Designing Tools For Safe Consumption Site Advocates

I worked with safe consumption site advocates in the Boston area to design a tool that could potentially revolutionize the current state of safe consumption sites in the U.S. today. This project was done in a team of four and over a semester through a user oriented collaborative design class.

The severity of the opioid epidemic today was shocking to see and we all really wanted to do something about it. All the research and anecdotal evidence pointed to safe consumption sites where unadultered drugs can be administered safely to users. We decided against talking to the actual users of safe consumption sites as that would be unethical and create a power imbalance.

Through conducting user interviews, and spending a lot of time figuring out the pain points of safe consumption site advocates, we were able to really understand the current issues as to why safe consumption sites did not exist today, and what we could do to change that. We even became trained to administer NARCAN!

A main focus of this project was to understand how tools like codesign, and user interviews are so important to designing a final product that people would actually need and use. To see our process in action (through the pandemic and school becoming remote), click on the link to the left. There is a powerpoint that demonstrates two of our sprints and what our final product design was. (Full Paper)