HCD Class 1 - Reading

[Related Links of This Week]

• Class Home Page
• Before You Begin
• Class Material Download
• TOOLKITS for Design Thinking: http://www.designkit.org/
• The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, read pages 09-25
• The Stanford d.school Bootcamp Bootleg
• More notes about the class

What is HCD?

• What Can the Approach Be Used For?
• The Design Process: Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation
• 7 Mindsets

Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions and find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. they consider what we call the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently, think differently, and consume differently.

Local Experiences Disclose More Opportunities

Shanti and Naandi treatment center

 What failed here was that the centre forgot to make considerations on what the end users, such as Shanti would want. First of all the distribution quantity was fixed and too large - to transport back and forth for someone like Shanti. So even though she needed it, she opted out of this. And similarly others in the area might have opted out of the centre’s option to provide treated water at a cost. So in this case it was very crucial for them to have first made the necessary survey by interviewing the end users needs and then tailoring their solution by designing it to suit the needs of a large number of people accordingly. 

 So what we can learn from this is the importance of interviewing and doing a user reasearch before going ahead and designing something without that insight into the lives and needs of the people who are ultimately going to be using the solution. 

Malnutrition in Vietnam

• The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyed four local Quong Xuong communities in the province of Than Hoa and asked for examples of “very, very poor” families whose children were healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking, and serving behaviors of these six families, called “positive deviants,” and found a few consistent yet rare behaviors. Parents of well-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snails from rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greens from sweet potatoes. Although these foods were readily available, they were typically not eaten because they were considered unsafe for children. The positive deviants also fed their children multiple smaller meals, which allowed small stomachs to hold and digest more food each day.
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• The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positive deviants to offer cooking classes to the families of children suffering from malnutrition. By the end of the program’s first year, 80 percent of the 1,000 children enrolled in the program were adequately nourished. In addition, the effort had been replicated within 14 villages across Vietnam.

The Sternin’s Positivie Deviance Initiative – observations made at Vietnam in relation to the malnutrition issue among the village children there. 

Positive Deviances – closely observe what is working for any positively deviant sample of the whole that is under observation to determine what distinguishes it from the rest and identify a quality, behaviour or practice or attribute that gives it the positive advantage over the rest of subject under consideration/ observation. Recognize a pattern in the positive deviant samples observed to determine and arrive at what’s working well and setting apart those samples from among the rest.

Mosquito Nets in Ghana

• One program that might have benefited from design thinking is mosquito net distribution in Africa. The nets are well designed and when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria.  The World Health Organization praised the nets, crediting them with significant drops in malaria deaths in children under age 5: a 51 percent decline in Ethiopia, 34 percent decline in Ghana, and 66 percent decline in Rwanda.
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•  The way that the mosquito nets have been distributed, however, has had unintended consequences.  In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnant women and mothers with children under age 5. These women can readily pick up free nets from local public hospitals. For everyone else, however, the nets are difficult to obtain. When we asked a well-educated Ghanaian named Albert, who had recently contracted malaria, whether he slept under a mosquito net, he told us no—there was no place in the city of Tamale to purchase one. Because so many people can obtain free nets, it is not profitable for shop owners to sell them. But hospitals are not equipped to sell additional nets, either.
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• As Albert’s experience shows, it’s critical that the people designing a program consider not only form and function, but distribution
• channels as well.

The Origin of Design Thinking

By 2001, ideo was increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed far afield from traditional design. A health care foundation asked us to help restructure its organization, a century-old manufacturing company wanted to better understand its clients, and a university hoped to create alternative learning environments to traditional classrooms. This type of work took IDEO from designing consumer products to designing consumer experiences.

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives. The reason to call these spaces, rather than steps, is that they are not always undertaken sequentially. 

Examples of the Working Process of HCD

Inspiration-Rwanda

• A better starting point is for designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, school- children, and community health workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve as interpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as having partners make introductions to communities, helping build credibility quickly and ensuring understanding. Through “homestays” and shadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkers become embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for.
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• 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, life- changing sum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold and the women prioritize their planning for the community.

Ideation-InnoCentive

• InnoCentive provides a good example of how design thinking can result in hundreds of ideas. InnoCentive has created a Web site that allows people to post solutions to challenges that are defined by InnoCentive members, a mix of nonprofits and companies. More than 175,000 people—including scientists, engineers, and designers from around the world—have posted solutions.

Implementation-VisionSpring

• VisionSpring, a low-cost eye care provider in India, provides a good example of how prototyping can be a critical step in imple- mentation. VisionSpring, which had been selling reading glasses to adults, wanted to begin providing comprehensive eye care to chil- dren. VisionSpring’s design effort included everything other than the design of the glasses, from marketing “eye camps” through self-help groups to training teachers about the importance of eye care and transporting kids to the local eye care center.
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• Working with VisionSpring, ideo designers prototyped the eye- screening process with a group of 15 children between the ages of 8 and 12. The designers first tried to screen a young girl’s vision through traditional tests. Immediately, though, she burst into tears— the pressure of the experience was too great and the risk of failure too high. In hopes of diffusing this stressful situation, the design- ers asked the children’s teacher to screen the next student. Again, the child started to cry. The designers then asked the girl to screen her teacher. She took the task very seriously, while her classmates looked on enviously. Finally, the designers had the children screen each other and talk about the process. They loved playing doctor and both respected and complied with the process.

Case Study: Clean Team

• cleanteamtoilets.com

Inspiration

“Because sanitation is a systems level challenge we knew that we couldn’t just design Clean Team’s toilet,” says team

member and designer Danny Alexander.  After six weeks of talking with sanitation experts, shadowing a toilet operator, digging into the history of sanitation in Ghana, and talking to scads of Ghanaians, key insights about what the toilet should look like and how waste should be collected emerged.

Ideation

This was a lightning-fast phase in the project, one that leapt from learnings to prototypes in seven weeks. After brainstorming with its clients and everyday Ghanaians, the team determined which direction to take and began testing its ideas. What aesthetics did people like? Would a urine-diverting toilet work? Were people comfortable with servicemen coming into their homes? Where in the home would the toilet go? Can you design a toilet that can only be emptied at a waste management facility?

Though the team had a hunch about how the service would have to work, they put the idea to test by running a prototype. By enacting even just a portion of the eventual Clean Team service, the designers could learn how people would react not just to toilets in their homes, but also to others emptying them. Once potential subscribers experienced what it meant to have a full toilet, and how involved proper waste disposal would be, their desires changed.

Implementation

Once the service offerings, and look and feel of the toilet were more or less fleshed out, WSUP ran a live prototype of the Clean Team service. Because tooling for toilet manufacture is so expensive, WSUP used off-the-shelf cabin toilets, which approximated about 80% of the toilets that IDEO.org would design to test the service. They got great results, went ahead with manufacturing.

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• More notes about the class