CASE STUDY
Project VOTIO
A 6-month project focused on research + design + concept value testing. Our team of 4 (Mamiko Hirose, Julie Mills, John Zoshak and myself) was highly collaborative and complimentary with 2 designers and 2 researchers. My most important contributions were in articulating our research methods, data analysis, ideation, test plans and script writing for our video and presentation.
OBJECTIVE
We chose this problem space in January 2020. The team was interested civic participation and while doing our literature review, found census bureau data on low voter turn-out of 18-24 y/o voters. Being an election year, we wanted to explore this topic and design a solution to increase voter participation.

We wondered: what might the barriers and motivators be for new voters and began with a broad research question:

Research WORK
Our study recruited 56 young adults, ages 18 to 25, to participate in a qualitative study. We used a mix of methods starting with online surveys, participant sketching activities and semi-structured interviews. We chose the methodology of constructivist grounded theory to allow ourselves latitude to follow the data and to account for our role as researchers engaging in this space.

We performed a general literature review to develop areas of inquiry for our online survey. The anonymous survey was distributed in college slack channels and through acquaintances. We also created a second version of this same survey that was available to voters on the day of the WA State primary. This was a plan B idea for a participatory activity we had planned to facilitate on that day, but were unable to accomplish due to COVID-19 precautions. We called this the "Survey Chair" and voters could scan a QR code to access the survey.

Responses to the survey helped us arrive at a baseline for attitudes and provided direction on topics to probe in our interviews.

We began our interviews with a sketching activity that I designed. This was an effective trust-building exercise allowing the participant to guide the conversation and created openings for follow-up questions. Our participants consistently told a story about moving, self-discovery and tackling ‘firsts’ (job, credit card, lease, living alone). Some participants referred to this transition period of becoming an adult, as ‘adulting’. We loved that term.
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In our interviews we expected to find 'voters' and 'non-voters', however, after conducting several interviews we re-framed our perspective based on what we were learning. There was no such thing as a non-voter. All our participants were voters, but some were more able and motivated to action on their right to vote.