Sex Education for Gen-Z & Gen-T pt. I
A case study using Design Thinking methodology
Part I: Research
I’m 32 years old and I’m unable to open a condom in time, and when I do it it’s broken or the “magic” is gone. I feel so embarrassed buying them at the drugstore that I end up borrowing them from friends’ friends not caring about the quality it is made of. My name is George Costanza, the bald and unemployed very best friend of a comedian you might know by the name of Jerry Seinfeld.
In my case, being a cisgender heterosexual white male in Spain haven’t put me through very hard situations as other people have been, except for my teenage shyness, which compared with it is a littleness.
Putting Seinfeld and my background asides, maybe most of Spanish teens (and even adults) can’t open a condom properly. Or maybe they don’t even use it because they wrongly believe they can’t have or transmit a STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease), or maybe they withdraw thinking there are no chances of getting pregnant. Maybe they don’t know what’s the difference between transexual and transgender, or what means pansexuality or gray asexuality. We can’t verify those hypothesis right now.
Sex & Emotional Education in Spain is not mandatory since 2013 because a conservative educational new law, so every school and high school had to decide how to teach it, if they actually wanted to. This law is still active, so our big challenge in this Design Thinking Project is How to improve (or fix) the experience in Sex and Emotional Education in Spain for Generation-Z and Generation-T. Sex and Emotional Education (SEd from now on) is a vast subject that englobes a lot of elements at every level, as shown below.
Oh my, this is big. But, how is Spain situated in SEd terms compared to other countries in the UE, and what can we learn from them. For example, the Norwegian Public Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) broadcast a SEd program for kids and teens, making them available on YouTube. If you want to take a look, just click here.
As you can see, in Spain we lack the same fundamentals as in Italy, and are way delayed compared to other UE countries like Germany or Norway. France or Portugal, our geographical neighbors, are improving while we are going backwards.
We have too many questions on how is SEd perceived, understood, how is the actual situation and how we will approach it, even having all this info so far. To help with it, all the team together came up with a range of questions we should focus our research, or at least, know before going further. This process is called Research Questions
Ok, that’s a lot of questions, so, where do we start?
This is where we needed an expert input, so we decided to get in touch with Dr. José Ramón Ubieto, a psychoanalyst and teacher at the UOC (Open University of Catalonia), who co-wrote the book From dad to iPad. Family and Internet in the digital era and have an interesting blog where he shares his thoughts and press interviews.
Sexuality is not taught, is experimented — Dr. Ubieto
He was superbly nice and allowed us to give him a call with so little anticipation. We interviewed him about this and other issues regarding SEd, like the pornography usage between teenagers (75% of boys of16 years and under have consumed porn, according to Europa Press Data).
Here are the most important insights from the interview:
- Teens do not ask their parents about sex. This is a subject mostly developed outside the family: sexuality in the family is often related to some kind of abuse.
- The adults have abandoned this (SEd) issue, they want this to be reduced to a technical subject, which produces a lack of emotional values and thereon violence and abuse (towards women or minorities).
- Sexuality is not taught, is experimented.
- Porn is dangerous because normalizes fantasy violent behaviors that leads to a standardization of how is the only way of having sex.
We know how bad the SEd situation is, but we need to know better and how do behave the main characters of this issue: the teenagers. For doing so, we firstly ran a survey for teens with ages compressed between 12 and 18 years which received 46 answers. Not a big amount, but taking in consideration all the difficulties studying this subject, we could extract some important information:
- 3 out of 4 think it’s important that SEd should be taught in school.
- 5/6 think the SEd class they received was interesting or very interesting.
- 2/3 have used internet to solve a sexual related doubt, but only half of them considered the info interesting or credible.
After taking a look at all the info obtained at this point, this means an entire generation of youngsters have a lack of sexual and affection awareness and knowledge that they have fulfilled through friends, family and internet.
Even all this information is important, the best way to have a valuable feedback and find the main pain-points is through stories, personal stories. We took all this data and squeezed it to produce the correct questions to ask teenagers between 16 and 17 years in three interviews in person:
The information they provide us was, by difference, the most valuable of all the data we retrieved. Their shocking stories and how they expressed them produced a great effect in our team, some of them were hard to imagine that still happen in a First-world country that considers itself progressive and liberal. After leaving the interviewees we instantly felt surprised and excited: we connected with this generation and how they approach sexuality and affection, in a way we couldn’t imagine before these interviews.
Personally, the feedback we received from them articulated most of the posterior decisions in order to design the prototype. But first, we created four Personas and their User Journey: 3 teens and a mother with issues regarding SEd. I will show you two of them, those who comprise the main ages and problems we found during all the previous research: Laura and Adrián. I’m pretty sure there’s some of us in each of them.
From the Personas bio and their User Journeys we locate their main pain-points and reformulate as Insights. Every pain-point means an opportunity for us: a chance to find a fix for this situation and make our product/project/idea viable.
So, now it’s time to get all the important research questions, data from surveys, insights from Dr. Ubieto, feedback, personal stories and pain-points of the interviewees and our User Persona. Thanks to this filtering process we think of ideas that might solve the higher amount possible of issues.
After this, we had two ways of approaching the challenge: via the Educational and Ethic Pornography, or via a platform where teenagers could solve their SEd doubts and receive professional help from psychologists and sexologists.
We decided to focus on the second one and concentrate all the items and characteristics into the Value Proposal.
At this point, all these elements are reformulated and included in the sentence that will define our application:
Our multi-device app is focused on video media containing tutorials, educational talks, interviews and documentaries. In addition, our users will have a forum and a chat moderated and conducted by medical professionals to assist them personally and, more important, anonymously. This app is oriented to kids and teens between 6 and 24 years along with parents. The content will be adapted for every age range (6 to 12, and 13 to 24), and the parents will have access to the video media, with no chance of entering the anonymous forum or any chat.
Said this we scripted a possible use of the app to see and show how our app could be used. Thanks to the amazing drawing of Alex, our solution came to live with this storyboard.
So, here ends the Research part of this challenge that, beyond all the knowledge acquired in every procedure, showed us how this Generation-Z and Generation-Alfa (or Generation-T, for touch-screen) have adapted to a very important lack of SEd in their schools. Also we have seen teens behaving very responsible with their actions, tolerant with other sexualities/identities, very focused but at the same time with all the energy and funny of these ages.
By the way, this could not be made without the beautiful and hard-working friends of the project team, source of many good ideas and funny moments working together (including helping me getting through a rough day), are Sonia Guillén, Alex Velasco Mesas and Isabella D’Ippoliti.
And thanks to our teachers/guides/shamans Pere Feliu and Núria Gomez, from the NEOLAND UX/UI Bootcamp in Barcelona.
