Designer & Researcher, MIT
Ziyuan (Zoey) Zhu is a designer and creative technologist. Working at the intersection of design, emerging technology, education, and sustainability, she is passionate about creating physical and digital objects to reflect and communicate the relationship between humans and the built environment.
With a background in architecture, interaction design, and computer science, she is the design technologist in the MIT Climate Machine and Anjunabeats sustainability project, in which she explores the potential of net-zero in live events via behavior science, data engagement, and augmented reality.
Re-Envisioning a Hybrid Participatory Design Workshop: People, Pedagogy, and Process
During the pandemic, we leveraged the resources from academia and industry to explore new, creative ways to conduct hybrid participatory workshops, emphasizing product and service prototyping during the human-centered design process.
In the study, we defined “hybrid” as two ways through which participants communicate: 1) through technologies to have virtual discussions and 2) in person. We experimented with using a hybrid participatory workshop as a new research medium and design methodology to explore how to design an immersive hybrid participatory workshop experience that can inform and inspire participants across the globe to solve systemic social-technological design challenges.
We created a series of assistive toolkits: one interactive workbook and five tutorials on a website to empower workshop participants to not only build early indoor footwear concepts out of paper and a service model for older adults, but also enable them to have more transparent and interactive communication, build trust, and extend connections through their group discussion.
The goal of the research is to explore and identify design opportunities by conducting a hybrid participatory workshop.
