Friends of Wildlife (FoW) is an all volunteer-run organization in Ann Arbor, MI that rehabilitates a wide variety of at-risk species. With colleagues at the University of Michigan, I designed a system that helped members to better communicate with each other and the wider community. Over the organization’s 20-year lifespan they have been able to tell an increasing number of success stories regarding species rehabilitation. However, with no central offices and a growing number of new volunteers, the founders felt it was time to revisit the systems and protocols through which users and rehabbers communicate. FoW wanted to make sure communication was consistent and reliable, and that rehabbers could continue their excellent work by more easily supporting each other.

We conducted a series of interviews with eight members specializing in differing species in order to learn about the needs of FoW rehabbers. Our methods included traditional Q&A sessions, gathering of artifacts and photographs of physical workspaces to help build empathy with users, and a wide array of data interpretation techniques including affinity diagramming and workflow modeling. We wanted to paint a clear picture of rehabber’s attitudes towards technology, their views about socializing with other team members, and their willingness to share their experiences in order to create a system that fit the distinct culture of the organization. My team and I came to three major conclusions: rehabbers desired ways to better support one another; senior coordinators felt overworked due to the system of routing of calls from the public; members wanted the ability to directly interact with data. A major design constraint was that any potential system needed to be free or extremely low-cost due to the limited resources of a volunteer organization. The framework we proposed had 5 major hubs:

Dispatch: The initial point from which a user of the FoW system calls to report an at-risk animal. The system needed to function equitably by distributing calls to rehabbers in the order of calls taken. This way, species coordinators had confidence that they were being called because it was their turn to rehabilitate an animal, making them more willing to answer calls.

Sage: A collection of menus to help callers decide if they need to speak to a human rehabber. Answers to the most commonly asked questions could be found here.

Lighthouse: A feed for signaling a rehabber’s capacity and the number of animals in care.

Clinic: A digital space supported by monthly in person meetings to facilitate asking questions and getting answers.

Guardian: A digital repository of details about the status of each animal passing through homes of rehabbers.

The following diagram shows how we perceived our design talking effect when implemented.