Hope can be hard to find, but not here. 

At this year’s UMSI Student Project Exposition, more than 500 students from the University of Michigan School of Information shared solutions to issues that matter. Their projects addressed challenges faced by nonprofit organizations, companies across industries, communities in Michigan and beyond, and even their own friend groups.

How do you keep friendships alive when you don’t live in the same place? It’s a struggle just as real for members of Gen Z as it was for the pen pals of pre-digital generations. 

Akash Dewan, a senior in the Bachelor of Science in Information program, is part of a tight-knit group of eight friends from Irving, California, who wanted a way to stay connected beyond superficial scrolling and occasional phone calls. 

With fellow BSI students Phoebe Oh, Liam McGartoll and Jenya Patel, he helped launch Wafflr, a video-based social app designed to hit the sweet spot between authenticity and substance.

“Social media has become less social. What started as a tool for connection for your direct contacts has now turned into an algorithm-driven form of entertainment,” Dewan says. “In my friend group, we all graduated and went to college in different parts of the country, different time zones, and it was kind of disheartening to watch our friendships fizzle.” 

Wafflr, which grew to 350 users in its first two months without marketing, is intentionally simple: Each member of a friend group, or “stack,” uploads a two-minute video update once a week, every week.

“Especially with male friendships, I feel like we're not proactively vulnerable with each other,” Dewan shares. “We're not going to go out of our way to share job updates or relationship updates. But when we're prompted each week to reflect for two minutes, we've watched it completely change the nature of our relationships.”

Wafflr began as an idea among friends and came into fruition as a course project in SI 311: Product Design. Now, the team plans to file as an LLC. They don’t want to chase profits. They just want to create a self-sustaining product that will strengthen long-distance friendships, Dewan says, including his own. 

Another kind of long distance — the many miles logged by semi-truck drivers — was the focus of the semester for Master of Science in Information students in SI 612: Pervasive Interaction Design. 

Through their research, Oresti Dine, Dhwani Rayathatha, Gagana Jadhav and Vardan Sargsyan learned that 60% of truck drivers report feeling drowsy at some point during their shifts, and this drowsiness can be a matter of life or death. In Michigan alone, more than 3,500 semi-truck accidents occured in 2022, with 765 resulting in injuries and 70 in fatalities. The team’s solution, developed as a Figma prototype, is tangible. 

“We created a system that uses an optical sensor,” Dine explains. “When it detects drowsiness based on the driver’s eye movements, it triggers vibration in the steering wheel to alert the driver and keep them awake.” 

The system, called DriverSense, is designed to escalate if signs of drowsiness continue. After vibrating the steering wheel twice, it gives the driver directions to the nearest rest stop, and if that fails, sends a notification to an emergency contact prompting them to call the driver.

“If this system was implemented, we would hope to save a lot of lives and also prevent injuries and accidents in the long term,” Rayathatha says.

Both she and Dine are students in UMSI’s Accelerated Master’s Degree Program, having earned their undergraduate degrees from UMSI. While they’ve presented at Expo before, it never loses its excitement.

“It’s really cool to see how everyone's bringing their passion,” Rayathatha says. “There's just so much talent in this room.” 

Better by design

In the titles of this year’s 174 Expo projects, one word appears again and again: reimagining. It’s a fitting choice — a word that implies understanding how things are in order to envision how they could be better. 

For her work to reimagine eviction court forms in Michigan, MSI student Rachael Zuppke earned second prize in the Access, Belonging and Inclusion category. 

“When I came to the School of Information, what I really wanted to do was change court processes through user experience design,” she says. Zuppke had spent six years working at Legal Services of South Central Michigan, where one of her focuses was eviction prevention. 

Each year, between 170,000 and 190,000 eviction cases are filed in Michigan, affecting about 1 in 6 households. All but 2% of these tenants lack an attorney to represent them. 

Last summer, Zuppke connected with court partners who were interested in redoing eviction court forms in plain language — their question was, is changing language alone enough to make a form more accessible to the average person? 

Zuppke offered to do user testing to find out, undertaking an independent study at UMSI. In the fall, she held two user testing sessions with UMSI’s Civic User Testing Group, followed by a civic design workshop to incorporate those findings. She continued the redesign process into the winter semester. 

Her reimagined forms go beyond plain language to feature a visual representation of the entire eviction process and a clearer hierarchy of information. 

“As a result of this testing, we convinced court partners that design is an important element of making sure people can use a form,” Zuppke says. “I’m hoping that we're creating something lasting.” 

