Honors Team Adapt responds to the COVID-19 pandemic
A group of UC Berkeley students design PPE gowns for eldercare workers
This academic year, Honors Fellows formed teams to work with local community partners to develop innovative solutions in areas blending healthcare, technology, and social impact. Team Adapt launched their team in Fall 2019 and intended to design adaptable clothing for older adults. However, in March 2020, the team made the critical decision to pivot their project to help create emergency personal protective equipment (PPE) for at-risk eldercare workers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We had the opportunity to speak with Team Adapt members Shirley Jiang, Yoyo Ko, Josie Lee, Romina Mazooji who partnered with Elder Care Alliance (ECA), a Bay Area senior-living organization, to share their project, the progress they’ve made, and the lessons they’ve learned as graduating fellows.
What did your work look like before COVID-19? How did your team pivot into your new project?
Josie: Before COVID-19, we were working on adaptive clothing for older adults. We did a lot of physical user engagement in the first phase of our project with [older adults and caregivers]. Once we transitioned to PPE gowns, we had to also change the ways we tested and made them.
A huge part of what we tested was whether the gowns could be easily made by local volunteers. Based on that feedback, we then made the digital asset—the playbook—because we wanted to scale the impact beyond our local eldercare facility. We knew these weren’t going to be perfect, but as we received feedback, we kept adding more into our digital playbook, including new iterations, so people wouldn’t have to make the same mistakes we made.
Yoyo: Taking into account our shift from adaptive apparel to gowns, our user framework changed a little bit, too. Our end user wasn’t fixed upon older adults, but it was now resident health workers, caregivers, and community volunteers. It gave us the flexibility to tap into a new network that was less vulnerable than those in the senior living facility we couldn’t quite access because of health concerns.
How quickly did your team transition to PPE, especially while working remotely?
Yoyo: Looking back, I’m so proud of us. We did all the primary and secondary research for an entire semester for Adapt apparel, but we did that again in two weeks for the new project. A lot of it was built from the semester because we knew the commitment workload and structure of the research, ethnographies, and methods from our two years as Fung Fellows. With that, our fall semester felt like training and spring semester felt like a test.
Romina: With just two phone calls, we were fully in the new project. We were conducting secondary research by the third meeting! The whole point of us joining the Fellowship was to serve public health issues, and the urgency of the situation honestly motivated us much more to pivot.
The whole point of us joining the Fellowship was to serve public health issues, and the urgency of the situation honestly motivated us much more to pivot.
Josie: I’d also add that our pivot happened in two phases: first with the phase of transitioning to PPE, then thinking about what element of PPE we were going to tackle. For a while, we were set on doing face masks since that seemed like it was most in need, but things were changing very rapidly everyday with the pandemic. We had to consider the availability of materials and costs along with our designs to finally decide we would focus on gowns.
Were there any surprises to the design process?
Romina: We had to take out some of the design process because we weren’t qualified to come up with a design on our own. We had to follow guidelines, so the bulk of our work was the secondary research of finding inspiration from others who had been doing this for the past month. Then, we had to verify that it was safe by CDC guidelines. We found ourselves having to study the [public health] field more instead of just designing something from scratch and testing it.
Josie: At the end of the day, we prototyped our structure of production and distribution. Our primary research was finding the best tracking tool to manage the people that cut fabric, who sewed fabric, and those that dropped off fabric. We were lucky to find such a great gown design online, but there was also the process of testing different distribution methods.
Yoyo: I’d imagine the playbook as our real product!
Can you share a bit more about your PPE plan and playbook?
Shirley: Our playbook is built towards showing how to replicate the gown production process. It shows how we tracked fabric cutting, production, and coordinated communications. It’s a framework that can be adjusted to individual needs. It was meant to be something that can be replicated by anybody.
Josie: It’s also not totally gown-specific. For example, if you wanted to organize a community mask effort, there’s information on financial planning and community outreach. It may have been specific to gowns with the patterns, cutting, and sewing methods, but it could definitely be taken as a guidebook for any community PPE production.
What progress has the team made over the past few months? What’s next for the project?
