Blog Post 1 — Open IDEO
Human Centered Design (HCD) is a very interesting topic which initially felt very broad to me. Nevertheless after reading about IDEO and their approach it began to make more sense. Their three step approach: Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation, makes it straightforward and coherent to understand and frame out a human centered design approach to basically any problem. Although I believe HCD has a very strong ‘in person’ component, we can definitely leverage technology and all its incredible power to potentialize this impactful framework; OpenIDEO is probably the best example of it. With an online approach, we can leverage network effects and globalization in order to get more great minds to participate in the inspiration and ideation processes. Anybody can contribute, regardless of the geographical location, time zone and other constraints which the offline world might have. With an online ecosystem, we can leverage the different backgrounds, cultures, experiences, etc in order to improve and increase the quality of inspiration and ideation. Implementation will require more of a physical, (in person) interaction, but with a strong foundation of inspiration and implementation this final step could probably be even more successful.
Thinking about how the online and offline aspects complement each other, if I were to run a challenge on Open IDEO it would be aimed at redesigning financial inclusion at rural zones in developing countries. In the USA, ~95%1 of the population has a bank account and cash is rarely used; in contrast, in developing countries such as Morocco less than 30% of the population has a bank account.2 I believe that having access to financial tools and knowledge is one of the best ways to decrease poverty and provide more opportunities to those who currently lack any source of financial freedom. I believe an Open IDEO challenge which helps redefine and reimagine how rural and unbank citizens who have never used a financial institution in their lives can be integrated into this system and benefit from it, could be very powerful.
Bringing people and ideas from all over the globe to this online challenge, will probably benefit from complementing different backgrounds, expertise, experiences, etc and hence try to find the best possible solutions (some which might even already be out there) and figure out what is the best possible way to tackle this issue. Combining different ideas and contextual understandings will allow the project to set a foundation based on experiences and a human centered approach which aims to use the best from ‘each world’ and put it together into a working project with a specific goal in mind.
