weareHUH
Service Design
2019-2021 - Options Community Services
WeareHUH was one of the proposed service models I was involved in as the sole designer on the Social Innovation Hub project, a unique 3 year project funded by Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to design new service model. After rounds of research, ideation, codesign and the realities of COVID 19 weareHUH was a web platform, hosting a variety of tools and a professional network to help spread the new way of thinking about community connections.
Project Background
WeareHUH was developed out of a mutli-year research and design process, doing research and codesign with newcomers to Canada. WeareHUH itself is an informal network and resource HUB for openly sharing the tools and resources we developed, and to help scale the intervention we design.
Core Idea
The core idea of weareHUH is Humans Understanding Humans (HUH), services and engagements that focus on breaking down barriers, and opening up communication. While weareHUH is a loose set of tools and resources Culture Cafe is our model for inter-cultural online activities, codesigned to be inclusive and to build the community that we heard time and again was missing.
My Role
At the beginning of the project I worked in collaboration with other designers, but for the second half of the project I worked as the only designer for the team. I was responsible for design facilitation and thinking skills to the work we were doing, and also for creating all of our touchpoints, like our website, learning materials and resources, as well as the project branding.
Culture Cafe
After developing a prototype for in person profession development bringing professionals and newcomers together, our plans, like many were upended by the pandemic. This rethink allowed us to reframe on building an online community, and to breakdown those labels of newcomer and professional that we had initially had. The core focus of culture cafe was to provide conversational English opportunities, while also making new introductions. But the space unlike many services was open to people of all language levels, beginner to fluent; working best with a diverse group of people coming together together, not as volunteers and students, but as a community of reciprocal learners.
Design Artifact: Conversation Cards
While I was working with the team to envision the entire service journey I also worked to design and iterate each touchpoint. Our conversation cards were originally imagined as a physical deck of cards people could use at a cafe. This turned into a custom designed web app for selecting specific cards you and your partner wanted to discuss. The interaction of choosing before hand was a bit tough, so we focused on one card per event, but brought in features for multi language cards, the ability to save the card as an image, and eventually a make your own card tool for other groups to use.
