Connecting Threads
Connecting Threads is an interactive digital quilt platform that unifies over 60 sustainability initiatives at the University of Michigan. Inspired by the metaphor of a quilt, each patch represents a student or administrative organization stitched together through shared goals and collaborations to transform fragmented efforts into a cohesive, visual ecosystem that fosters community, transparency, and systems-level impact.
Client:
Go Blue
My Role:
UX Researcher, Product & Interaction Designer
Year:
2024
Service Provided:
System Design, Web Design
Problem Statement:
Students and administrative bodies at the University of Michigan struggle to discover, connect, and collaborate across
the university’s many sustainability organizations. Information about existing projects and initiatives is fragmented across multiple platforms, leading to duplicated efforts, poor visibility, and limited coordination.
How might we facilitate boundary spanning between student and administrative sustainability organizations to enhance collective awareness, collaboration, and coordination of sustainability efforts on campus?
Our project began with a seemingly straightforward
issue: waste management and recycling confusion across the University of Michigan campus. Despite visible infrastructure color-coded bins, standardized signage, and multiple awareness campaigns our early field observations and interviews revealed persistent misclassification of waste by students and staff.
Digging deeper, we realized the issue wasn’t just about bins or signage it was about how sustainability knowledge was communicated and maintained across the university ecosystem.
14 Stakeholder Interviews (Office of Campus Sustainability, SSC, student orgs)
2 Co-creation Events (DEI x Sustainability Summit, Planet Blue Listening Session)
Field Observation (Campus recycling stations, events, signage)
Benchmarking (UM websites, Planet Blue, Maize Pages, UMMA Quilt Exhibit)
Research Methods :
Information about sustainability orgs is fragmented.
Students were unaware of existing sustainability initiatives or how to get involved.
Organizations worked in silos, often duplicating projects.
Platforms like Maize Pages were outdated, cluttered and lacked intuitive search or filters.
Need for visual, emotional connection between sustainability efforts.
Research Insights:
Design Requirements Mapping:
Ideation:
Building on these requirements, we began our ideation phase grounded in divergent thinking and structured creativity. Each team member generated over 25 ideas using Design Heuristics cards, functional decomposition, and wild-idea brainstorming inspired by IDEO.
We clustered 100+ ideas into four categories Digital, Physical, Event-based, and Organizational to capture the full range of possibilities. A unifying metaphor emerged: a quilt symbolizing individuality and connection. Each “patch” represented a unique sustainability effort, resonating strongly with our stakeholders and design goals.
Through iterative discussions and rapid paper prototypes, we identified the potential of a digital quilt platform an interactive system visualizing relationships, fostering collaboration, and scaling over time. This concept evolved into Connecting Threads, our final design direction, combining the emotional warmth of collective identity with the structural rigor of a systems-driven information network.
