When children visit incarcerated parents, the visit itself is often preceded by hours in a bland waiting room. Personal belongings aren't allowed inside, leaving children with nothing to do in a space that's already tense and unfamiliar. This can lead to an extremely strained visit. Research links weaker parent-child relationships during incarceration to significantly higher rates of intergenerational incarceration, so even though the goal was to make children more comfortable, the mission was to reduce generational harm.
My team saw a connection between two organizations working on adjacent pieces of this problem: LaundryCares Foundation had already designed warm, engaging early-learning spaces, and the Women's Justice Institute worked directly with women who'd experienced the prison system and understood exactly what these waiting rooms felt like from the inside. We proposed translating LaundryCares' model into prison waiting rooms, and the challenge was getting the right people aligned for interior design execution.
Facilities have no renovation budget, so improvements like a mural, custom furniture, games, or soft seating depend on people willing to donate skills or materials. Our core disconnect was that a muralist willing to donate work had no way of finding a facility that wanted one, and a coordinator hoping to improve their space had no channel to find that muralist. We designed a service exchange platform to close that gap, connecting donors directly with the facilities requesting them.
My role centered on research design and stakeholder synthesis in a context where trust had to be earned before any data could be gathered. I built an extended introduction phase into our discussion guides to build rapport before sensitive material, and flagged any question phrasing that risked re-traumatizing participants. I then synthesized findings into a stakeholder map visualizing the full donor-requestor network (facilities, donors, WJI, LaundryCares, etc.) to identify exactly where the matching mechanism needed to intervene.
Outside the original project scope, I independently prototyped a Facebook Groups version of this exchange to show both organizations what it could look like in practice. Both WJI and LaundryCares told us they'd discussed a similar concept but hadn't known how to implement it.
Early Learning Spaces
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Most of our research participants were women who had personally navigated the prison visitation system, and it’s often the hardest part of their experience to talk about. I strategically treated the discussion guide as a trust-building exercise: a longer warm-up section, careful sequencing from low-stakes to high-stakes questions, and language review on every question that touched directly on incarceration, separation, or loss. The goal was a research process that didn't extract a difficult story, but created enough safety for someone to choose to share it.
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Stakeholder interviews, focus groups, trauma-informed discussion guide design, usability testing, card sorting, qualitative synthesis, network and relationship mapping
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Service design, service blueprints, two-sided marketplace design, user flows, interaction design, experience design, spatial layout design, stakeholder mapping, independent rapid prototyping
Who We Worked With
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Women's Justice Institute of Chicago
The WJI's work is anchored by the voices of impacted women and girls and advanced through broad and deep partnerships with diverse justice system stakeholders.
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LaundryCares Foundation
The mission of LaundryCares Foundation is to enrich under-served communities by providing basic needs services including free laundry services via Free Laundry & Literacy Days, learning resources for early childhood development, and disaster relief assistance.