According to her independent study advisor, lecturer Scott TenBrink, Zuppke’s project highlights something important about UX design. 

“The benefits of human-centered design are not constrained to apps and websites,” TenBrink says. “Rachael's work to redesign a paper form to make it easier for renters to understand is an example of how information professionals can generate positive change in the public sector.”

Community partnerships lead to more fitting solutions — solutions that go beyond the conceptual to serve people’s needs. 

MSI students Hamza Naveed and Sheza Naveed earned first prize in the Civic and Community Engagement category at Expo for their work to prevent deaths from opioid overdoses through community-driven response. They became involved with the project — a collaborative effort between researchers at multiple universities, including UMSI assistant professor Gabriela Marcu — as graduate student research assistants. 

UnityPhilly is a smartphone app funded by the National Institute of Health that equips trained community members to respond to nearby opioid overdoses. When an app user signals an overdose, the app alerts nearby volunteers, calls EMS and provides guidance for administering naloxone. 

In a one-year pilot with 112 trained volunteers in Kensington, a community in Philadelphia, volunteers were alerted of 291 overdoses and successfully administered naloxone in 95.9% of these cases. Since the pilot, the app has also become operational in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. 

Taking a human-centered approach, Hamza and Sheza conducted usability testing and market research to improve the app’s design. In March, they held a focus group to incorporate feedback from non-medical opioid users, concerned community members, and harm reduction advocates. 

“We got a lot of very interesting insights,” Sheza says. “For example, we're now looking into how to protect people's privacy, because your name is being shared and your location is being shared. Volunteers are concerned, what if the person does not want 911 to be called?” 

As the team works to address these privacy concerns, so they don’t become barriers to seeking help, they also have plans to bring the app to more cities. 

“We're looking into scaling this across the U.S.,” Sheza says. 

Growing hope 

The opportunity to tackle real challenges — with real impact — provides some of the best learning. All BSI students complete a client-based project as part of their curriculum. Over the course of two semesters, they apply their skills in UX design and information analysis in dynamic contexts, where the “right path” isn’t immediately clear. They come away, in many cases, with industry-level deliverables. 

For their UX design capstone, Claudia VanValkenburg, Jenya Patel, Tiffany Tam, Fay Piyathassrikul and Amy Deng collaborated with Growing Hope, a nonprofit urban farm in Ypsilanti, to advance its mission of food justice and youth education. 

“We created an interactive, digital map for them, as well as a physical map for first-time visitors and volunteers to be able to navigate their way through the farm independently,” VanValkenburg says. 

Because the client didn’t have a web developer or programmers on staff, the team embraced the opportunity to build an actual website. 

“We had to create a solution where they could easily update, edit and add content, making sure that the solution is actually implemented and usable,” Piyathassrikul says. 

The solution they created, like the organization it serves, prioritizes sustainability. 

“This project gave me hope,” VanValkenburg says, “seeing how what we've learned at UMSI can be used for nonprofit organizations and other civic engagement efforts. We can use our skills to make something accessible for different communities.” 

In the librarianship and archival practice mastery course, MSI students John Bergstrom, Austin Book and Jordan Rhym also collaborated with a mission-driven organization. 

Their client, History UnErased, is a national provider of LGBTQ-inclusive U.S. history curricula. The team’s work will support the production of a play, “The Past is Always Present,” for use in K-12 education. 

Each student researched a different queer figure whose history was hidden away in archival repositories: drag performer Josie Carter, entertainer Manny Dias, and public servant and activist Tea Schook. 

For Bergstrom, who had the unexpected opportunity to interview Schook after spending countless hours getting to know her through newspaper clippings, the project became more fully alive as the semester went on. It also felt increasingly timely, with attacks on LGBTQ rights and cuts to federal funding for libraries, archives and museums.

“In a way, it’s given the project more of an impact,” Bergstrom says. “It’s putting a foot down to say, ‘This curriculum is here. It’s staying, and it’s growing.’” 

Fraught as it might be, this feels like hope. 

Funding for the 2025 UMSI Student Project Exposition was provided by the Hoffman Family Engaged Learning Fund and the UMSI Culture and Community Fund.

Lead image: Claudia VanValkenburg, Jenya Patel, Tiffany Tam, Fay Piyathassrikul and Amy Deng designed a self-guided tour map for Growing Hope’s urban farm. 

LEARN MORE

Organizations from all industries and sectors are invited to propose information-based projects to UMSI’s Engaged Learning Office for students to work on through courses and programs. Host a student project.