If you haven't already, check out OpenIDEO:

To become a place where good ideas gain momentum, OpenIDEO depends on participation — your inspirations, his comments, her concepts, our design process. It's these efforts, these big and small moments of sharing and collaboration, that make this platform a dynamic resource for tackling significant global challenges.

The challenge I participated in is now complete and ten final ideas were selected that the partners will seek to implement.

You can download the challenge catalogue to see the 40 shortlisted ideas that emerged during the Affordable Learning Tools and Services Challenge. You also get bonus worksheets that can help you apply a similar process to your own work.

I'm thrilled to see (and participate in) the launch of openIDEO as it reinforces the concepts covered in the Design For Social Change course and pursues similar ideas that were developed when creating Dinner With A Side of Design. From inspiration to evaluation, diverse groups can collaborate together on tough challenges with the aim of actually participating in the process of solving the posed problems. I am keen to see how it will develop and grow over time and am encouraged to see a platform that doesn't just talk about the big issues facing us but also provides the means to tangibly respond with our collective insights.

So I find myself back in Rwanda as a designer, observer, learner, muzungu, and traveler. It is all at once familiar and foreign. And all so very good. I am learning much because as per usual, I am working on something that hosts a steep learning curve. Here is the essence:

I am collaborating with a professor of international nutrition from UBC and we are here investigating various opportunities to see if they can be applied as appropriate and effective interventions for the future. The aims of the project are multifaceted. In order to address this complexity, we are meeting with key stakeholders and leaders, such as the Minister of Health, the Director General of the Rwanda Horticulture Development Authority, Rwanda Agricultural Research Institute and various others in the Ministry of Agriculture. There are more meetings to come! We are also set to meet with individuals from nutrition and health communications. We do this to ensure that we contribute to the tools already developed and complement, rather than contradict their efforts.

In the simplest terms, we are looking at the relationship between agricultural improvement/growth and nutritional impact in rural communities.

As the designer on the team, I am aiming to understand health messaging: how to do it appropriately and effectively with the ultimate goal of developing tools for behavior change and adoption in this diverse and cross-cultural context.

One of the focuses of my work will be to consider how I can apply the HCD Toolkit and related methods by adapting it to suit some of the quantitative approaches used by my colleagues. I am looking forward to sharing these ideas with those outside the field of design and seeing how they can be used to assess the community needs and aspirations (while also providing a framework for successful implementation). I am also keen to learn about their methods in order to ensure a robust and valid outcome that can be measured in their respective disciplines.

Using these methods and approaches, I am aiming to develop solutions for messaging a micronutrient to the mothers of infants/young children aged 6 mos – 2 years (who are not included in typical targets when addressing malnutrition). This messaging will run the gamut: from packaging and promotion to distribution and impact assessment (as the framework for a home-based food fortification program). From here, we are also considering how to incorporate a larger integrated approach into the current approaches to agricultural growth and nutrition impact evaluation. We’re in the formative stages but are excited about the potential (and enthusiasm from those we’ve encountered so far).

Of note is the response I get when I say, “I’m a designer.” The Minister was surprised that an art and design school could exist in an exclusive institution. The head of the research institute wanted to put me to work in their office immediately! These responses are notable because there are no design schools in Rwanda (and yet everyone acknowledges and appreciates the value of communication). Because of this, I look forward to the day I might find myself teaching courses to Rwandans that will enable them to develop these tools and messages. And as a result, I get to learn much from them when it comes to designing outside one's own borders.

Love how this reframes the process of navigating complexity: "What will we create?" instead of "What will we give up?"

I have the physical cards already but an iPhone app (for travel and the like) is just what this designer needed. What I appreciate about both versions? The special note to respect your participants:

• Approach people with courtesy  
• Identify yourself, your intent, and what you are looking for  
• Offer to compensate participants 
• Describe how you will use this information and why it's valuable
• Get permission to use the information and any photos or videos you take
• Keep all the information you gather confidential
• Let people know they can decline to answer questions or stop participating at any time 
• Maintain a nonjudgmental, relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere

Stanford Social Innovation Review recently published an article by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO. The whole article highlights the many ways that design thinking and process are being applied to complex global problems. You can download it for free here.

This quote is from the article and describes my adaptation of the HCD toolkit:

Earlier this year, Kara Pecknold, a student at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, took an internship with a women’s cooperative in Rwanda. Her task was to develop a Web site to connect rural Rwandan weavers with the world. Pecknold soon discovered that the weavers had little or no access to computers and the Internet. Rather than ask them to maintain a Web site, she reframed the brief, broadening it to ask what services could be provided to the community to help them improve their livelihoods. Pecknold used various design thinking techniques, drawing partly from her training and partly from Ideo’s Human Centered Design toolkit, to understand the women’s aspirations.

