Co-Designing Pin

The project started from a question: how can digital platform design enhance dignity and comfort in everyday life, in the small moments that public and digital environments routinely overlook? On a university campus those moments are concrete: a broken lift, an unaffordable lunch, a socket that doesn’t work, support services no one experiences as connected. The problem statement the research settled on: students experience everyday campus needs that are small and shared, and hard to resolve alone. Support exists; students just don’t experience it as visible, accessible or connected.

Research opened with a pop-up engagement campaign on campus, run as two public-facing activities. On the Invisible Needs Map, students pinned needs to the places they happen. Future Campus Imagination cards used gold-star voting so passers-by could weigh in inside a minute. I designed both activities to cast a wide net on what students notice, and where.

The pop-up mapped categories and locations. What it could not show was how a need is noticed, tried, avoided and absorbed. That question needed a different method, and a different assessment.

The first of two generative workshops. It was separate from the pop-up in method, materials and purpose. Campus Support Relay ran for 60 minutes with four students, designed activity by activity to follow the path the pop-up couldn’t reach. Every material choice was deliberate: activities were pilot-tested first, the session ran under a consent-and-care protocol with opt-outs and no-face photography, and all materials were printed at 14pt+ in plain English.

The relay sheets surfaced what the campus never hears. Students bring power banks and share sockets, pay $40 for an adapter the campus should have made unnecessary, leave class to find a bin, restructure timetables to avoid a building. Transcripts, sheets and wall notes went through thematic analysis, which produced four insights that everything downstream follows from.

The second workshop, a week later, turned the relay evidence into a design. It was built to be assumption-free. Insight cards were framed as evidence from the previous workshop, with explicit space to add, edit or challenge. Journey boards shipped blank with renameable stages, and no feature list was placed on the table. Seven activities carried the participants from handoff to a finished decision.

The board below is where the workshop left the concept.

Pin is a campus map where a student drops a pin on something broken or missing, +1s pins they share, reads short peer tips, and sees what the university actually did about it. Five screens carry the concept, and each one is a direct translation of a participant’s paper sketch and final star. The interface follows USyd’s design language, its ochre red, flat surfaces and plain typography, so Pin reads as campus infrastructure rather than a third-party app.

Usability-testing a paper prototype would have told me little, so the final assessment stress-tested the concept ethically instead. I built a composite persona I labelled P03: an undergraduate who has spent a week manually pushing a broken automatic door at Wilkinson north. Then I walked them through the journey Pin’s five features produce, using a standard journey-mapping format with one added row it doesn’t usually have: ethical pressure. Five points surfaced where the design starts to push back against the people it is meant to help.

Two speculation prompts from the Tarot Cards of Tech sharpened the critique. The Forgotten pushed on the schema: Pin’s tidy categories decide what counts as a reportable problem before a student has even opened the app, screening out anyone who doesn’t already speak the institution’s vocabulary. The Backstabber pushed on Status: the same public timeline that earns trust can also spend it. Aggregated across campus, it pressures the under-resourced teams doing the triage rather than the decision-makers holding the budget. And at a societal level, treating “won’t fix” as a clean closure teaches future public servants to log refusal as resolution, which is the failure mode the Robodebt royal commission documented.

The redesign answers the three pressures that were actionable at screen level (E2, E3 and E4), and each change is traceable to the tension that caused it. E1 and E5 are structural rather than interface problems, so the reflection deals with them instead. All three screens are rebuilt inside the same USyd design language as the originals. The university’s ochre red is reserved for the primary action and the live status, and everything else sits on flat white surfaces with plain black type. Components like chips, radio cards and dated timelines are reused rather than redrawn. The redesigns had to read as the same product a student already trusts, not a designer’s fork of it.

The biggest thing this project taught me was to design against my own conclusions. My instinct was to prove Pin worked; the ethical assessment forced me to map who it would fail instead, and that produced better decisions than any usability test would have. It also exposed a limit I’d built in without noticing. I am a white, male, able-bodied domestic student, and my four workshop participants were close to me in most of those ways. The people this problem most concerns (women weighing up safety, disabled students, international students with limited English, commuters and casual workers) were not in the room. The findings carry that limit.

I’m not claiming more than four people like me can show. The redesigns are deliberately small, because that’s as far as the evidence goes. The real next step isn’t more design from me. It’s putting Pin in front of the students it’s meant to help and letting them tell me where it falls down.