First Steps First in Human-Centered Design Thinking

Primary author: Mucsi Blanka

Co-curators : Lilla Dóra Mező, Clémence Hamard, Valentine Castella, Raluca-Ioana Stănciulescu

On the 24th of November, we started to learn Human-Centered Design Thinking methodology and we started implementing it right away in our Social Innovation- SDGs-related projects. We realized we can be effective if we are learning by doing. We set up a mindset, and created the sketch of our methods, our inspirations, we framed and implemented our Design Challenge, a project plan and we built The Impacters team.

First, if you would like to get familiar with our team and our work, we can tell you our design challenge in one sentence: protect women against domestic violence. If you are reading this article, you are maybe a victim or you would like to educate yourself about domestic violence, which is one of the most urgent issues worldwide, because each day and in every country of the world, women suffer from domestic violence.

It is hard to solve this problem because domestic violence is one of the most invisible abuses due to the patriarchal society, the cultural differences, the lack of technology in some regions. Our goal is for every woman to feel safe in their home. We also want to raise awareness and educate men and women about this issue. So how might we protect women from domestic violence? We find out some possible solutions which can help us, and victims, to face and solve the problem. First, we have to put in place programs for policemen taking care of the victims. Then we can educate the youngest through conferences and interventions of volunteers. Finally, we can allow women to access self-defense classes for free live and through a website.

After we realized how urgent the issue we face, we asked ourselves: how might we educate people to reduce violence against women in Greece? We created a plan and marked out a deadline: we wanted to set up our association until the end of the semester, at the end of January. We set up our team: Raluca is our webmaster, Valentine is our community manager, Dora makes draws and videos, Clémence and Blanka are publicists. We realized that we need a graphic designer, a webmaster, psychologists, and volunteers (NGOs, victims, etc.), a self-defense trainer, and a communication or publicity agency to reach our audience more effectively. We are calculated with approximately 18,000 euros per year. We are pleased to announce on this day we could start our association.

Link to our PowerPoint presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y2GP48s6qxSJyQ37garLOGkg9VzGIu9dW6PXj1PX1t0/edit?usp=sharing

To learn more about our project, you can use the following links!

Our website: https://stanciulescuraluca.wixsite.com/womenimpacters

Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/women_impacters/

The Impacters team members: Valentine Castella, Clémence Hamard, Raluca Stănciulescu, Lilla Dora Mezo, Blanka Mucsi.