Do Your Homework, Children*

Before designing anything.

*If you haven’t watched Paris is Burning, go watch!

Here’s the tightrope you’ll forever walk in Girl-Centred Design: going far enough into the nuance and detail while not getting stuck in weird black holes of never-ending questions and data gaps. We’ve learnt the hard way that a design sprint is only as good as the work done beforehand. That’s why one of our Manifesto principles is ‘Do the Right Thing’.

Once upon a time, I inherited a project in a protracted crisis about a highly taboo subject. The team was under resourced, so they’d brought in an external agency to help. By the time I joined the project, the agency was a week away from getting on a flight to run a blended research and design sprint with girls and young women. My first question to the agency was ‘what research have you done about this challenge, the girls and young women experiencing it, the existing solutions and the opportunity for disruption?’ There was dead silence on the line. And then, one of their researchers said: ‘We will do that there’.

Dear reader, if you ever hear this, know that it spells doom. In the end, we spent a lot of time and money, and potentially risked the well-being of the girls and young women we worked with, for literally nothing. The things we learnt during the 2-week blended sprint we could have learnt before getting on the flight. The ‘ideas’ that resulted were unusable because they were not anchored in a nuanced, profound understanding of the lived experiences of the challenge. We could have been much more effective and efficient with girls and young women’s time, we could have provided them with real value during the sprint and we would have had a better chance of ideating disruptive solutions if we had actually taken the time to do our homework. Honestly, it still hurts.

So, since that day forward, we diligently do our work. Doing our homework means investing enough time, money and brain power into understanding how our innovation challenge exists in the world and how it affects girls and young women to the best of our ability before working directly with them and their communities. By doing this, we ensure that we can

A. minimise the time we ask girls and young women to spend away from their daily responsibilities when working with us,

B. ensure we use our time with girls and young women most effectively, doing the hardest work in an early-stage project (i.e ideating and validating),

C. ensure we use our resources (staff, time, and money) most efficiently,

D. ensure we anticipate the safety and safeguarding risks properly and have solid mitigation plans,

E. ensure we provide real value to girls and young women during our interactions with them.

Indeed, doing our homework means increasing our chances of success.

So, what’s this homework, you ask? Elementary, my dear Watson(s): good design research. If you’ve seen the double diamond before, this is the first stage of divergence or discovery.

The end goal is to learn as much as possible about the challenge, the opportunity, and the people and generate questions to answer and insights to validate with girls and young women and their communities. During this process, we use desk-based and qualitative research methodologies to move from the general and abstract toward the specific and tangible. Generally speaking, this is how it goes:

· We explore the 5 Ws of the challenge: What, Who, When, Where, Why.

· We start to learn about the girls and young women we seek to serve: demographics, intersectional identities, living context (including physical and social spaces), gatekeepers, etc.

· We explore how the challenge affects girls and young women and how they’re currently dealing with it: governance, regulatory frameworks, behaviours and practices, power structures, technology, services and products they’re using, etc.

· Create a system map: a visualisation of the current situation.

You may need to do a few rounds of exploration before you reach the point where you are confident you know enough about the challenge; you may come up some ideas of where in the challenge system you should intervene for impact. You may also get a good idea of the risks and barriers to success for your project.

Think about proxy problems and populations here: there may not be a lot out there about your specific challenge or the specific group of girls or young women you’re designing for, but 9 times out of 10 you will find proxies for both.

What about sources? go for a mix of government, intergovernmental, and academic publications, plus journalistic sources, and case studies. We also do expert interviews, and semi-structured interviews with girls and young women, adult power holders and gatekeepers (or proxies). The aim is to get a thorough understanding of the lived experiences of the challenge and available solutions before the team work directly with the girls and young women they seek to serve.

So, what happens after our homework is finished? This is where it gets interesting. We take everything we (think) we’ve learned and we validate it by doing design research directly in the places and with the people we seek to serve. We like to keep things fun so we do a minimal number of interviews, and focus instead on ethnographic-inspired methodologies as well as action and play-based ones. We often use chaperoned walkabouts where everyone pretends to be journalists, coached diary activities (using photos, Legos, clay, etc), participatory observations, role playing or music-based activities. This work will then become our foundational insights and design principles as we move into ideation.

Try these tips out and let us know how it goes in the comments!

P.S: What do we mean when we say we ‘add value’ through every interaction with girls and young women? It goes far beyond the promise of an eventual new programme or initiative, or just listening to their stories; it means actually seeding something important through our interactions: new knowledge, skills, relationships with their peers, confidence, access to services AND having lots of fun together. What it actually is we define together with the girls and young women we’re working with on each specific project.