The Social Impact Lab Alberta

The Athabasca Design Lab

The topic for The Athabasca Design Lab is

“Athabascans often learn about critical information from others in the community. Those who are less connected miss out on important opportunities, worsening isolation. How might we address the communication gaps of access, awareness, connection, and power in Athabasca to provide Athabascans the opportunity to choose how they’d like to engage in community?"

In The Athabasca Design Lab, we will use a human-centered design process to address this opportunity, from building empathy to producing new ideas that could benefit the community all the way to prototyping and then testing those ideas in Athabasca.

The Athabasca Design Lab sessions are facilitated through 4-6 hour in-person workshops on the third Thursday of the month from 9am-1pm or 9am-3pm at Athabasca University's ARC building. Sessions include coffee, snacks, and a catered lunch.  

So far, each of the 30+ Athabasca designers have facilitated 1-5 empathy interviews in the community to learn more about social issues that affect our neighbours. We focused on interviewing a broad section of Athabascans from both the town and the county with a variety of experiences and backgrounds, which has provided us with a slough of feedback and perspectives to inform our work.

At our second session, participants recorded the data from our conversations onto post-it notes and set about organizing them to find connections and patterns. We grouped the data first by the topic (housing, transit, mental health, and other) and then broke those topics into sub-themes. From here, The Athabasca Design Lab participants selected a topic of focus that underlies many social issues in Athabasca: Communication. Athabascans noted that some social supports are inaccessible to them because of communication gaps, that it can be difficult to find housing without relationships with landlords or connections in the community, and that there is no central place to find information in the county. We also heard that people often don’t hear about events in their community before they occur, leading to a sense of disconnection.

To date, The SIL AB team has facilitated skill development that will benefit participants in future innovation, including the processes of: interviewing; data synthesis; insight creation, assessment, and selection; creating “How Might We…?” questions and Point of View statements; and ideating to form new and innovative solutions. We will select the best ideas, turn them into prototypes, and test these ideas with the community to determine the best solution or group of solutions for Athabasca. This critical skill building will support participants in repeating this team-oriented process as needed to solve for future concerns in their community.

Interested in Learning More or Participating?

Our next session is on May 2 at Athabasca University from 9am-3pm.

We will be testing prototypes with the community on May 16 from 9:30-11am and hosting our wrap up celebration on June 6. Anyone from the County of Athabasca is invited to attend to provide feedback about our ideas, celebrate the success of The Design Lab, and learn more about the next steps.

To RSVP, please contact Kelsey Brown, Project Designer
Phone: 403-441-2275
Email: Kelsey.Brown@thesocialimpactlab.com