As one of the largest nonprofit shared spaces in the country, the Water Cooler is home to 35 social impact organizations across 5 floors and ~175,000 square feet of space, representing more than 700 employees on campus. It is a vibrant community of best-in-class agencies working together to improve North Texas and beyond.
The Water Cooler at Pegasus Park serves as a community hub for nonprofit and social impact organizations, offering a collaborative workspace to drive impactful change in the Dallas social sector. The challenge was to establish an environment that fosters collaboration among Water Cooler tenants and enhances their overall experience within the innovation park
The Problem.
The design challenge focused on exploring how to facilitate collaboration among the diverse range of nonprofit organizations housed within the Water Cooler at Pegasus Park. The objective was to improve access to services, amenities, and opportunities for interaction to create a more cohesive and collaborative community.
"How Might We establish an Environment of Collaboration for Water Cooler tenants at Pegasus Park?"
Chloe Lee I Kenedy Kundysek I Harrison Tassopoulos I Martha Fernandez
The Process.
Define
Understand
Imagine
Refine
Make
Test
Tell
Define
Define
In order to first define our problem, we needed to answer a few questions first. To guide the general scope of the project, we set out to answer four guiding questions through our context building and research.
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How are tenants and staff accessing and utilizing existing services?
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How are tenants and staff using current services to collaborate?
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What shared services might interest tenants and staff?
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What is Water Cooler management’s role in delivering services?
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What does collaboration mean to this community?
Understand
Understand
This phase is where we continued to define terms within our guiding questions through extensive secondary research and deploy customized design research methods in order to answer our guiding questions, understand the problem we are designing for, and accurately account for the audience we are designing for.
Research Methods
Observation
12 hours
Interviews
25 organizations at various levels of leadership
We wanted to understand how Executive Directors and leaders within these organizations intentionally invested organizational resources (time, people, funding) in collaborative work. We also wanted to understand how each organization defined collaboration.
Because there are more than 700 employees at the Water Cooler, we wanted to get as many user's desires and motivations as we could for a holistic understanding. To do this, we sent a community survey that asked questions related to:
1) the current experience accessing amenities and services
2) what prevents people from collaborating across organizations
3) what services or tools would help you collaborate in the future?
We printed out flyers and hung them around the Water Color as well as placing digital flyers in the hot spots around the office.
Over multiple days, we spent more than 12 hours touring individual offices of United to Learn, The Dallas Foundation, Uplift Education, and Social Venture Partners, and working from the space.
We learned that within the five floors of the Water Cooler, there are three types of office styles for tenants: open co-working space, private office suites, and entire floor offices.
We also learned that each organization is managing the hybrid work environment independently.
We understood that whatever we designed would need to support various organizations and their work styles.
Survey
Distributed to 200 Water Cooler community members.
Refine
Refine
This stage is where we refined our guiding questions by synthesizing all of the qualitative data we had gathered through our research methods. This is what we learned:
Communications-related functions survey respondents said would help you better collaborate with other Water Cooler staff and non-profits:
Bulletin Board
Shared Calendar
Employee Profiles on website
Content Sharing
40%
of survey respondents agreed that they were not able to easily build relationships with other Water Cooler employees.
43%
of survey respondents agreed that they did not have a clear understanding of the other Non-Profits within the WaterCooler
The Water Cooler Community wants to collaborate but doesn't know how or who to connect with.
Research revealed that while Water Cooler community members expressed interest in collaboration, they lacked awareness of who their peers were and what they did. There was a desire for clear structures and tools to facilitate connections and participation. Many expressed difficulty in connecting with others and saw the potential for technology to bridge this gap.
Imagine
This stage houses a specific space and time for brainstorming about what could take shape to help the project that accounts for all previously gathered information and evidence. This is where our team started to think about potential solutions that are rooted in evidence and supported by our context gathering
As we started to brainstorm where to create clear structures for collaboration, how we build it, and how to share it, we took inspiration from the communication structures that the survey respondents said would help them collaborate:
Bulletin Board
Shared Calendar
The Idea: A digital bulletin board community
A digital community platform emerged as a promising solution to fulfill the needs that we synthesized from our data. Not only would this platform increase awareness of who is located in the Water Cooler, facilitate connections, and act as a shared calendar where community members could share resources.
The Solution: A digital bulletin board through LinkedIn Groups
We realized a perfect platform to prototype on would be LinkedIn, specifically the group feature because of three things:
Employee Profiles on website
Content Sharing
But How? an already existing platform
Given the constraints of time and budget, particularly as we were students, we recognized the impracticality of developing our own application or platform from scratch.
Also we sought an existing platform that could seamlessly integrate into our clients' lives, ensuring both efficiency and user-friendliness.
It is a platform many professionals at the Water Cooler were familiar with and/or already had accounts
It has personal profiles which would foster awareness of who is in the Water Cooler as well as connections from senior to entry level employees.
The tenants could post events, informational, or questions to the group feed also increasing connections.
Imagine
Make
Make
Test
Test
&
By testing what we make and not just making it, we are able to learn and iterate on the prototype before we give a final deliverable. This phase can be the most nerve-wracking and yet the most rewarding. Our goal with this phase was not to prove that our design worked, but rather to see what we can learn from what we put into the world.
So we built it! We posted two posts before going live so that when people started to join we could welcome them and set the tone.
We launched the LinkedIn group by promoting across multiple communication channels throughout the Water Cooler. We put up flyers throughout the facility as well as promoted our flyers on digital hot spots.
We also did some A/B testing in order to see which content resonated more with the community
Results.
61
sign ups within the first 24 hours
28
organizations represented
105
QR code interactions
25%
Water Cooler tenant participation
Test #2
After we had successfully launched the LinkedIn group and started to see some participation, we were curious whether this new digital experience could be leveraged to inspire in-person connections and relationship building. So, we added to our prototype by hosting an in-person Water Cooler Community Meet Up.
We promoted the Water Cooler Community Meet Up exclusively through the LinkedIn Group and hosted it on campus at the Compound on a Tuesday morning at 9:00am.
While we had no attendees, we realized there were still learnings to carry forward:
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Day of week and time of day are critical to driving high attendance
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The Water Cooler needs to establish norms around programming expectations to increase participation over time
Results.
0
attendees
We learned that the LinkedIn Group needed time to gain traction and awareness before pursing and hosting an in person social event.
Post-Prototype Survey
We distributed a post-prototype survey to capture more data about the holistic participant experience, including specific actions we could not directly gather from the public LinkedIn group.
30%
of respondents added new LinkedIn connections
Tell
Tell
After executing the Water Cooler Community LinkedIn Group prototype, our design team laid out guiding design principles and actionable design recommendations for the client to consider and implement.
Our Design Recommendations
Invest in a Digital Community
Investing in a digital experience would provide Water Cooler organizations and community members with increased access to needed information to build new relationships together.
Leverage Digital to Complement In-Person
Leveraging digital to complement in-person programs and spaces would add to a holistic community experience and set clear structures for participation.
Providing a consistency of hospitality
Providing a consistency of hospitality over time will deepen trust between management and community members and increase adoption of services.