TEAM
TENDO, THE TOTO GARI AND HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN by Churchill
I always had a hint
as to what social innovation could mean even before I took a brief course on
the same earlier on this year. And as I would discover during the inaugural
East African Social Innovation Safari in April, I wasn’t so far from the
meaning. What I was far from even guessing right is how the process unfolds and
the challenges that come with attempting to innovate a solution to a challenge
at a personal, group, communal, organizational or societal level. Five months
down the line after the Safari, my problem solving methods have changed a lot
and the way I also interact with people generally has transformed. I decided to
adopt and use some insight I got from the ten day training and as a result I
can confidently say that things are more interesting this way.
And so when I
received an email from Peace and Collaborative Development Network two and a
half months ago about a free online course on Human Centered Design facilitated
by +ACUMEN and IDEO.ORG I didn’t hesitate to click on the discussion link to
see how I could participate in it. It would turn out in the page that opened on
the next tab on my browser that the course wouldn’t take a lot of time, had a
few weekly assignments (ideal considering my already tight schedule), was to be
done in teams and would be rewarded by a certificate of completion at the end
of the course after the submission of all assignments. What mattered to me most
was the fact that I am actually really passionate about change-making and
getting insight on how I could do this through this course would really be
something I’d not mind doing. As the course required, I had to form a team of
not less than three people before we could get started on October 24th.
Wallace Odiwuor, Elizabeth Muthama, Susan Kalekye Muia and Maureen Okuto (all
fourth year students) would be the four other members of Team Tendo as I
decided to name it. Globally, the course had more than 16,000 participants and
the last time I checked, the other teams in Kenya were just in Nairobi.
 |
| Team Tendo members, Left To Right : Churchill, Kalekye, Liz and Maureen. |
Businesses, social
entrepreneurs, and other innovators have used human-centered design for decades
to create solutions for many different types of challenges. This course introduced
us to the concepts of human-centered design to help make us more effective,
innovative problem solvers. According to
the course organizers, the three major phases
of the human-centered design process are Inspiration, Ideation, and
Implementation.
In the Inspiration phase, you learn directly from the people you’re
designing for as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply
understand their needs and aspirations. The Inspiration phase is about learning
on the fly, opening yourself up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as
long as you remain grounded in desires of the people you’re designing for, your
ideas will evolve into the right solution. As part of the course, during the
inspiration phase we had to choose a design challenge from a list of three
challenges that had been identified by the course facilitators. To choose a
design challenge we had to collect our thoughts around one challenge that we
chose through voting then followed that with a review of what we already knew,
defined what we didn’t know then reviewed the constraints or barriers to taking
on that challenge. That was followed by planning our research method where we
defined our audience with the challenge we chose, planned the logistics of
going to the field, came up with recruitment tools and established how to
create a trusted atmosphere with those we were designing for and those we had
to talk to while designing.
.jpg)
We had to learn from experts, immerse ourselves in the context of the
problem we were designing a solution for and selected an analogous inspiration
that could help us understand our challenge more. At this point we were
introduced to a case study, VROOM, a human-centered take on early childhood
development. In this case, The IDEO.org team undertook a highly immersive
inspiration phase, visiting low-income communities in California, New York, and
Pennsylvania to conduct interviews with parents and to observe existing
programs aimed at improving child development outcomes. The team learned that
many of the parents they met had had very tough upbringings. These parents
didn’t feel fully equipped to engage with their children, because their own parents
didn’t engage with them. At the end of this phase we settled on challenge three
where we had To Design A Solution That
Would Help Parents In Low-Income Communities Ensure Children Thrive In Their
First Five Years. We interacted with the community around Mabungo and
Nyawita areas as part of our immersion process and also talked to child care
experts around the university. This challenge had been selected as one of the
#zerotofivechallenges by AMPLIFY that was also collaborating with +ACUMEN in
this course. This meant that if our idea was to be shortlisted upon completion
of the course, we could continue participating on the AMPLIFY platform to
refine our idea based on the Refinement Phase. If our idea gets all the way to
the final stage, we could be in the running for funding and design support from
IDEO.org!
 |
| Wallace, Liz and Kalekye integrating findings after field research |
The Ideation phase transformed our research into meaningful and
actionable insights that became the foundation of our design. We begun by making
sense of what we learned from our design research. These themes and insights helped
us define opportunities for design that were differentiated and generative. We then
brainstormed lots of new ideas and set out building prototypes to test these
concepts. Continuing to test and iterate on our ideas helped shape a more innovative,
effective solution. In the design process, searching for meaning in the nitty
gritties you find in the field is really critical to getting down to the beat
that could give you the rhythm to the solution you desire. We listened to each
other and adopted a YES AND approach in place of a more common YES BUT approach
that usually excludes most people ideas.
While brainstorming we had really wild ideas and encouraged each of us
to generate as many as possible. We also deferred judgment, went for quantity
and illustrated ideas visually. After selecting the most promising idea, we
determined what to prototype and designed for them. Upon getting feedback after
prototyping and prioritizing it, we had to integrate them in our next
iteration. At this advanced stage, we studied Moneythink Mobile, an innovation
where human-centered designers were designing digital tools to build financial
literacy. Another case study was where IDEO.org
partnered with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a new pit
latrine emptying business in Zambia. The team designed a service called Pump
Away.
1 |
| We had a mock pitching session and as you see Liz was strict! |
The Implementation phase is about understanding how to bring your
solution to life, and to market in the real world. In the end, you’ll know that
your solution will be a success because you’ve kept the very people you’re
looking to serve at the heart of the process. In this case, we learned the
tools necessary to consider how we could build partnerships, refine our
business (or non-profit) model, pilot our idea, and eventually get our idea out
there — all these is if we were to truly
implement our idea, which is dependent on how our idea will be rated by
the course facilitators.
Well if you would like to get the final presentation of our idea, The
TOTO GARI, kindly mail us at bamumaseno@gmail.com and we will be very glad to mail you the power point presentation. Alternatively, comment below with your e-mail address and we will mail it to you. We are sharing it on this platform to get your feedback on places
you think we might have not explored well or ignored totally. I decided to
share it as the last part of this article after having taken you through the
design process. Feel free to leave your questions, insight and views in the
comments section. Also, wish us luck!
 |
| The Toto Gari will be something close to this |
No comments:
Post a Comment