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The Neighborhood Box: A bite-sized approach to local exploration

Our Human-Centered Design students partnered with LAist to design for discovery. 

The Challenge: Help public radio station LAist better meet the needs of their listeners who are struggling to connect, navigate, discover, and enact change in their home city of Los Angeles. 

The Design Solution: The Neighborhood Box, a monthly subscription “guide box” full of tastes and treasures designed to inspire residents to leave their local haunts behind for a day and discover a new and vibrant neighborhood in the city they love. 

The Impact: The LAist team was moved and excited by the idea of The Neighborhood Box, and saw its potential to help LA residents discover and connect with the city. They are excited to run with and potentially launch this idea! 

 

 

The Challenge: 

Public radio station LAist takes their role as a public resource very seriously. They know their job extends far beyond entertainment, that it reaches into the needs and daily lives of people all across Los Angeles County. LAist didn’t just want people to tune in, they wanted, and needed, to know why they were tuning in. Working with design consultant Tran Ha, LAist did extensive user research and interviews, and learned that Angelenos tune in to 89.3FM for four key reasons – to connect, to navigate, to discover, and to enact change in the sprawling and vibrant city they call home. They found that the need to connect was driven by isolation, the need to discover was driven by curiosity, the need to navigate was driven by confusion, and the need to enact change was driven by dissatisfaction or concern. Knowing this was critical, but the station needed help moving from knowledge to action. This is why LAist turned to our Human-Centered Design students in the fall of 2022. 

They asked our students, how might they meet their listeners more fully in those moments of isolation, confusion, or overwhelm? They needed fresh ideas, energy, and perspective. Ten teams of five students each got to work, each focusing on a different mode of engagement – Connect, Discover, Navigate, and Change. The student teams conducted dozens of interviews, spent hours observing their local communities, immersing themselves deeply in the problem space, and then got busy dreaming and brainstorming up potential solutions to the challenges they saw bubbling to the surface. One student team – Jonathan, Emily, Thalia and Isabella – focused on Angelenos’ need to discover.

 

The Research + The Insight:

In the team’s interviews, observations and research, a common story began to emerge: a story of someone who is curious to explore more of LA, but is scared to venture outside of their comfort zone and explore a new neighborhood. They deeply want to feel more connected to their city, and feel a sense of place, but have been told by family members and peers that the city is “dangerous.” As the team noted, “Ultimately, our insights reveal that people who wish to discover LA need to be reassured of their safety in order to probe them to explore LA, and as a part of this, need to deconstruct preconceived notions about neighborhoods that may not appear ‘stereotypically’ LA in order to feel deeper appreciation for the city. How might we (HMW) questions we asked when ideating were: How might we make an unfamiliar neighborhood feel familiar and safe without having visited it before?”

For people without cars, the city feels even more distant and daunting, as the team notes, “enormously large to the point that it felt sparse.” 

 

The Design Solution:

How might we invert that sparsity and uneasiness to create an experience of abundance and ease of exploration? Seeking that concentrated discovery, the team came up with the idea of the Neighborhood Box. The Neighborhood Box is a monthly subscription “guide box” that is sent to LAist listeners’ doors, full of goodies from a neighborhood they’ve never explored. The boxes include a range of items including snacks from local businesses, coupons to use at a restaurant, tickets to local music events, or a local’s guide to their go-to weekend spots. The hope is that this box not only sparks joy and introduces LAist listeners to some fantastic local businesses, but also makes the process of going to that new neighborhood in person more appealing and familiar. If a listener had zero idea where to start, now they have at least five. 

To test their idea out, Thalia, Jonathan, Emily and Isabella went to the neighboring city of Pomona, California, to gather materials for their first box. They went to local coffee shops, art shops and concert venues recommended by a Pomona local. The highlight of their trip was speaking to business owners, baristas, and other locals and learning more about the history behind these beloved local businesses and community spaces. Returning to the core story of the user who felt scared to venture outside of their local sphere, the team decided to pair each item in the box with a note or story from the people that love and run them, packaging a small piece of that warmth and welcoming energy into the box. 

The team fine tuned the box and tested new ideas until they arrived at a parcel that truly felt like a interactive invitation to a new neighborhood. The students pitched their idea to the LAist team, who immediately got it and loved it. Holding the box, looking through the goodies and stories from Pomona, they saw the box’s potential to make discovering a new place easier, full of surprise and delight, as well as more personal and grounded in community and stories. 

 

Above: Kristen Muller, Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, interacting with the team’s Neighborhood Box prototype