Professional Approach to Projects and the People Involved — Part 2
Designing for a Societal Context
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic, it is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty but also compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.” A quote by Howard Zinn cited by Wilmi Dippenaar.
Kind of following the tradition from Part 1: Key to enhanced team dynamics, I quoted one of the points brought by one of our speakers, Wilmi Dippenaar who is the founder of the “Seven Passes Initiative” in South Africa. In the last article, I spoke about my reflection on her talk. In this blog, I would like to cover another talk that was held by Rachit Shah.
Rachit Shah is a designer who has experience working in medical and social issue design. He has worked with multiple Non-Government Organizations around the world and in this talk, he provides his insights on the design process in a social context and its implementation. He started off with a background in Medical Device Design and soon branched out into Primary Healthcare Service and System Design. Eventually, he became a design consultant in many NGOs. I decided to mention his background in this blog as this would be my aspiration as well, if possible.
So this talk, Rachit focused on two projects of his. The first was about his work with “Strong Minds, Uganda”. Here, their teams’ primary focus was addressing depression and other mental health issues via group therapy. One of the first things done by Rachit and his colleague was to go into the environment and start with a fresh mind. Changing the space and environment changes the experience of the people even if the problem is the same, the cause has been different. Hence, this leads to all the previous analyses for another similar scenario being redundant and not usable. It is better to start with a fresh mindset on the issue. This also leads the way to clearly being able to see the issues with an open mindset rather than allowing the people who are used to the situation and have worked over there for a long time. This point is very relatable in our cases as well as our team is completely new to this NGO’s work and we are trying to analyse and help. The only slight issue we have is that we are not able to be there in person but instead have other students from India working with us to provide us with the in-person information.
Some of the other information that I found very useful was the type of research conducted. Though we have done a lot of research, I feel this can also be equally used as the deliverable in our structure as it can be implemented in different ways. And it can be used by me personally for other research. They conducted an initial test of making the students answer some simple questions which revealed a lot like “Draw the people in your house and your relationship with them”, and “What are the 5 things that make you happy?”, “What are the 5 things that are problems for you?”, “how do those problems affect you?”. These questions opened up a lot of the information necessary for the study like the students felt their teachers didn’t understand them and their family abandoned them. This also had to be conducted such that they didn’t feel judged or analyzed.
These were then categorized into the themes of happiness signs, mental health issues, adolescent challenges, teacher challenges, program challenges, and group challenges. The designed structure was an advice-providing group therapy session where the students gave each other advice. But there were also advisors or counselors prepared in the background to give advice in situations that were too complex for other students to give advice to. they had broken down the program over 12 weeks, going from simple to complex. Also initially they made the students write down and anonymously have someone else read out the scenario and give advice.
There were also other games created where there were emotions provided and the adolescents could provide experiences based on that. Another insightful instance was the beads test where they made these youth pick up beads at random and asked why they picked it up. Some shared that it was their favorite color or their mood but others even shared triggering stories. Initially, they also made them write and someone else read it out for recording and then played those in these sessions to keep anonymity and also hearing to the situation humanizes it more than reading it.
There were multiple other such tests spread over the 12 weeks of the program along with the PHQ-9, depression tests given to the adolescents. To also balance it out, they had a mix of students from schools and youth who had dropped out due to issues. Rachit and his team also realized that the main resistance came from the teachers rather than the parents. But to reason them out, they showed results of the student’s improvements in this program instead of just words to go against their beliefs. Additionally, to make the participants comfortable, the team researching also participated in the activities along with them to gain their trust in the first few weeks. Another thing they did was introduce themselves as foreigners and ask them to explicitly inform their daily lives and schedules openly to gain an understanding.
Even though I went out of order, I feel all these analyses were extremely useful to apply in our project as well.
The other project Rachit mentioned was working in a situation in Jordan to help people with PTSD and other mental health issues. The team had to start off fresh as the situation was completely different as people there had gone through a lot of different scenarios like death and loss and poverty. It was started again with the mindset “We don’t know”.
In this project, they were trying to reach many people over a wider region and so they decided to use the method of storytelling over social media to assist them. They designed a few characters/ personas who went through different situations and faced issues similar to the audience. Then they tried to post this only and gained information from the user’s input. The personals were created like real-life characters with backgrounds, challenges, a journey, services accessed, needs met, and primary and secondary challenges.
Here they again had a series of storylines and activities designed over a certain number of weeks. Their main goal was to expand the number of people seeking mental health help. So their forms of storytelling in these campaigns ranged from gaining insight from the primary help providers — the pharmacists in this location as the people went through a lot of physical pains and issues that couldn’t be cured with any medication. The pharmacist agreed that many could be possible mental health issues.
They started off with posters as social media messages. The posters spoke in the language of the community and addressed what they wanted to hear and not demean the stigmas and culture. Using local language and terminologies, they found ways people to support their friends and family by saying “We know you are doing it but there is a structured way to improve your impact on the people facing issues.” They taught the people the method of the 3 L’s — Look, Listen, and Link. As they had split the campaign into weeks they were able to address issues like:
- stress (not overthinking or anxiety)
- sadness and demotivation (not mild depression)
- somatic symptoms (issues with sleep/ digestive issues/ headaches and backaches)
- types of services available — to bring all the topics together
- provide care to friends and family
By avoiding the use of psychological terms like mental health or depression and instead using local wordings like stress and sadness, it avoids triggering people and also facing discrimination due to stigma. The type of content also varied with the weeks of the campaign:
- Week 1: introduce the characters with their stories. Ask the audience how they feel like and what they should do
- Week 2: expert videos
- Week 3: comic strips to show scenarios
- Week 4: Signs and symptoms
- Week 5: Ask the audience themselves to suggest the characters
- Week 6: Normalize Mental Health issues by providing actual statistics
- Week 7: Quiz the audience
Over these weeks, they also provided ways in which people can seek help by any means like telehealth, in-person visits, event attending, and social media. This also highlighted the importance of the community’s role in helping the people address their issues and also the designers on where to focus.
As observed, Rachit provided innumerable resources to be able to apply to our own project as well and we will try to implement a few at least from this. This is what all I could take away from both the speakers and I’m excited to learn more from others.
