My Role

Stand Up Austin!: A Civic Comedy Show

User & Product Researcher
Lead Visual Designer
Usability tester
Service Designer
Producer

The City of Austin Innovation Office reached out to our team to better understand the way residents were not civically engaging. Following six months of design research, prototyping, testing, and iterating, our team developed a concept that combines cultural arts and civic action in activities that bring citizens of Austin together to participate civically.

Engineering New Contexts In Which To Participate

In order to address the issues of low civic participation in Austin, our team designed a system in which residents in the Austin area can volunteer, register to vote, talk to neighbors, and become informed on civic topics in an entertaining manner and environment.

Empathizing With East Austin Residents

To begin, we focused on understanding how low income residents articulate their viewpoints towards government. We spoke to over 26 residents and immersed ourselves in city resource activities such as, riding the metro bus and talking with passengers, attending city council meetings, and going to community center dinners and events.

Concept Mapping

We noticed early on that there was an inherent sense of distrust towards the government, both local and federal, and because of this many of our participants expressed they did not reach out or articulate their viewpoints. Through synthesis we found that behavior was dictated by a perception that they could not accomplish anything in civics.

“The government is a kings sport. You need to be wealthy to play.”

-East Austin Resident

Insight: Negative perceptions towards government and the community are shaped by negative experiences.

Opportunity Area: How might we create experiences of civic participation not influenced by negative bias?

Design Principles

Our Team began ideating concepts keeping in mind our key insights and adhering by three goals that we as a group agreed on during our synthesis sessions.

Civically Educate In a Manner
In Which Is Enjoyable

Bring A Diverse Community
Of People Together

Provide Opportunity To Take Direction Action

Allow residents to shape new
perceptions about civic education

Allow the neighbors to form bonds and break down barriers.

Allow residents to take action in a way that we can measure success.

Thinking Outside The Box

During three ideation session our team came up with the concept of having civic meetings around local topics in the form of a comedy show. We took inspiration from existing analogs like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live that spoke on political issues engineering new experiences by using a humorous context.

Validating The Idea

In order to validate our idea, we created a website landing page measuring how many email subscribers we could get within a seven day period. In order for the experiment to be successful we needed to receive 25+ email sign ups by the end of the week.

Within twelve hours 25 people provided an email address, and at the conclusion of the seven day period we had received over 77 subscriptions.

Validation

We wanted to know what residents hope to achieve by participating in an actual event, what format they wanted it to be in, how much they wanted to participate, and what they hoped to gain through participating in this event.

“This is cool. I would take my husband to the comedy show. That sounds interesting.”

-East Austin Resident

In order to test our idea with actual users we set out to pilot test this concept to see what value we might bring in a minimal risk scenario. We partnered with a local venue at no cost, we partnered civic organizations like League of Women Voters, Open Austin, etc, and got over 100+ people to attend our event.