How I ended up doing Design Thinking with fishermen in India
At the beginning of the year, I found myself in India talking to fishermen about communication and safety at sea. Quite a big change from my daily office hours.
Rewinding a bit, a few years back I applied for a voluntary assignment called IBM Corporate Service Corps. For one month, teams of IBMers would work side-by-side with communities from developing countries to address the challenges they are facing.
In my case, the assignment was set for February — March 2017 in the city of Vijayawada, in India. 11 team members were split into smaller project teams and started working on the projects allocated to our group. Some of these projects were on addressing farming challenges, empowering women, and eliminating rural poverty.
OUR PROJECT
As for me, together with two other colleagues, I think we were the lucky winners who were tasked with the project of a one-month immersive experience into the fishing community.
OBJECTIVE
We had to review existing marine communication strategies and design a communications framework to help the Fisheries Department guide stakeholders when disseminating information to the fishermen, with the goal of ensuring safety at sea.
In a few words our client, the Government’s Fisheries Department, wanted us to bring together all the pieces of the communication puzzle. They wanted to have a cohesive view of who was providing what information when and the current roadblocks that would need to be removed to increase safety at sea longer term.
THE PROCESS
Where do we start? The answer came in the form of a question from our client “So, should we start field trips tomorrow? Is 5 am ok?”
From here, Design Thinking seemed as the natural direction. As a human-centered approach, Design Thinking talks first about getting to know the people you are designing a solution for. It also helped to have a Design Thinking facilitator in our group who guided us through the process. So we structured our work in this format, following the three pillars: OBSERVE, REFLECT and MAKE. Or as IDEO calls them: INSPIRATION, IDEATION, IMPLEMENTATION.
1. First, we went out to the field and gathered information and were inspired with ideas by talking to people about their struggles and needs
2. Then we reflected on what we saw and hear and we generated ideas
3. Finally, we proposed a strategy.
Disclaimer: what comes up next may not be the perfect representation of a Design Thinking project but rather, a way in which the Design Thinking framework helped us carry out our project.
INSPIRATION
I didn’t know much about fishermen and their lifestyle when we started the project. The first week on the ground was dedicated to inspiration in the form of research and field trips.
We used methods like in-depth and group interviews with our fishermen and expert interviews with some local NGOs and harbor officials. We started by visiting different harbors. Here is where we conducted in-depth and group interviews with the fishermen. Talking to them in the context of where they live and work allowed us to understand their struggles. We spent a couple of hours observing/shadowing the fishermen and having them walk us through the following daily tasks:
- Preparation for a fishing journey with the focus on what information they need and how they access that information now
- The sea journey with a focus on how they communicate shore to vessel and vessel to vessel
- How they use mobile phones, GPS, and other marine communication tools to communicate.
- We also used scenarios like “Imagine if you had engine problems, how do you ask for help?” or “We are at sea and a big storm is coming, how do you ask for help?” These scenarios allowed us to see the reality of daily life much clearer.
Answers like “We take care of each other at sea, we are like a village on water” or “When the storm hits we sit down and pray to the gods” underlined two things: community is strong and tradition is important.
Expert interviews were conducted with NGOs involved in the current communication process. We discovered two main players who were sending out SMSs (text and voice in local language) with weather, ocean and potential fishing zones updates. They were also providing phones, SIM cards, a 24/7 line, and training sessions in the villages.
Another data collection method used was the photo journal. Photos are a powerful way to capture glimpses of everyday life and helped us tell the story better.
All the information gathered from the people we’d spoken to and all the data collection methods we used helped us identify key insights:
Fishermen want weather, ocean, and potential fishing zones data and want to be alerted when they approach the international waters border.
This information is available with restrictions: within 10 km from the coastline and when weather is good. The reach is also dependent on whether or not fishermen provided their phone numbers.
Education and technology skills are critical in deciphering information; Illiteracy represents a big issue.
To receive the information sent from shore, equipment needs to be in good condition (waterproof, functional, and good battery).
Signal limitations are part of a bigger safety strategy imposed by Central Government.
IDEATION
As we concluded our field trips we got together as a team and started to organize what we saw and heard. This phase involved a lot of “post-its on the walls” activities. We were looking for tools to help us structure the vast amount of raw data which was stored in our minds, on the laptops, and in our agendas. Ex: Notes, photos, impressions, and quotes.
We used stakeholder mapping, empathy map and “as is scenarios” to organize the information.
Through the empathy map, we built our fishermen persona. Structuring information on 1) thinking and feeling; 2) seeing and hearing; 3) saying and doing; 4) fears, frustrations, and obstacles; 5) hopes and aspirations helped us get inside the hearts and minds of our fishermen.
MEET THE FISHERMEN PERSONA
Males, 21–55 years old, spending most of the time at sea, dependent on the catches and living in fishermen villages.
Having a strong sense of community and respect for authorities.
Low education, sometimes illiterate, which influences the way information needs to be sent out so that it is deciphered and used.
No rejecters of technologies if they can see the value in using this. The young generation is more likely to adopt technology and teach others in the village.
Strong believers in the traditional ways of fishing and spotting danger. Relying on their intuition and experience to keep themselves safe and to find fish.
As is scenario
To uncover areas of improvement we recreated the way information flows during a journey at sea. As we did this, areas of improvement started to surface. We grouped these areas of improvement into 1) silo communication, 2) technical issues, 3) knowledge and skills issues, 4) government regulations.
On these, we mapped short, medium, long term solutions.
- Small term solutions were in the form of having one person to coordinate the entire communication system and the work with the NGOs. Reduce silo work, infuse collaboration. Also extend the reach by collecting phone numbers from as many fishermen as possible.
- Midterm solutions were in the form of working with mobile phone providers to increase the signal on the coastline.
- Long terms solutions were in the form of satellite data usage, promoting an educational system which combines general education (reading, writing) with practical skills (fishing skills).
IMPLEMENTATION
Due to the time constraints, we didn’t cover the prototyping phase in our project. We closed the project by providing an end-to-end view on how communication happens right now. We also uncovered gaps and proposed a set of solutions to help reduce these.
LESSONS LEARNED
Four weeks of assignment went by in a blink of an eye but the lessons are still making waves.
On one hand, I felt that my work means something for someone. As small as it may be, we contributed to something beyond the 9–5 tasks and that’s a wonderful and hard to explain feeling
Secondly, this experience opened the door to Design Thinking. I started learning about Design Thinking, reached out to people and getting involved in projects. By acting as the User Researcher I was able to bring those research skills down from the attic, polish them and start using them again. Was happy to realise that’s still something I enjoy doing….just look at this big smile on my face!
