From Design Thinking To Design Doing: Social Innovation Challenge Human-Centred Design Workshop
by Jaya Myler
How can we bring some of the best talent and innovations from around the world to co-create solutions to some of the most pressing challenges with communities at need?
Asia P3 Hub and its partners World Vision Canada and World Vision Philippines took participants on a journey “from design thinking to design doing” at a dynamic workshop in Iloilo, Philippines in March, to tackle water and waste challenges as part of the Social Innovation Challenge. The workshop was attended by participants from World Vision Canada, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Ethiopia, Finland and the Asia Pacific Regional Office.
“One of the things that’s challenging about making progress against today’s social and environmental challenges is that they’re accelerating,” said Kal Joffres of Tandemic, who led a session on innovation at the workshop. “As these challenges increase exponentially, and our solutions increase linearly, we have a bigger gap in our ability to address the challenges that we have today. And that’s a relevance gap.”
Co-creating Water And Waste Solutions With Community
The social innovation challenge takes a human-centred design approach to problem solving: community are empowered to be collaborators, to help in co-creating solutions. All of the challenges are real-world challenges facing communities, and the digital platform this year features four challenges that are open to submissions from around the world. The solutions for the water and waste challenges are now in and the communities themselves are helping to refine the solutions.
Human centred design workshops were followed by consultations and discussions with the communities and challenge owners. During the workshop, the shortlisted entries for the Water Challenge and the Waste Challenge were selected, and then the shortlisted waste entries were prototyped and field-tested with the communities in order to get feedback and improve the solutions.
Prototyping and Gathering Feedback
All participants were able to learn and experience the basics of prototyping a solution, practicing it on the 5 shortlisted entries for the Waste challenge. Participants took on each of the shortlisted entries in groups and looked at how users would engage with the solutions. They identified the riskiest assumption made for the solution to work, and built an experiment to test out the assumption.
For example, one of the solutions touches on recycling of soft plastic wastes (e.g. plastic wrappers, packaging). The biggest assumption made for this solution to work was that the villagers would be motivated to collect and bring in the soft plastics for recycling, given a small incentive, either monetary or in products. The team went to the community and made a pop-up booth to attract villagers and ran a short experiment to see if the villagers would respond and how much soft plastics they were able to collect. They were pleasantly surprised to see that the villagers were very responsive and they used up the allocated ‘incentives’ within 3 hours, thus validating the hypothesis that supply is not an issue.
From Shortlist To Tested And Iterated Solutions: Outcomes And Next Steps
Tangible feedback will now be provided to the shortlisted teams for the Water and Waste challenges to iterate and improve on their solutions, and a final pitch will be held for the Waste challenge on 19 June in Toronto. The operations team from World Vision Philippines will now take the key learnings of the process and repeat it for the remaining challenges. Entries will be shortlisted soon for the Agriculture and Out of School Youth challenges.
One consultant on the challenge is Janvie, a former World Vision sponsored child, and he shared his thoughts on the shortlisted solutions: “I’m very excited of the solutions, the kind of solutions that we have not heard before. Something out of the unknown. Something that is technology-driven that can provide income opportunities to the affected families in the community.”
You can read our earlier post on the Social Innovation Challenge here.
This article was written by Jaya Myler, Asia P3 Hub Communications and Marketing Consultant.
Jaya Myler is a non-profit manager with more than 12 years of experience working with international NGOs, corporate and consumer brands, in both developed and developing country settings. She has a strong background in managing projects and programs, and advocacy and communications, and experience working in environmental, education, and WASH NGOs. She is passionate about water and sanitation, education and poverty alleviation. She has experience working on multi-sector partnerships with NGOs, corporates, academia and governments, and is a big believer in the power of cross-sector collaboration to drive innovation and achieve impact. She holds a Master of Media Practice. She is currently Asia P3 Hub’s Communications and Marketing Consultant.
