Colors of Nature

tldr:

The main goal of the Colors of Nature Project is to make strides towards increasing the Chicago BIPOC’s (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) connection to nature and their feeling of belonging and comfort in natural outdoor spaces.

My team partnered with the Cook County Forest Preserves to determine how their organization could help in achieving this goal by using their resources and facilities to increase BIPOC utilization of the Chicagoland forest preserves.

This is an ongoing project that my team set into motion. Our research efforts are currently being utilized by a different team, who is taking our learnings into the prototyping phase.

Co-Design Process

Co-Design

Our team used co-design methods to ensure that our design solutions were coming from BIPOC lived experience.
Co-design is a form of human-centered design that goes beyond just researching an intended community. Designers take a back seat and enable members of the community to generate ideas and plans for how to best address the issues that are affecting their community.

Researched the patterns of BIPOC exclusion from natural spaces

CCFP employee interviews and on-site participation in BIPOC volunteer event

Identified important BIPOC stakeholders

Ran a two-part interactive, co-design workshop series for stakeholders to share their experiences and brainstorm opportunity areas together

After synthesizing the work done by the workshop participants, we established four main areas of focus that the CCFP needs to address if they want to improve equity in their services and increase BIPOC inclusion within Chicago:
1. Health
2. Safety
3. Tools for Immersion
4. Transportation

The Cook County Forest Preserve needs to examine its current DEI efforts to see if they are effectively addressing what BIPOC stakeholders are saying that they care about.

How might CCFP address health concerns and access to medical treatment on forest preserve grounds?

How might CCFP enhance the volunteer experience by including tech and basic tools for nature immersion?

How might CCFP increase safety for BIPOC through addressing the systemic patterns of discrimination?

How might CCFP improve the transportation availabilities and capabilities of forest preserve?

My main takeaways

There is no "client" in a co-design project
The role of trained designers in co-design workshops is not to generate ideas, but to empower the participants with design tools
You cannot solve a systemic racism problem in one semester (or two, or three...)

The best ideas for fixing systemic problems come from the people in the community that are most affected by these problems

The Story

My introduction to Co-Design

Colors of Nature was my first exposure to co-design, and the values I learned from this experience will play a role in every future design project I am involved with moving forward.

Throughout this project, it was important for me to keep what Angela Odoms-Young said in mind: the Black and LatinX communities are the hosts, and I am guest at their table. It was imperative for me to understand their experience to the best of my ability, but always recognize that my purpose was to elevate their voices, and never assume that I knew what was best.

Balancing the partnership with Cook County Forest Preserve

The biggest challenge throughout this project was balancing the priorities and missions of our team and the Cook County Forest Preserves. Even when project partners have the best intentions, it can be difficult for them to switch from the perspective that they need to "help people realize the resources that they are providing", and instead understand that their current resources might not be accurately serving the BIPOC community. They need to learn from the community how to fix it.

Also, because our project involved figuring out why BIPOC communities were not utilizing the forest preserves, representatives at the CCFP were operating as though they were the clients in this project instead of a partner. We had to carefully navigate this dynamic by keeping the focus on the experience of the BIPOC community, and communicating their experience in a way that showed the CCFP how it could adjust its services to address the exclusion in natural spaces.

Takeaway #1
A partner organization is not the client in a co-design project

Determining the stakeholders

A crucial part of this project was figuring out who to collaborate with in the BIPOC community to generate opportunity areas for this problem. We identified stakeholders in two different ways:

Brainstorming Workshop with CCFP

My team ran a workshop with representatives from CCFP to brainstorm stakeholders to involve in this project. The reps also unexpectedly invited stakeholders that they had in mind to the workshop as well, so it was great to get to know them as well as hear their suggestions of additional people to talk to. After the workshop, we reached out to the contacts and invited them to our workshops.

Attended a LatinX CCFP volunteer event at a local forest preserve

A team member and I attended a volunteer event that a CCFP representative hosted that was specifically an opportunity for LatinX families to come out and help conserve the land by cutting down invasive species. There were representatives of a LatinX 4H group there, as well people who lived nearby. It was a really cool to experience my first ever forest preserve volunteer event alongside a bunch of other first-timers, as well as make connections with volunteers in a meaningful way. I clicked right away with the leader of the 4H group, and she offered to participate in the workshops in exchange for me connecting her with LatinX and women STEM clubs on campus.

Running the co-design workshop series

Planning the co-design workshop series was unlike anything I have done before as a designer. The purpose of the workshops was to create a safe space for the stakeholders to come together, make connections between their experiences, and work together to generate opportunity areas for us to explore in making natural spaces more welcoming for BIPOC. I got to embrace a new role that I had not previously taken on before as a designer, but that I had taken on in my previous experience: a teacher. The role of trained designers in co-design workshops is not to generate ideas, but to empower the thinking of the participants with design tools.

The workshops we held were virtual and had 3-4 participants at each one. Here is how it went:

Takeaway #2
The role of trained designers in co-design workshops is not to generate ideas, but to empower participants with design tools

We broke the workshops into 2 one-hour sessions. The first one was focused on determining the current state of how BIPOC feel about engaging with natural spaces in Chicago, and the second one was focused on future thinking and imagining potential solutions for the problem.

To make sure our sessions were safe and welcoming places, the participants developed a social contract for all of us to follow.

My team wanted to ease the participants into brainstorming with each other, so we started them off with an activity where they thought of things to fill "goodie bags" with that would convince two types of people to visit their local forest preserve: a La Salle high school student and a single mom from the south or west side of Chicago with her kids. The items had no size or budget limit, and they could be physical or intangible.

With our guidance, the participants clustered the items into groups of related items and labelled the groups.

From there, our team identified the three main themes from the clusters, and asked the participants to share about their experiences with the three themes in natural spaces. The participants then matched the goodie bag objects to their experiences, and we worked to identify the root cause of needing those objects by introducing the 5 Whys framework. This activity was meant to trigger conversation about their community's needs surrounding engaging with outdoor spaces, and whether or not they are being met.

After identifying current needs, we transitioned to future thinking to see what they would like forest preserves to address/provide a few years down the road concerning safety, access to transportation, and access to nature activities and education.

My team introduced a couple frameworks (such as PESTLE) to help the participants organize their thoughts as well as analyze the opportunity space to the fullest extent.

This final activity involved presenting the participants with a blank map of the Kickapoo Woods park, and asking them to add what they would like to see included in the park to address safety, transportation, and education. The participants had a great time coming up with their perfect map and shared some powerful insights!

Sharing the collaborative ideas

After the workshops, my team was able to showcase the stakeholder's work to CCFP and show them some key issues to address to increase BIPOC's faith that the forest preserves will serve their needs.

Conclusion

Takeaway #4
You cannot solve a systemic racism problem in one semester (or two, or three...)

Our stakeholders were amazing and opened a window for us into their lives, and my team really wanted to make progress on turning the results from the workshops tangible. However, we had to accept that this project was still in the very early stages of being able to make a large impact, and it would require many more workshops and community involvement in the future. My team was able to hand the project off to the next team to pick up where we left off, and bring the project into the prototyping phase.

I am inspired by the stakeholders that participated in the workshops, and proud of my team for stepping outside of our comfort zones to use our new skills to help attack this systemic problem.

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