Fitwits Program is an ongoing research project created by Associate Professor Kristin Hughes in partnership with UPMC Saint Margaret Family Health Centers. It teaches children and families how to make healthy lifestyle choices.
Some activities included mapping where people go in their neighborhoods to be active; what they do for physical activity; and revealing the cost vs. nutritional benefits of a home prepared meal against its fast food equivalent.
As a research assistant for Fitwits, I helped develop research activities to run in participatory design sessions with community parents, to help us understand how we could design and execute the final phase of the program, Fitwits Zones. The goal of the Zones is to create a safe community for families to support each other to make healthy lifestyle choices, by empowering Fitwits Champions as leaders throughout the Zones. The goal of our workshops was to learn about what the families in our target communities already knew about food and exercise, what kinds of choices they were making, and what they valued when making healthy lifestyle choices for themselves and their families.
This model shows the progression of influence to create change in an environment. Fitwits Program started as a memory game in elementary schools to teach 5th graders (individual level) about portion size and physical activity. The Program has slowly evolved over the last couple of years moving to the community level.
The research activities developed and conducted during this spring term helped the core Fitwits team prepare and execute the Fitwits challenge held during the past summer.
Duration: 16 weeks
CONTRIBUTION
research activity development and execution, participatory design facilitation, directed storytelling, volunteer recruitment, secondary research, high-fidelity prototypes, outreach
Carnegie Mellon University
Fitwits Research Assistant
Kristin Hughes, Associate Professor
School of Design