Because Pecknold didn’t speak the women’s language, she asked them to document their lives and aspirations with a camera and draw pictures that expressed what success looked like in their community. Through these activities, the women were able to see for themselves what was important and valuable, rather than having an outsider make those assumptions for them. During the project, Pecknold also provided each participant with the equivalent of a day’s wages (500 francs, or roughly $1) to see what each person did with the money. Doing this gave her further insight into the people’s lives and aspirations. Meanwhile, the women found that a mere 500 francs a day could be a significant, lifechanging sum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold and the women prioritize their planning for the community.

Human-Centered Evaluation

Some folks led a session at SoCap09 that I wish I could have been sitting in on. Twitter allows you to catch a glimpse of the topics but I would have loved to hear the dialogue beyond the 140 characters.

Two people I follow on Twitter were on this panel: Aaron Sklar & Tatyana Mamut (both work at Ideo and are connected to designing for social impact).

Here's the description:
Social investors and social entrepreneurs have been struggling for years to align on the right tools for measuring new-to-the world offerings. These offerings often take years to show results and many initiatives run the risk of stalling or failing due to lack of demonstrated progress. In addition, the evaluation of new solutions is often uncharted territory in terms of how to measure and what to measure. In this session aimed at funders and social entrepreneurs, Ideo, Jd Power and associates and Keystone will share their frameworks and experiences for creating a strategic measurement portfolio based on human centered measurement and evaluation methodologies. In the workshop portion of the session, participants will break into teams and create a human centered evaluation strategy to meet their current measurement challenges. Participants are invited to come with an evaluation challenge of a new-to-the-world initiative that they would like to work on in the workshop. The session is part of a collaboration between Ideo and Good magazine to advance dialogue about evaluation in the social sector.

Twitter began feeding these 5 principles for making change happen:
1. Put people at the center of evaluation
2. Take a systemic view
3. Navigate uncertainty
4. Zoom out to a portfolio view
5. Measure what you care about

Having pursued a focus on human-centered design in my graduate studies, I can relate to the struggle to adequately evaluate. There are so many factors that play into this! Notably, this becomes difficult when you are seeking to access evaluations from those who don't share the same language but who could benefit from your offering. Professor Ranjan at NID has a great diagram that reinforces how to keep people at the center of the evaluation by constantly revisiting the community at all stages of design. His diagram infers being present to these individuals: "You have to get your hands dirty on the ground to be able to really understand your customers' needs." (Lucky Gunasekara)

What Ranjan's diagram can't address is how you should interpret the feedback you receive in order to establish some sort of metric. It likely presumes that a conversation has occurred that will allow you to move onto next stages of evaluation. To me, this presents another reason why meaning and metrics are worth investigating. I continue to return to Jacqueline Novogratz's words in The Blue Sweater where she assesses how social programs have often created a culture of charity that don't empower people to say what they really mean. How can we access what people really think when money (or lack thereof) might affect their decision? Check the Twitter feeds under #socap09.ideo for much more on this. The diversity of discussion is worth perusing.

I'm definitely not a pro in the area of social innovation and/or its measurement. I am keen to grow in it because of the witnessed frustrations of ineffective offerings. I don't want to suggest simplistic ideas on such a far-reaching topic either; my limited experience continues to remind me that the number one principle suggested in this session is the one which will define the remainder on the list. Organizations like the ones included on this panel are asking good questions in order to link us to the broader topics of democracy, transparency and governance (for the sake of those who aren't physically present to lend their voices to their own social innovation but who are the beneficiaries of these discussions on some level).

But that's another blog entry altogether.

For more on this discussion, check out the Innovation in Evaluation forum.

An honor

I have a huge amount of respect for IDEO's work (as I've mentioned in a few blog posts) and I'm truly honored to have part of my research included in the new version of their Human-Centered Design Toolkit. This resource has offered me some great insights and I highly recommend it to any designer. As a bonus, it is open-source and completely free!

From their site:
Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people's needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

The Toolkit is divided into four sections:
The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.

The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.

The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.

The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.

The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization's existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.

If you want a printed version, they are also available for purchase.

Innovation through design presentation at Future Trends Forum

In this presentation in Madrid, Jocelyn Wyatt gives a great overview about how design can be used when approaching social sector complexities. She highlights IDEO's five principles that I find helpful in understanding the process of this type of thinking:

1) Design puts people first
2) Design thinking starts small and starts now
3) Design balances the eco-system
4) Design experiments to learn
5) Design thrives in constraints

(And at about the 13 minute mark, Jocelyn comments on my adaptation of their toolkit where I used a camera for self-documentation.)

A great article on human-centered design (that hosts a wee quote from my work with the kit in Rwanda).

Method Cards

Method Cards

View more presentations from whatidiscover. (tags: ideo design)

These method cards are brilliant ways to enhance or inspire one's design process. My cultural probes are one of the ideas that IDEO also utilizes in their work.

Big Question

Ideo has always been a hit with me. Love what they do, how they do it and then some. And I love their widget. What's your big question? I'm still working mine out but apparently I can look ahead in time to find out if someone else already wrote it. Phew.