Romina: We got 100 of our gowns done, and we bought material for 100 more. We have all our kits distributed out, which includes pre-cut fabric for sewers! We’re waiting for some of them to be returned now. Our initial timeline did include a quick turnaround because we didn’t exactly know how many volunteers we would mobilize.
In the end, we were able to get about 40 volunteers. For the future, we decided that we would give all the trackers and email addresses to someone to eventually take over, but by the end of our involvement with the project, we’re excited to have 200 gowns completed. We’re pretty happy with that turnaround.
How did you garner so much community involvement, given the shelter-in-place and remote work situation?
Josie: We’d post on social media, and people would be kind enough to share [the posts] amongst their own communities. It had somewhat of a ripple effect. People saw this opportunity to send it to people they cared about.
Yoyo: We just reached out everywhere — to the Fung staff, our own LinkedIn networks, Bay Area cultural groups. We tried to involve anyone and everyone we could think of. I remember there was even a local sewing newsletter committee that we reached.
Romina: It was definitely a mix of social media, newsletters, and personal networks. We also tried to leverage the people we interviewed during the fall semester. One of those people was a lady named Andrea who connected us with her family members as volunteers. We got to connect with people we wouldn’t have known if we didn’t have that background of getting to know them and interviewing them before.
Shirley: We definitely were able to leverage the networks we established on social media to find volunteers willing to sew. For fabric cutters, we did stay closer to the UC Berkeley community.
Yoyo: We even had an MEng student as one of our volunteers — someone from the Fung community!
Romina: It was really heartwarming to see all these volunteers coming in and picking up the kits we made. They were so happy to volunteer all the time! It made me happy to see that there are still people out there that actually care about others that they don’t even know.
I’ll also remember when Andrea, one of our volunteers, came to my house to drop off some of the kits she had sewn and left a little postcard that was so sweet! I put it next to my nightstand because it gives me so much hope. Inside she wrote a letter about how we’re doing a great job on our project despite the terrible times. It built a community for us.
It made me happy to see that there are still people out there that actually care about others that they don’t even know.
Now that you all have graduated from UC Berkeley, what were your biggest takeaways from the Adapt project and the Fellowship?
Josie: One thing that was so beautiful was [seeing] how many different needs there are in a movement. It sounds cliché, but I’m finding quotations about everyone “finding their lane” to contribute to a project or movement with their own skillset. Our project incorporated so many different needs. There were the sewers, those who shared with their networks, those who offered to drive fabric, Yoyo managing finances, fabric cutters, Shirley made our intuitive spreadsheet; there were so many ways to add value to the project.
Shirley: Teaming has been the big takeaway for me because of the things you can do with a great team and driven individuals. Personally, I remember not having a good perception of group projects [before] because there was always this unequal balance of labor. Those certainly still do exist, but when team collaboration works, it really works. You can form a community with this diversity of perspectives. I’ve come to really appreciate that now, and I can’t quite find that same energy elsewhere.
Romina: Something I’ve realized after working with companies for a while is that you don’t get the same team collaboration when you’re in the industry. We all came in eager with the same mission, driven on the same path, so the way we collaborated was in sync. When you go into a company in the working world, people have different missions, so you don’t get to connect with people on the same level. It was a learning experience in both soft skills — learning to work and communicate with people, create motivation — but also design skills. I don’t think I would’ve learned or experienced any of this if I didn’t join the Fellowship.
Yoyo: Now that I’m getting a glimpse of the post-grad working world, I feel like I’ll never get an experience like this again: to have a project where you’re mentored by brilliant people with a prestigious university and an industry mentor, while also working with a local senior facility. This past month after graduating, I’m realizing that all those things don’t intersect very often. I now joke with my friends, “I think I peaked in college!”
I’ve always dreamt of finding opportunities that would make an impact on the world. I always wrote it in my essays or tweeted about it, but I think we actually did it this time — even if it was small. That’s something that will always encourage me to stay hopeful and positive for what’s coming in the future.
Connect with Team Adapt: Shirley Jiang, Yoyo Ko, Josie Lee, Romina Mazooji
Edited by Alison Huh.
Applications for the Fung Fellowship are now open for the UC Berkeley transfer class of 2022 until July 31, 2021.
Learn more about the Fung Fellowship at fungfellows.berkeley.edu.
