Pamela Napier

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/11715

Promoting people-centered design research and community engagement

Professor Pamela Napier’s research focuses on how to enable people to solve challenges facing them in their everyday lives by facilitating cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary communication and collaboration throughout the design process. Founded on the belief that all people have the potential to identify challenges, create innovative solutions, and bring about meaningful change, Napier’s approach is people-centered. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses utilizing a service-learning pedagogy, where students engage people in various communities, organizations, and institutions to help them do those very things. The frameworks and models she developed to practice and teach people-centered design research and facilitation are not only being used in other classes—but by educators in other universities across the country. Organizations and institutions for which she has provided design research, strategy, and facilitation services have implemented new products and services as a result of that work, and have adopted her approach and methods in their own practices. Professor Napier’s work to solve challenges with people and organizations is another example of how IUPUI faculty are TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Growing NearWest: An Urban Community Gardens Pilot Project
(2015-05-30) Napier, Pamela
This is the story of the collaboration between Junior and Senior Visual Communication Design students, representatives from IUPUI’s Office of Neighborhood Partnerships and residents from four Near Westside neighborhoods in Indianapolis to develop, design and facilitate the creation of The Growing NearWest Urban Community Gardens Pilot Project: four distinct urban gardens in each of the four neighborhoods, creating a unique opportunity to foster community engagement, capitalize on existing assets, and build community capacity to address food access issues. The Near Westside needed help in envisioning, planning, designing and building these gardens, as well as the creation of a solid foundation to ensure their continued success. Within the senior-level "Designing People-centered Services" course at Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI, the students conducted people-centered, participatory design research that included methods ranging from standard web and print-based exploration, to ethnographic research methods such as conducting contextual observation and interviews within the communities, and designing and facilitating engagements with community members using generative tools. This research informed the planning processes, design and development of the gardens. This experience through applied service-learning gave the students the opportunity to transform the way the neighborhood residents viewed engagement, working together, and even issues around food access. The process and methodology enabled citizens to actively participate in the planning and creation of something that would positively impact their way of life. This experience also gave the instructor an opportunity to facilitate the collaboration between diverse stakeholders in both higher education and local communities.
A People-Centered Approach to Improving Interprofessional Communication in Health Care
(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Wada, Terri; Napier, Pamela; Crain, J. Brian; LaMothe, Julie; Hendricks, Sue; Stull, Kellie; Sweeney, Jennifer; Syed-Adeel, Zaidi
As part of the objectives stated under the Interprofessional Collaborative Practices (IPCP) Model funded through a grant with the Health Resources and Services Administration and Indiana University School of Nursing, it was necessary to better understand the challenges around interprofessional communication across a hospital unit. To carry out this objective, research consultants from Collabo Creative, a design research company, partnered with the Renal Metabolic (B5C5) unit at IU Health Methodist. The main purpose for connecting design researchers with B5C5 was to assist the unit in utilizing a people-centered design approach in order to: 1) understand the current context of interprofessional collaboration and communication, 2) frame pertinent communication design challenges; and 3) develop solutions to improve interprofessional collaboration and communication across the B5C5 unit. Resulting from the 8-month research engagement, Collabo Creative and B5C5 identified four core challenges to interprofessional communication that appear to be relevant to other hospital units in addition to B5C5. These challenges include: 1) patient handoff of information; 2) doctor and patient two-way communication; 3) employee tensions as a result of PCA training; and 4) night-shift inclusion in plan of care. This poster will describe the people-centered design approach and methods that were used to engage B5C5, along with key findings and newly developed interprofessional communication tools resulting from the research project.
Design for Social Change: A Pedagogical Approach to Prepare Students for Human-centered Design Practice
(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Napier, Pamela
The discipline of design is changing. Today more than ever, there is a growing need for designers to utilize their skills, methods and processes to address complex social challenges. In order to be prepared for this evolving landscape, designers of today must value and carry out a human-centered approach—putting the needs and concerns of people first—and shape design activities that enable and empower people to express, make, evaluate and collaborate in order to creatively solve problems and develop meaningful solutions. Today, design students are being required to expand their skill sets to include design facilitation, and a deep understanding of practicing human-centered, participatory design. Due to this shift in mindset and approach for social innovation, the design education community must be continuously seeking ways to teach these emerging skill sets and provide learning experiences that prepare students to be successful in today’s professional design context. With this focus, research was conducted to shape a process and approach for allowing students to work in real contexts with real people, and build new skills for designing for social change. This poster will describe a pedagogical approach that utilizes a human-centered process to help students select, develop and deploy participatory design methods in order to identify and frame social challenges. In addition, this approach teaches students to collaborate with stakeholders while generating, prototyping and evaluating solutions to those challenges. For this research, visual communication design students engaged in this process for a social design project in their senior-level studio course, VC5: Design Methods for Innovation. The pedagogical approach, process, project outline, student outcomes, and challenges/implications for future research will be highlighted.

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