Sex Ed in Barcelona — A Design Thinking Research Pt.1
“Did you know that only 34 % of young people around the world can demonstrate accurate knowledge of HIV prevention and transmission? And that two out of three girls in some countries have no idea of what is happening to them when they begin menstruating? “
These were some of the findings made by UNESCO in 2018.
In a world more connected than ever, where information is accessible in the very palm of our hands, these are rather worrying numbers.
Also because, exactly due to this easy accessibility to the internet, it is important to give younger generations the necessary tools and knowledge to filter the content they may find on the web.
Ironically enough, Spanish legislation in 2013 (LOMCE), removed all sexual-related content from the mandatory school’s curriculum.
This only induced youth to rely more and more on online content for exploration and information which, in some cases, made porn the new “sex ed teacher”.
As seen from the stats, youngsters come in contact with porn content as soon as puberty kicks in (around 8 years old on average).
The lack of an official curriculum also pathed the way for the private sector to take advantage of this “unattended” need of our youth.
One example could be Netflix’s TV series “Sexual Education” for which commercial campaigns are quite widespread.
But sexual education is a very broad topic that tackles not just the biological/anatomical component but also sexual orientation and the emotional/psychological wealth-fare of an individual, among many other things.
THE CHALLENGE
Why is an important topic such as this one, that has such an impact in modern society, be so left out by the educational system?
How can an out-dated model of current sex ed. attempt be renewed and improved?
Through which means should we interact with the new generations (such as Generation Z) regarding sex ed.?
In the attempt to answer these questions, me and my team-mates — Alba, Raquel, and Jose, attempted to summarise all the areas that impact the topic through a mind map :
Considering how broad the topic can be, we wanted to try to focus on Barcelona’s “Generation Z” and attempted to Empathise with them in order to narrow down what these user’s needs and troubles may be on the subject.
One way to do that was by coming up with research questions from 3 different perspectives:
the User’s, the Service’s (in this case the education system/schools) and the “Competition” ‘s (how are the other European countries tackling the subject).
Considering that we don’t have much control over the Product/Service perspective, we will focus on the other groups of research questions :
COMPETITION — Benchmarking (EU only)
Some examples of metrics we decided to go for were :
“Does it have a mandatory Sex Ed program in schools?
“Age at which Sex Ed is taught”
“% of ETS amongst teenagers”
“% of unwanted pregnancies amongst teenagers”
Among the analyzed countries, the ones that proved to have better stats were Germany, Sweden, and Norway.
What these countries had in common was that they all had a mandatory Sex Ed program starting from a young age among other things.
USER
After a couple of user interviews and an online poll at a specific school in Barcelona, we identified some clear trends.
Here is a summary of our key findings :
- Current format of Sex Ed available in school is highly unsatisfactory
- Nearly 100% of the interviewed/polled users look up information about sex-related topic on their own on the internet through their mobile devices
- Among the most looked-up topics were “learning more about one’s body” and “sexual practices”
- They are aware that not all sources are reliable on the internet and that is when they rely on their friends although that does not always solve the issue.
We also got the great opportunity to do a phone interview with José Ramón Ubieto, writer of the book “ Del Padre al iPad” which tackles in-depth this phenomenon where youth nowadays looks up to the internet instead of their parents for guidance.
One of the many interesting things that he mentioned to us was the following :
“Sexual education needs to be experienced, it can not be taught with books”
Could this be one of the reasons why teenagers would rather surf the web on their own, rather than looking up at their peers for counseling?
Now we have a better picture of what different “types” of users we can find, along with what are their thoughts and their biggest pain points.
Thanks to this acquired knowledge, we proceed to create a couple of personas representing specific archetypes and have tried to create simulated scenarios that may help us identify points of opportunity in order to tackle our main challenge.
I present to you Mario, one of the personas I created:
Here’s Mario’s journey that will help us identify possible insights:
What is represented here is a struggle similar to one of the users we interviewed: the difficulty of being able to retrieve relevant and reliable information from the web, the exposure to undesirable porn content, the struggle to relate to more expert and older classmates on sexual related topics and the lack of a reassuring communication with his parents.
We proceed to Zoom-in to some of the pain points that our Mario had to face and extrapolate what we believe to be potential insight :
To summarise :
- inability to talk to peers (such as parents) for lack of trust/understanding
- the school is inefficient in providing support over Sex ed. related topics
- the internet is one big messy place
This brings us to the next step — How Might We…?
How might we help teenagers, to make their inquiries in a judgment-free zone but at the same time ensuring the veracity of the info provided?
This was one of the HMWs that resonated more with the team, and also one that was believed to be something more within our control.
Considering the highly marked trend that youth nowadays investigate mostly on their own through the use of the internet, our ideas started flying towards a digital solution.
This gave birth to “FluidX” — Fluid comes from the fact that in sexuality everything is in constant fluctuation and change (the same as our bodies and our desires) and the X comes from the X-Gender or Gender Neutral people.
What followed was also our Value Proposition :
As the final part of this research phase, we drew a storyboard that depicted a possible situation in which our potential digital solution may provide the needed advisory help to teenagers on sex ed. related matters.
This concludes the first part of our project — in Part 2, we will tackle the ideation part all the way to the prototyping and testing with users.
Thanks for reading!
