According to the NIDCD, 15% of American adults (37.5 million) report some trouble hearing, yet only 1 in 5 people that would benefit from a hearing aid use one. Sound Sustainability’s online hearing screening removes barriers preventing people from determining whether they have hearing loss. To do this, we worked with audiologists to produce a free, easy-to-use, hearing screening that has users listen and respond to a series of tones played at different frequencies and decibels. Our goal is to allow people concerned for their hearing health to quickly check their hearing within the comfort of their own homes.

Voices: Data from an Expansive Christian Community is a structured repository of people, published media, and affiliate organizations that expands beyond the hegemonic voices of white American Evangelicalism and represents a more diverse, ecumenical, and global vision of Christianity. It provides a metadata schema and selection criteria for a curated dataset intended to support further research and analysis. The structure aims to elevate diverse content creators across disciplines who engage in smart and significant conversation about Christianity and its intersections with other faiths, race, social justice, gender, sexuality, and environmentalism.

With the rise of gentrification in the Seattle Chinatown-International District, the intrinsic sense of community is slowly eroding. However, public interest in these local communities can spread awareness, which helps preserve the rich history found there. Wander is a website developed to amplify the voices of local restaurants and promote the cultural significance of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Not only will business owners get the chance to tell their stories about their food, but we hope that visitors will also be inspired to engage with and learn about the people at the heart of this community.

The Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) is a core agency of our state government, providing a variety of personal and professional licenses and other legal documents. It manages huge amounts of data about Washington’s people and economy, and its data analysis is crucial to our legislature. However, its data governance lags behind its goals. We conducted dozens of interviews with DOL employees on how and what data they work with to craft a taxonomy and recommendations for how DOL should organize/conceptualize its data, improving efficiency and making the agency more responsive and modern, resulting in better services for all Washingtonians!

Approximately half of the US immigrant population is limited English proficient (LEP). The language barrier leads to stress and health issues and hinders immigrants’ employment opportunities, social environment, and more. Existing online translation services don’t offer further explanation and are often unusable for immigrants with limited education, including low reading and writing comprehension in their home language. Our app bridges this gap and provides real-time, interactive translation help from bilingual and multilingual volunteers who can further explain translations and the context surrounding them, whether cultural or technological. Wave helps LEP users navigate daily life with independence and peace of mind.

Employees at mid- to large-sized companies are faced with many challenges when it comes to connecting with peers and cultivating new working relationships. It can be intimidating to make new friendships outside of your team, and demanding work schedules can make this even more difficult. WorkConnects aims to foster new workplace friendships by automatically matching employees based on their availability and interests.

Lower Lake Michigan – the area ringed by Illinois, Indiana, and parts of southern Michigan and Wisconsin – is full of shipwrecks and other sunken historical treasures. The knowledge of the wrecks’ histories, survey records for preservation purposes, what actions can be taken to recover artifacts and create new documentation, etc., is spread widely across the Lake Michigan dive community. The Wrecker’s Report is a new reference document that compiles federal, state, county, and city laws to assist divers in planning shipwreck diving expeditions.

Our team worked with Adios COVID and their Partners to create a reliable and convenient resource for the Hispanic community within Washington to ultimately put more vaccination shots in arms. Our goals were to support this ongoing project by improving the features and designs that were urgently needed to be pushed on to the web page. Specifically, we focused on simplifying the user interface and providing tools through different forms of research to improve the design of every feature of the application.

Otherworld Media is a nonprofit media production organization that creates educational programs for children. It produced a radio show “A is for Adventure” with various literary themes and genres. Otherworld wanted library scavenger hunts to tie into the radio show to encourage children to use library resources. As the needs of today’s children changed due to the pandemic, the initial designs for scavenger hunts were adapted into an outline for an online game. A programmer is using the framework of games and resources we created to complete development of the game.

Academic libraries can mindfully collaborate with higher education in prison programs and support system impacted students on their campuses. Nonetheless, barriers may arise when forging these connections. Focusing on the UW tri-campus system, this capstone drew on design thinking methods to discover some of these obstacles and generate potential solutions. The result is a project on Manifold, a digital platform that the UW Libraries and Press are currently piloting. Overall, the capstone’s goal is to serve as a starting point for the UW Libraries to consider co-creating instruction, programming, and resources with stakeholders to support current and formerly incarcerated students.