Beyond 12 Action Board

Project Description

A mobile app and web portal as part of a service design to create a formalized and centralized way for students to make proposals to their schools.

Problem

Our project partner, Beyond 12, asked us to design a way to mobilize community college students to improve their schools. Our group—Di Xu, Aaron Guhin, Omzee Pitchford, and I—chose to find a way to improve the college experience for low-income students, who are generally more burdened than other students.

Insights

We conducted interviews with low-income students at Santa Monica College to understand their unique pain points and how those issues stand in the way of improving their schools. From these discussions, we learned that low-income students, on average, have additional obligations that detract from their ability to engage with their schools, particularly with regard to confusing and time consuming processes like making proposals for change.

Solutions

The Beyond 12 Action Board is our concept for a system that makes the process of proposing changes to school administration more accessible to students as a whole while giving particular priority to proposals from low-income students. The concept contains a student-facing mobile app and web portal and an admin-facing web portal. Students would use their portals to compose and submit propositions for school change that would get posted to a student-facing board and would get sent to school administration. It contains features for searching existing proposals, following and joining proposals, tracking the progress of your submissions, discussing ideas with students and administration.