Team

Scout Labs

An interdisciplinary team working to create a better Boston through design thinking.

Our mission

Scout Labs brings together a multidisciplinary team of students with varying skill sets, ways of thinking, and academic backgrounds to solve pressing problems in our community. Simply put, we believe in the power of design for social change! Through our projects, we aim to build connections and co-create solutions with the people of Boston.

Student writing on whiteboard

What we do

This year the team will have two focuses (1) partnering with the YMCA to learn more about their food access program (2) the Boston Mayor’s Office of Housing to explore and research the state of housing affordability and livability in the city of Boston. Labs takes deep dives, guided by design thinking and data visualization, to help define issues facing the Boston community. The team works to document research into opportunities for the city and further questions on the topic.

Student conducting research session with children

Our process

Empathize

So how do we start? We observe, engage, and immerse ourselves in our design challenge by learning from relevant stakeholders through interviews, surveys, and workshops. We also aim to understand the existing body of knowledge in the field by talking with field experts and conducting literature reviews.

Define

In this stage, we analyze and synthesize our research findings to define the core problem we're trying to solve. This problem statement will guide the rest of our design process and kickstart the ideation stage.

Ideate

Here's where we throw things at the wall and see what sticks! The team collaboratively brainstorms ideas for solving our newly defined problem. At this stage of the game, we try to think as freely as possible, and aim to push ourselves outside of the box in a lot of different ways.

Prototype

This is where our ideas take form! We construct rapid prototypes, or scaled-down versions of our solutions, to allow our team to experiment with our most promising ideas from the previous stage.

Test

Time to put our work out there! We iteratively test the prototypes with members of the larger community. Feedback gained during this phase allows us to refine our prototypes and develop a final solution.

Repeat.

Our most recent project

 Student Action Portal homepage next to 3 sticky notes that say Reliable Public Transit, stop climate change, and End gun violence

City Hall Student Action Portal

From interviewing state senators to running workshops with over fifty middle school students across Boston, our Labs team spent a year working with the City of Boston's Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics to design and develop a new website to help students to meaningfully engage with people in City Hall.

Get involved

Labs Director

Scout’s Labs Director champions human-centered design thinking by managing an interdisciplinary team through the ambiguous design thinking process to create social impact in a partnership with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.

Project Lead

Manages a team of strategists. Organizes and runs biweekly team meetings + research sessions. Attends all leadership meetings. Leads all-strategist meetings in cases of Director’s absence. Is responsible for overseeing the end of semester deliverables, making sure that all strategists meet their deadlines, and assisting stategists with any problems. Skills/Background: Architecture, Public policy, General Research.

Strategist + Researcher

The strategist side of this position implies an interest in learning about design research as a methodology for understanding relevant issues within the local community. The researcher part of this position does not require a background in design, but rather in other research and problem-solving skill sets, such as those of engineers, architects, computer scientists, and psychologists.

Strategist + Designer

The strategist side of this position implies an interest in learning about design research as a methodology for understanding relevant issues within the local community. The designer side of this position implies a creative side with a design background in graphics, layouts, type, data visualization, etc.

Strategist + Community Outreach Coordinator

The strategist side of this position implies an interest in learning about design research as a methodology for understanding relevant issues within the local community. The community outreach coordinator part of this position involves managing communications between participants and Labs.

Strategist + Copywriter

The strategist side of this position implies an interest in learning about design research as a methodology for understanding relevant issues within the local community. The copywriter side of this position involves managing submissions from participants as well as writing up copy for the community recipe book deliverable. The copywriter will also work alongside the community outreach coordinator in submissions-to-book pipeline.

Apply to Labs

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