Overview
Small Changes, Shared Impact
The Team
Contributions
Research
Co-Design
Experience Prototyping
Time Line
7 March, 2026
to
14 May, 2026
Service Blueprint
Understanding How The Service Operates
The Office of Student Involvement (OSI) at Pratt Institute is a department within Student Affairs that supports campus life beyond the classroom. With over 120 clubs and organizations, 15 varsity sports teams, and a wide range of on-campus events, the office serves as the backbone of student community life — acting as the primary point of contact between students who want to get involved and the institutional infrastructure that enables it.
Our clients for this project were Emma Legge, Director of Student Involvement, and Jailene Matrecito-Salcedo (Jay), Assistant Director of Student Engagement. Jay is a central figure within the service scope we examined, she is the first point of contact for club leaders, making her a critical actor in the system. We interviewed Jay alongside four club leaders drawn from diverse groups: undergraduate, graduate, new club, and established club. These conversations helped us map actions on both sides of the service to build out the blueprint shown below.
The service blueprint above is organized into three phases, detailed below. The Club Leader Journey, mapped in green, captures the end-to-end experience from the leader's perspective. Jay's Workflow and Inside Office Actions both represent activities performed by the Office of Student Involvement — Jay's Workflow, marked in blue, includes interactions that are visible to club leaders, while Inside Office Actions, marked in purple, refer to internal processes that happen behind the scenes. Support Processes, marked in orange, capture all external systems and services — both within Pratt and beyond — that enable these workflows.
The Ecosystem
Information Flow in the Service Ecosystem
From the blueprint, we identified a heavy dependency on a single actor, with OSI emerging as the central mediator across the service. To visualize this further, we mapped an ecosystem loop. What it revealed is that a significant share of information moves through one point: nearly every club query and request routes through Jay, arriving via email or Engage forms, then manually handled or forwarded to the relevant offices. Outside of resources clubs access independently, very little bypasses this channel. The flow below makes that concentration visible.
Co-Design
Creating Value for Club Leaders With Club leaders
We conducted two co-design workshops with 8 club leaders. From our initial conversations with Jay and club leaders, we knew the RSO handbook contained answers to many of their questions — but wasn't being delivered in a way that landed. We also identified a need for more human support: club leaders weren't just looking for information, they wanted emotional support too. The co-design workshops were structured around both of these insights, with the goal of understanding what could realistically be done to address them.
Goal
The goal of our co-design session was to get a better understanding of the personalized needs and struggles different student club leaders face when operating a club at Pratt. We aimed to gather this feedback directly from student leaders through an intentionally designed co-design workshop that encouraged them to share personal insights grounded in their lived experience of yearly club operations. Through this collaborative experience club leaders would be able to leave feeling empowered by defining and relating common struggles in a shared space with other leaders.
Workshop
Each workshop was structured in two parts. The first focused on understanding key pain points — not just what they were, but when they hit. By mapping these against the club calendar, we could identify which moments in the year club leaders needed the most support and where intervention would matter most. The second part asked participants to design a successor toolkit for their club: what information would the outgoing leader most want to pass on? This helped us understand what the RSO handbook actually needs to deliver, grounded in what club leaders themselves consider essential.
Outcomes
Struggles Trend towards the Middle of the Semester
The most common struggles for club leaders tended to come up during the middle of the semester rather than the beginning or end, except for January (spring semester start) where 3 difficulties were noted related to getting started again as an organization. Most challenges occurred between October - December and January - April. This finding emphasizes the importance of timing, as most club leaders tend to start facing challenges once the semester has picked up.
Emotional Readiness is highly important, but possibly unsupported
Emotional and social readiness are important dimensions of club leadership success, but are rarely addressed. While leaders are presented with several rules and procedures where they need to succeed as club leaders, there appears to be a gap in handing down or training in soft skills. While many leaders can possess these skills innately, there is an opportunity to provide club leaders with more support in this area.
Knowledge is easier to digest from people rather than documents
We also discovered that the right people seemed to matter more than the right documents. New Clubs mentioned that learning directly from other leaders, clubs, and faculty on campus was most helpful to them in starting an organization. Additionally, established clubs also continued to mention that keeping in contact with offices (like Student Involvement) was highly important to club operations.
Interventions
#1 Humanizing the RSO Handbook
#2 Structuring Human Support
#3 Salesforce as a Case Management Tool
The Ripple Effect
Retrospective