This project began as an initiative to support National Church Residences, a national non-profit senior living housing organization, in their efforts to bring their diverse residents together to create more inclusive and welcoming communities for all of their residents.
Interviews and focus group were conducted across several properties. Residents were asked about the challenges they faced and what activities they hosted already that worked to bring their communities together. It was after this stage that I entered the project. I worked with a business development partner to analyze the results of the interviews and create a plan for a new program that National Church could host in their properties.
Challenges
Diverse Cultures
The client had properties across the country with a wide variety of cultures represented.
Language Barriers
Along with diverse cultures comes varying languages. English was not the main language in all properties.
Property Budgets
Some properties did not have budgets to pay for supplies or resources.
Process
After the research phase, my business partner and the client created 5 pillars to organize the different parts of the initiative: Enabling Community, Inviting Conversation, Reserving Judgment, and Putting Aside Differences. It is within these pillars that I categorized a series of activities related to their purpose.
Now came the challenging part: designing activities that would breach barriers and reach across languages and cultures. It was imperative to make sure the activities not only solved the problem of creating community, but also were easy and simple to implement. With limited budgets and resources in several properties, I had to keep in mind that the more complex the activity, the less likely it would be implemented on site.
I included several features in the activities to address the usability concerns: including live links to resources and additional printouts, creating printable flyers and supplemental materials, and creating editable pdfs so users can adjust specific content as needed.
Global Changes
As this project was being developed in the beginning of 2020 a global crisis hit that greatly affected the client. With the changing landscape of life and business came changes to the project. The client still wanted to launch this as creating community became ever more important in an age of physical distancing.
After conversations with several staff members, and gathering data from the on-site teams, I worked with my business partner to create “physical distancing guidelines” for every activity. In addition some activities were re-worked, scrapped, or added. In the end, a fifth section was created specifically for activities in a pandemic. This included resources created by and suggestions from on-site members.
While the goal of the project was still to create community with diverse groups of people, the reality of the world required adjustments to the scope and context of the project.
Technology for the User
While I drafted and designed the activities, we were also discussing how this information would be hosted and presented to the team members. We explored different hosting platforms and I suggested a landing page that would be accessible on their website. The activities could live online as editable and downloadable PDFs, and could be updated as necessary.
At this stage I created a hi-fidelity prototype of the landing page. The design would largely be dictated by the client’s new website design that was being implemented during this project. I utilized screen shots of parts that would not change and mimicked the typography and formatting from another page on the site.