Praxis II: Friend-Safe Gate and Wristband System at Friends Daycare

PIAA - Framing

During this project, PIAA allowed me to recognize a challenge that our team was facing and act accordingly to overcome it. Specifically, I realized that we were getting overwhelmed and confused by the many requirements relating to gate access to different groups of people. Even after listing them out, the specific needs of different stakeholders at different times at each of the 4 gates was too much to consider all at the same time. I perceived that our productivity had decreased, and interpreted that we were all getting overloaded with information and getting confused with our requirements. After assessing what the best course of action would be, I decided to do two things. First, I started creating a set of solution-agnostic working definitions that we could use within our team. Second, I started setting up an "access matrix" which visually summarizes the requirements of which groups can access which gates at which times. The new definitions and access matrix are shown below.

These actions were helpful, as they simplified our communication and clarified our thinking on the most essential requirements. The definitions allowed us to communicate ideas about candidate design concepts, without having to clarify ambiguities between words like "locked" vs. "closed", especially in our solution-agnostic diverging process where not all design concepts involved gates at all. Meanwhile, the access matrix allowed us to simplify the framing of our opportunity by integrating all the essential requirements for which groups are allowed to access passages at which times. Moreover, the access matrix helped us notice that Passage 4 was the most restrictive (had the strictest requirements) at any given time. This allowed us to to focus on designing for Passage 4, which would then satisfy the requirements for all the other passages as well. Hence, my use of the PIAA framework allowed me to perceive a difficulty that our team was having, and act intentionally in order to help overcome this difficulty.