominent aspects to to post-it notes. Then the team underwent a continuous process of prioritizing, categorizing and mapping the post-it notes, which eventually led to thematic analysis and synthesis of trends into insights used to create the final outputs and tools.

Final Deliverable Packet

The final deliverable packet presentation includes an overview of the process, outcomes, and tools from the 12-week effort!


Click here to view the packet!

Individual Outputs & Tools for Future MI Drinking Water Collaboration

Click on the images below to see the full version of the output/tool!

Insights and Principles

10 Insights from stakeholder experiences

Take a look at the main insights that resulted from trends analysis of information collected from the innovation salon and interviews!

8 principles for research-practice collaboration

Tools & Maps

Goal: Show the complexity of Michigan’s current drinking water industry via insights around political,economic, social, and technological factors that contribute to the challenge of collaborating in this space.
Potential Uses: Read through to understand nuances around the industry and to see how your role may fitinto the bigger sector. Use this to pull out when and where you can collaborate with people from different sectors (political, economic, social, and technological).
Methodology: Each block of text and its connections represent a collection of our insights from 70stakeholder interviews. The factors were split based on the examples shown on the map’s introductionslide.
Future Enhancements: Keep this map updated as interactions in the industry change.
Goal: Clearly map the communication occurring between key stakeholders in the drinking waterindustry and show areas for potential collaboration and improvement
Potential Uses: Users would use this map to see how different stakeholder groups interact with one another. When looking at a specific stakeholder group’s interactions, they can see what current interactions are like, how to improve those interactions, and areas in which they can join collaborative efforts. Users can utilize the stakeholder profiles section to gain understanding of each groups goals, their skill sets, and understand how they can help one another.
Methodology: Stakeholder groups were made by categorizing our interviewees based on position, work area, company, ect. Data describing the interactions between stakeholders was found from our interviews.
Future Enhancements: Incorporate real-world examples in each connection, make stakeholder buttons more sensitive, add interactions, and add to the stakeholder groups.
Goal: Provide a way for stakeholders to view the key priority issues of diverse stakeholders groups across the drinking water industry.
Potential Uses: Stakeholders can use this tool to identify other groups with similar priorities as themselves or use this to identify important topics to discuss at conferences, research, and put resources toward. This tool can highlight similarities and differences at a general level that people may not have known about beforehand.
Methodology: Priority issues were collected from 61 interviewees from 10 different stakeholder groups. Those numbers and key priorities were combined with the Needs for Innovation groups from an “Innovation Salon” held at University of Michigan on May 22, 2019 between utility professionals and university researchers across Michigan. Any person who we interviewed for key priorities was not counted in the Innovation Salon count.
Future Enhancements: Incorporate ways to highlight key stakeholder groups that share the same issue so one can navigate it and get suggestions on who to reach out to in other stakeholder groups.
Goal: Provide clear recommendations to stakeholders around ways to support and engage in collaborative research initiatives between utility professionals and drinking water researchers.
Potential Uses: Utility professionals and drinking water researchers can use the opportunity map to identify steps they can take to get started in collaborative research. Researchers can use the tool to gain an understanding of the steps utility professionals will take and vice versa. Other stakeholders can see how they may contribute to the efforts by examining leverage points that express collaborative needs.
Methodology: Each step represents one or more of our design principles for collaborative research. Specific examples are pulled from insights and data points within our 70 stakeholder interviews.
Future Enhancements: Incorporate real-world examples of each step - a Google Form has been created to capture submissions.