Manila hosted the Philippines’ first design thinking workshop back in 2013, Designing.ph. Since, the Philippines has been host to a strong growing interest in design thinking. We thought we’d put together a list with some of our favourite things happening in the Filipino design thinking space.
1. Bringing design thinking into schools and universities
The innovation firm Tandemic has been working with several organisations in the Philippines to bring design thinking into educational institutions. Last year, Tandemic worked with Globe Telecom and De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde to train 300 teachers and school administrators from across the Philippines to help them bring design thinking practice into their schools. Tandemic has also been helping equip faculty at Benilde to integrate human-centred design and lean startup approaches into their curriculum and teaching.
2. Creating Mobile Banking Services for the Unbanked
80% of the Philippines population does not have a bank account. This impacts where they put their money, and their ability to recover from an emergency. In 2014, BPI Globe BanKO, the Philippines’ first mobile phone-based savings bank, and the global humanitarian agency Mercy Corps teamed up with IDEO.org to design financial products to help Filipinos hit by Typhoon Haiyan. The partnership provided relief for tens of thousands of survivors through mobile savings accounts, giving survivors of the typhoon the ability to save money securely for the first time, and to access cash transfers. Watch the video to learn more about this partnership for financial inclusion in the Philippines.
3. Creating more empathy in education
Habi Education Lab is a design and research group that works in various contexts, from early childhood education to adult learning and development. Named after the Filipino act of weaving indigenous fabrics, Habi Education Lab strives to develop projects that are synergistic in nature, locally inspired, intentionally designed, sustainable, and ambitiously innovative. So far, they’ve worked on projects in teacher development, innovation bootcamps, and designed nationwide materials for Filipino public schools. We’re excited to see what else comes out of this exciting new education lab that envisions an education sector that “leverages empathy, learning science, data, and design thinking for continuous improvement and innovation.”
4. Improving Sanitation for Rural Populations
In rural areas of the Philippines, 31% of people do not have access to improved sanitation. Following the devastating impact of the Typhoon Yolanda, the Department of Health and the Philippines WASH Cluster partners developed the Philippines Approach to Total Sanitation (PhATS) to assist the national government develop safe disposal of human waste, promote health and hygiene practices, and create a phased and holistic approach to sanitation development. Design thinking was used to guide product development, business model development, product promotion, and testing. The result was a great success: after only six weeks of promotional events for the latrine product, over 1,200 orders were placed. In addition to private community orders, some sanitation entrepreneurs were awarded a contract for the municipality of Giporlos, Western Samar, to construct and install 400 toilets using funding provided by UNICEF directly to the municipality.
Interested in building your organisation’s capacity to find new growth opportunities and deliver on them? Looking for workshops and training to help your team deliver on innovation? Tandemic has everything from 2-day design thinking workshops to innovation incubators and sustainable transformation programmes to train innovation catalysts within larger organisations. In addition to training, Tandemic helps organisations design new services, products, and interventions that solve business and social challenges in new ways.
Looking for design thinking or human-centred design workshops in Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia? Have a look at some of Tandemic’s programmes.
