Overview

This project on youth homelessness was designed in response to a prompt from Nalukai Academy: Research and present a problem worth solving that you perceive in your community.

I chose to research youth homelessness because it’s a topic I knew about from volunteer experience and could easily empathize with.

I saw this assignment as an opportunity to educate my cohort members about youth experiencing homelessness, its causes, effects, and demonstrate that it’s a problem worth solving.

This was an independent project, but I felt supported by my fellow Nalukai Academy cohort members throughout the entire design thinking process.

Design Ideation

After conducting my research, the design process began. I quickly designed a lo-fi wireframe for my infographic in order to visualize a balance of images and text in my design.

Research Methods

How can we visually and concisely articulate our problem?
I decided to debrief using a presentation and an infographic to explain the scope of the problem.

Where do we gather community data?
We were asked to cold-call at least 5 people in our community and interview them in order to validate the problem’s existence and whether they think it is worth solving. At the end of the day, people should be a part of the conversation if they are the ones expected to participate in the solution.

Become an expert in the problem space.
Here, an important clarification had to be made about the assignment: No solutions were to be presented today. We needed to know the problem inside-out before we could approach solving it.