FUTURE US
Elitnisa Solenay, Isabelle Horlings, Yuhan Luo, Lu Chen, Nattanun Sainont
Future Us is a service design collaborative project, reflecting the future of teaching, aiming to build a new vision of how the work of teaching needs to be redesigned to accommodate technological, social and economical changes within the future.
Insight
From research findings, there are two salient points in the area of education we came across. First, it is expected that the number of teachers, especially secondary school teachers, will constantly decrease as resigning has almost doubled within the past five years.
Second, the funding gap within charities proves to be a major obstacle for staff to achieve everyday tasks. As a result of the limited capacity, this also prevents task progress and development.
Research provides insights into the way we discover underlying points accompanied by opportunities which could guide us to deeply navigate and examine persona and user journey.
This persona & journey presents a clear picture and a better understanding of teacher profile and daily routine, along with the emotion behind those main everyday activities. As the activity flow, this could be used to facilitate navigating and highlighting the interesting pain point where we focus on. Based on the selected pain points, it is obvious that teachers are faced with a lack of student’s attention arisen from the existing tedious traditional curriculum, followed by a gap in the relationship between teacher and student.
With the addition of student persona and journey, this allows us to better understand both sides of stakeholders and navigate through hidden needs behind those everyday activities. The interesting points highlighted convey both pain points and opportunities which are the unfair evaluation and the motivation for learning respectively.
Based on the findings, there are five key focuses to ensure that we could keep on track to find the most feasible solutions. The principle is to involve all main stakeholders in collaborative activities that could bring about the opportunity for them to share individual resources such as skill, knowledge, and idea to create shared value and mutual benefit within the developed and long-lasting relationship that ultimately secure the future of teaching.
In other words, this is also considered to be our service mission or the promises to deliver to our users - teachers, students, and local charities. The service proposition reflects our aim to create a meaningful impact on education through the practical way of teaching, focusing on the new way of learning process gained from the result of resource sharing to improve student’s motivation for study to discover their potential through real-life experience. Due to the physical co-creative workshop provided as a personalized suggestion, it is expected to bring stronger bonds and to eliminate bias between teachers and students since the workshop offered is mainly based on a match between students’ interest, teacher’s strength and local community availability of resources. With the complementary, this could lead to a fair and realistic learning assessment in the end. Moreover, teachers will benefit from utilizing the resources available in the community which could reduce their tasks and workload, then the result of the workshop output will return to the community where the need for workforces required to complete their regular tasks. Therefore, our service could be a platform where a sense of shared values begins.
Service Ecosystem is a visualized term of explanation for how stakeholders are connected and how the value shared between them. It could best describe where our service is positioned.
To clarify how the overall service works, it is worth presenting the service operation diagram. This diagram shows all stakeholders involved, touchpoints and also our service design key element regarded as a new dimension of engaging curriculum.
Future Us provides the main service in terms of a digital platform where our three main stakeholders will be identified, based on personal information given to our survey and form. To provide workshop options, the algorithm behind the system will find all possible matched cases and prioritized them to provide the best suggestion. With the different aims for each workshop, all the workshops are divided into five main specific areas, Humanities, Performing Arts, Culture and Environment, Sports, Design and Enterprise, and each area provides three event topics relevant to the main. It takes around three months for the completion of the workshop, so the event takes place once a month as to enable users to have sufficient time to do some online preparation through all course detail provided in the application beforehand.
Scenario
Conor is a secondary school student. She goes to school as usual, but has never found it engaging at all due to the tedious way of learning. She has been wondering if this traditional teaching style will be changed. One day her dream comes true since all students are introduced to “Future Us” through both mobile and desktop applications. Conor feels excited and keen to try this service out. She begins with filling out the survey which is a part of registration, then three tailored options are provided for her to select. She has no hesitation in choosing the first one as it interests her most. After that she is brought to the workshop detail appearing on her mobile phone.
Apart from a basic feature of mobile and desktop application, generally providing notification that alert Conor to the upcoming event, our service also give her additional options to get notification by asking her to choose between physical letter or email. It is apparent that our service still emphasizes on the integration of physical and digital. Conor chooses the physical letter, she is really happy to keep this letter as a good memory. Once when it comes to the scheduled date, Conor gets back to the application to find all detail about the event and location.
The event takes place at Care home which is one of the local charities. This Care home in general runs charitable activities mainly aiming to support the elderly’s mental health. The event that all participants need to do is to share the idea of cooking and utilizing the available resources that charity already prepared. During the co-creation time, Conor enjoys spending time with her teacher and people in the community, she learns several new things that she couldn’t find in the school lesson. After that she finds out that she loves cooking and find the new recipe which is the unexpected result of co-creating. The food is spared to be given to all participants and also shared with people in the community.
Even though the event is done, it still leaves everyone with a memorable moment. Conor feels happy that she completes this small goal, she realizes that it is rewarding as it does not only make her feels closer and related to her teacher, but also get incentives as rewards. Now Conor has no question about the future of teaching anymore and eagerly looks forward to the next event.
Prototyping Process
User Interface Design
This is the example of a user interface design showing the combination of handcrafted and computer graphic elements. Under this theme, the styling is designated to engage secondary school students’ interest.
