Human Centered Design Thinking — BeyondRace Team

For this project, we decided to base it on IDEO’s guidelines for human centered thinking. Based on this, we created a project to better define our goals and our missions by the IDEO’s “blueprint” of human centered design thinking.

To do that, we first began with defining the problem that we are going to solve as an organization. After a lot of speculation, we decided that our main goal was to try and solve the problem of injustice against people of color and also support the black lives matter movement in any way we can from Greece.

We did not only have to define our mission, but also broke it up into smaller pieces, as to have and more specific more easily achievable goals , like , fight racial discrimination, end police violence, offer equal job opportunities and, lastly, make Greek people aware of their own privilege and how to use it.

Based on this kind of thinking, we created an event friendly to the current situation of the global pandemic. The event took place on Zoom, an online platform. Speakers were present from the comfort of their own homes and talked about the topics that we mentioned before and that we identify as our mission. The event took place on Saturday the 12th of December at 7:00 o’clock. The special guests representing the Afro — Greek community were Giannis and Thanasis Antentokoumpo.

Now as for the details of that event, we planned the stuff and the budget we would need to make it a reality. When it came to staff, other than our two guests, we had a full crew of people capable of discussing and controlling the flow of the conversation. That staff consisted of the coordinators being the members of the team, the main speakers, our speaker and conversation starters, our two guests and of course, since it took place online, an IT expert. And also, when it came to budget, it was the bare minimum with the calculated expenses being the salaries of the staff, the license to hold a zoom meeting and the fees for the advertising agency that we used to promote our event.

We really hope that you joined our event and that you learnt something from it. If you did, please let us know and give us some feedback, it would be very much appreciated.

Click here to see our full project

BeyondRace Team Members: Eirini Samoli, Efthymis Kontos, Melina Makridi

Special thanks to our professor and mentor Mrs. Betty Tsakarestou