Intro
For COMM 124A, we were tasked with researching an issue at UCSD, and proposing a speculative design project. As students enrolled full-time in this public institution, we believe that the process of course enrollment should be made as easy as possible. However, it is often complicated by bugs and glitches of the WebReg interface and political issues like administrative issues, low class availability due to a lack of professors to teach classes, and scattered information. Despite paying 15K-65K a year, many students cannot enroll in their desired classes in a timely manner, resulting in potential delays in graduation. Our goal is to propose an optimistic or even Utopian solution to this issue, hopefully raising awareness that this problem is solvable and that UCSD should take action.
Research
The first stage of the project was for us to conduct thorough research on the issue of class enrollment at UCSD. We would first brainstorm the labor, people, movement, place and situatedness, political/organizational, economic, technological, and mythological aspects of the enrollment issue. Each criterion dove into specific questions regarding how that subject affects our issue. Once brainstorming had been completed, we mapped out our research on a knowledge map and an ignorance map to visualize our existing knowledge. Then we would research each criterion again, focusing on specific questions we were ignorant about. Afterward, we created one more knowledge map post-research to visualize what we learned.
Prototypes
We created three prototypes including a game board and an airline company that served to highlight some of the difficulties of current enrollment policies. We ultimately settled on created a fake enrollment system that would "solve" some of the issues of the current process.
The idea would be that students identify the classes they want to take two quarters in advance, such that UCSD has a better grasp of class demands. That way, the system can coordinate faculty hiring to ensure that class demands are met. As a result, students will have a higher chance of enrolling in the classes that they want because there will be sufficient faculty available to teach those classes. To avoid altercations with the university, we would represent “Enroll Ease”, a fake company consulted to manage university class registration systems state-wide.
Touchpoints
To initiate our first touchpoint, we posted flyers around campus to promote our campaign and second touchpoint. We also made a Reddit post featuring the flyer to generate publicity. However, that idea quickly backfired as people grew with suspicion and quickly researched the internet to conclude that Enroll Ease was fake. Therefore, we took the post down to deter any further suspicion of our campaign.
For our second touchpoint, we first printed a large poster to advertise both Enroll Ease as a company and give people a visual, bullet pointed list of our main points. Our main points summarized our new changes and were: (1) four year academic planner integration to allow students to submit their class preferences early; (2) instructor expansion based on student feedback; (3) no last minute course cancellations; (4) an overall better website experience to reduce the frustration of lags, which often prevents students from enrolling in competitive classes on time. After printing the poster, we pasted it to a large whiteboard. Across three hours, we allowed students to come up to our whiteboard, after which we gave a quick pitch about our new enrollment system and then allowed them to share their frustrations with enrollment. We were hoping that by opening the pitch by stating that this was a fake company, students would be more likely to share their true opinions about what they wish the new Webreg would look like.
To initiate our third touchpoint, we gained permission from each person to post their testimonials. Before we took the pictures, we asked them to hold up the sticky note in front of their faces so that their identities were still concealed. By posting the testimonials, our hope was that people who missed our tabling would still have the chance to share their thoughts if they wanted to. We were also hoping that people who participated would possibly share with others.
Interventions
Here are some photos of our interventions:
flyers posted
reddit comments
live touchpoint
Reflection
Once the project concluded we discussed some potential improvements to our design:
the reddit post: we somewhat knew that people would be suspicious as we could not brand ourselves as representatives of UCSD for legal and budget reasons, but we didn't anticipate the strength of the reaction.
preparation for instagram post: we should have prepared our instagram account and items before our third touchpoint so we could tag peoeple to increase engagement
overall reach: our third touchpoint didn't get much traction, partly because of the lack of preparation, but in general we didn't have the budget or the time to focus on outreach, so if we were to do this again, that would be a primary focus
But overall we were happy with our results, in particular with the enthusiastic engagement of students with our live touchpoint.