Background
In the spring of 2019, for our first group project in E180: Human-centered Design, we were tasked with redesigning the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations. The rule at the center was that no English could be spoken once you walked through the doors. The center’s director would be pitching a renovation of the building to their board, and would be considering using our proposed solutions to inform her pitch.
Goals of Research
• Conduct a wide range of interviews and identify an extreme user
• Understand the highlights and pain points in the Oldenborg experience for this extreme user
• Create a few user persona profiles and choose one to solve for
• Propose a solution that would improve the user’s experience of Oldenborg
Role
Experience Designer and User Researcher
Duration
4 weeks (class project)
Type
Space Redesign
USER PERSONA PROFILE
After building three user personas from our interviews, we chose one to solve for:
• An engineer and native Spanish speaker from Peru who is completing a residency at The Claremont Colleges to study environmental analysis and learn English.
• Part of his residence here includes facilitating Spanish conversations at Oldenborg every day, and he must sit there and help the native English speakers learn Spanish, but is not allowed to practice his English, despite one of his goals of moving to California, to learn English.
• He’s an extreme user for us, because he is someone who was hoping to use language immersion at Oldenborg to practice English, which was not considered when the center was founded.
KEY INSIGHTS
• Oldenborg currently seems to be focused on a specific user - a native English speaker learning a language other than English.
• There may be other people who work at Oldenborg who would like to practice their English, but the assumption is that Oldenborg mainly serves students, not faculty or staff whose native language is not English.
• There is currently no space at Oldenborg for people learning English, which subscribes to the Western idea that English is the lingua franca of the whole world.
PROJECT SOLUTION
• We prototyped a sports lounge that would be housed in the Oldenborg center, named the Entertainment Immersion. Our first iteration was in class, with another group. We used the rolling TV prop in the Hive to simulate a television, and wrote out labels for the dial for different languages. When you changed the channel, you could watch news in Spanish, a soccer game in French, movies in Portuguese, and more. When we tested this out on the other group, they gave us valuable feedback; they said that they were worried that it might get too confusing, and that we might consider different rooms for the Entertainment Immersion center, each with its own language.
• We tested our prototype with the extreme user that we centered the video on. He enjoyed our video. We showed him two versions of the video and got feedback each time. After the first version, we decided to add an extra part, where the camera zooms in on our prototype of the Entertainment Immersion room. This really helps the audience feel as if they are entering the room. He was also present for much of the design process, giving feedback on our mood board, mind map and ideation. His presence guided our work and we felt like his feedback throughout the process helped shape our idea into a specific and focused design.