Team Gymbucha: Benjamin Frailey, Rheaa Kamath, Ria Sali, Leah Nuestedter
Time Frame: 2 months, September – October 2019
Project Brief: Our goal was to create a digital civics projects for those within our community here at Purdue that culminated in a website they could use. We were also required to host a Co Design, which would ideally be used to gather input on our idea and see how people felt it impacted the community. From there we were to create a website that involved using the takeaways from the Co Design and lead to positive social change on Purdue’s campus..
Documentation:
Scope
Our scope bounced around a lot. Initially, we were just trying to make the Purdue CoRec a more comfortable place to work out by familiarizing people with the layout. We planned our Co Design around this scope, which I will go into more detail later. After our project one presentation though, we realized this scope was way too broad. We thought a lot about how it should change, and eventually settled on making the weightlifting space in the basement of Purdue’s recreational center more comfortable for women to exercise in, as it was a a very male dominated space that we learned made many women feel uncomfortable. We gathered these insights from our member’s experiences as well as the co design. Our scoped furthered from this to have it be something more feminist and rebellious, a call to action. It was late into the project cycle when we made this final change, but I think we managed well enough.
Co Design
Our Co Design was performed when we had a broader focus of making the CoRec more comfortable for all types of user, and mainly by providing them a greater knowledge of the layout. We had them do activities including drawing a workout character, describing CoRec experiences, and trying to figure out the location of certain CoRec facilities. We found out a few things from the co design. One was that many had difficulties figuring out what was on each floor, and there was even confusion on what floor was which. There was also the revelation of how going down to the weights in the basement made a few women uncomfortable, which shaped the rest of our project. It was debatable how useful this codesign was for us, because we only used one takeaway from it and then based the progress of our idea on that. We changed our scope to focus solely on women who felt uncomfortable exercising in this weightlifting area, which knowledge of the CoRec’s layout and other things we were looking for had no impact on. So, we did not gain many very insights that were useful in our new scope, however this CoDesign did motivate us to be more courageous and focus in the scope on women.
Final Idea and Website
Our final idea for our website was to create a flash mob organizer, called FitMob, where women were encouraged to take back the CoRec basement, and organize a 20 minute workout with many women in the weight lifting area of the CoRec basement. This was an evolution from the idea we had before this, where we had female mentors accompany women to the basement to do weight training to make them feel more comfortable. The final idea had a more revolutionary and feminist energy to it to try to make positive social change within the Purdue community, which made it more in line with the digital civics scope.
The website we coded to organize this flashmob which we called a fit mob. It included a video of the work out, rebellious language, and a sign up form. This site was simple for me to code, but was a good experience on formatting a signup sheet.
Reflection
This was a rocky project, and a few things kept me from participating it in more fully. I had been just diagnosed with something that really stifled my ability to participate in class, and was not yet able to overcome it in any significant way. This left me out of a lot of ideation and overall project organization, so I focused my efforts in other parts of the project, mainly the website. Our team was also afraid to get too political in the beginning, and wanted to keep our user group broad, as obviously not all women felt intimidated by the CoRec basement. However, this just hurt us as we had to pivot very late into the project timeline. This was a shame because I was very excited to work within the digital civics space, so I hope to inject some of it into my future projects I can do better on after I have learned these lessons.
Benjamin's portfolio 