What: A potential solution for Seattle’s transportation woes during the period of maximum constraint targeted towards working parents.
Why: A good segment of Seattle’s population are working parents, many of whom have to drive their kids to school before driving to work.
Major learning point: Design thinking can take you places.
Highlight: Imagine Mobility Ideathon winner, currently funded for discovery research. Also, the press loves it.
Product of an Ideathon, Back to School is the brainchild of my team from the Imagine Mobility Ideathon (comprised of January Shen, Chris Woodruff, Simon Suh in addition to myself).
Brief Description
The idea is about transforming public schools with higher working parent ratio into mobility hubs and is derived from the fact that about 25% of the city’s driving population comprises of working parents who have to drive to school to drop their kids off and then drive to work. If mobility hubs could be created around schools, where buses could be made available to popular work areas or parents could organize vanpool/carpool/rideshare to common work areas from the school, it could encourage them to stop the use of cars during the period of maximum constraint.
“Back to School” won the first place in the Imagine Mobility Ideathon. The judging panel comprised of Gov. Christine Gregoire, CEO of Challenge Seattle, Vikram Jandhyala, VP for Innovation Strategy, UW; Exec. Director, UW CoMotion; co-Exec. Director, GIX, Babak Parviz, VP, Amazon, Jonathan Hopkins, Exec. Director, Commute Seattle, Paula Hammond, SVP, WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff, Former WA Sec. of Transportation.
Confusing beginnings
The Ideathon began with us being assigned random teams and my team had 3 others with little to no design experience. This was going to be exciting. Beginning with presentations from stakeholders of various city organizations (Challenge Seattle, King County Metro, Sound Transit, etc.), we were introduced to the concept of “Period of Maximum Constraint”, to the uninitiated, it means the period of next 3 years when Seattle’s roads would have to suffer the maximum load of traffic it has ever faced because of various infrastructure projects undergoing construction across the city. Before the city can get better, it will have to get pretty worse. Our Ideathon was about designing a solution to solve Seattle’s transportation problems during the period of maximum constraint.
On Friday evening, we were assigned a location to go to and interview people. We were assigned the Northgate area. We came up with about 25 questions to be asked in our interviews. Our questions ranged from starter questions, broad questions, storytelling questions, and deep dive once. Having mentally prepared ourselves for the first full day of the hackathon, we called it a night for Friday.
User Research
We visited Northgate and started interviewing random people on the street. We had decided to interview as many people in 2.5 hours as possible. We also wanted to keep the demographic as wide as possible and were purposefully talking to people who were of different ages and occupations. We split into teams of 2 and kept alternating the roles of interviewer and scribe to keep up the pace.
By the end of our 2.5 hours, we had spoken to 19 people, and from various places in the area ranging from the transit center, the mall, the library, UW Medicine center, Target & Petco stores, etc.
Qualitative Analysis
Once we were back at base, we created an affinity map to analyze all our interviews and find themes.
Once we identified the common issues between all our interviewees, we could clearly see a user persona being built.
User Persona
Our user was an aggregation of most of the people we spoke to at Northgate. Our interviews had enough depth to have highlighted pain points such as having to drive to school to drop kid, double commute times on transit, multiple transfers, etc. as reasons for not taking the transit. We had to come up with a solution to address these issues.
Ideation
We came up with almost 50 ideas for solutions in 30 minutes, some of which were completely outlandish, such as teleportation. But others were pretty relevant to our user Judy’s problems. We then arranged the ideas on an evaluation scale which looked quite like this:
We then employed techniques such as winnowing, six hats, and dot voting to narrow down on our idea.
Iteration
With the help of our mentor Eric Speckman, we were able to narrow down to one idea. The idea that we decided to go with was having a Vanpool/Schoolpool app that would route parents to schools with their children where they could catch another Vanpool to work. However, during our quick hour of iteration, we realized that the idea of turning the school into a mobility hub had far more potential than the idea of a Vanpool app. We decided to shift our focus onto creating a mobility hub around schools.
We discussed possible ways to promote this solution, impact on community, addressed security concerns, and then called it a day.
Pitch
On Sunday morning, we started creating the presentation deck for our final pitch. The idea was to show how it was going to impact the life of our user persona Judy. How instead of taking 2 hours on transit and having to change 3 buses, Judy could now do only one hop at the school and take a direct transit option to her work. She was able to see her kid go to school safely and be on time at work despite of all the traffic.
Our final presentation consisted of an overall description of our user base, identifying their problems and addressing them in the most succinct way possible in under 5 minutes.
Our idea was declared the winner almost unanimously by the judges and we were heavily encouraged to go ahead and implement this project. There was good amount of press coverage for our idea and you can find the articles from Seattle Times and Crosscut about the event and especially our idea.
Current Status
We have been funded by the National Science Foundation through the iCorps program with an initial problem discovery fund and we are currently working on it. During the next 3 months, we will talk to many stakeholders across the city and see if our idea is feasible for implementation or not.
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