How exactly does Boston
respond to a shooting?
While working at Agncy Design︎︎︎, we conducted a comprehensive project analyzing the City of Boston’s response to a shooting incident for the Mayor’s Office of Public Safety (OPS).
We conducted eight in-depth interviews that included city and district staff, first responders, and trauma recovery non-profits.
From these interviews, we synthesized two deliverables to best inform the systems-level work of the OPS.
A).
Site
Maps
Site
Maps
These maps show the communications, movements, and interactions of responding organizations and individuals affected by a shooting.
Because a shooting has long-lasting effects and diverging possibilities, the information is split across key sites and timeframes that are consequential in a shooting.
B. Interaction Maps
People and communities need support after a shooting. Unfortunately that support, and the information to access that support, is distributed across a convoluted network of organizations.
These maps show how organizations currently interact with affected individuals, to reveal where OPS might intervene to better support Bostonians.
Process
Once the interviews were complete, I had in hand the most complex set of information I’ve ever worked with, which included:
-
20+ organizations
- 12+ month time scale
-
multiple stakeholders and users
-
vastly diverging possibilities
*It is worth noting that this project was being conducted while many people, myself included, were protesting police violence and racial inequality in the summer of 2020. It is my sincere hope that this project, in its next iteration, can draw attention to the relatively small role that police currently play in preventing gun violence and the critical work of organizations like the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute︎︎︎, the Violence Intervention Program︎︎︎, and SOAR︎︎︎
less importantly, this work was recently selected as Notable for the Core77 Strategy & Research Design award︎︎︎