Problem Statement: How might we foster less antagonistic interactions between the pro-life and pro-choice movements?
Scope: In the midst of the 2024 election, my team—consisting of Nayan Sarma, Yilin Wang and myself—was tasked with designing a service that addresses at least two of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We chose “quality education” and “gender equality.” Our goal was to create a project that primarily utilized the resources we already had, such as access to the diverse population of New York City to research a target topic, then create low fidelity prototypes.
Methodologies: Upon brainstorming (primarily consisting of mind mapping), we consistently found our interest returning to topics surrounding sex education, which ultimately resulted in the topic of political tension surrounding abortion.
Going into the actual research, one of our primary objectives was to maintain an equilibrium in our research demographics due to the fact that New York’s population is heavily left-leaning. We kicked off our research by interviewing 4 people per team member for a total of 12 interviews, evenly split between pro-life and pro-choice interviewees. Interview questions focused on the interviewee’s history with abortion (including their sex education and the environment of their upbringing), how they perceive the opposing side, and why they do or do not want to interact with those with opposing views.
Key Insights: Upon synthesizing the collected data by grouping similar keywords, phrases, and ideas together, we saw that the overwhelming shared consensus was that while people were often open to talking about abortion—especially with their close friends or family—they (1) did not want to start a debate and (2) did not feel as though they were in the right environment to hold a proper conversation.
Frameworks: In response to this key insight and brainstorming solution ideas with a technique similar to Crazy 8’s, we ended up narrowing down solution ideas to three: a standardized sex education/abortion curriculum for schools, a magazine/zine dedicated to sharing art from both sides of the debate over abortion, or a discussion guide with the aim of bringing two friends/family members in disagreement together.
However, upon pitching to industry professionals to help narrow down the idea, a far more appealing idea emerged from one of the critics—a physical game that brings people together.
Process: The card game idea was immediately recognized by the team as the best solution idea to expand upon, with the target audience being those who already have an idea/opinion about abortion, but are open to learning about the opposite views while simultaneously bettering their relationships with those viewholders.
Over the course of the next 2.5 weeks, the rules and gameplay of “The Grey Zone” were sorted out. By user testing, we iterated several times on, primarily, the following aspects of the game: