Studio & Entrepreneurship
The interview with Dan and Nara Parry from Tectonic gave an interesting discussion on how to work on ideas that can make a difference for a service or product through understanding the problem and the audience. They made it very clear how to choose a focus point on either the problem or audience at first to help understand the product or service you wish to persevere. Their methodology is created in a number of steps to get you to the end product but overall it’s focusing on community-centred design that brings experiences to life. Every stage of this journey is constantly challenging and asking the ‘Five Why’s is a significant part of the cycle to find the answer to any solution that they apply towards. This will help in finding a clear goal and revert back to your research in creating the possibilities in your problems for the audiences. Highlighting your problems is key and the utmost effective part of dealing with a solution for your audience. Dan and Nara suggested working with the smallest of ideas to your problems because they can become a bigger solution through trial and testing from a large part of the project. You also need high-level goals to help you achieve the best possibilities so you can then facilitate collaboration with the audience and the people you wish to work with. It is key to take the smallest problem and looking at the big possibilities that may result in the best outcome where you may need to pluck away at problems that may not work or problems you may not recognise in the first place. You will at one point deliver the idea that you are looking for through the voice of the audience where you share your ideas and prototypes for people to experience through developing and making.
Human-centered design sits at the intersection of empathy and creativity
Ideo.org are a nonprofit design studio that designs products and services for organisations that are committed to putting people first. They focus on building tools that help millions learn and practice human-centered design which is their focus for any project.
They have a great open resource ‘Design Kit’ which allows users access to their platform full of practical tips on applying human-centred design context to any discovery. They also offer plenty of short courses on their methodology which is easily accessible for everyone.
IDEO.org showcase many tools to use for creating human-centred design solutions. They strive to work with the people they’re designing for to create good decisions in their making. To IDEO they see there are 3 phrases to human-centred design which are Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation which define the needs of the audience. This allows you to reveal endless possibilities in applying these areas of research to help towards your final goal through communicating with the community within service or product. This allows your ideas to be adopted and embraced by getting your ideas out there to the world, where you can mould a service or product on the demands of the audience when sharing prototype ideas.
Design Kit by Ideo.org
Design Kit has great content on human-centred design practice. The website showcases the importance and the tools of creating research that will benefit those looking to work closely with people.
There are plenty of methods you are presented in front of you that can be overwhelming. There are some filters you can narrow your search to find the right method for you. These go from inspiration to questions, which they have organised the filter to what the user needs. I believe the Design Kit can help accelerate the process for my project to focus on the people aspect which will benefit hugely towards the outcome.
Hello Mondays
Hello Monday is an agency that builds brands on their experiences by collaborating with their audience. They’re digital agencies that thrive around products, branding and experiences that truly bring out the best of brands. Their clientele range from start-up tech companies to Google, where they work their wonder on human-centred experiences to help brand and develop products and services. They base their brand on a positive start of bringing joyful collaboration to the table where they have a ‘Code of Honour’ that delivers endless possibilities to their practice which everyone can be part of their methodology in creating for the good of things.
Q Health Exchange
The Q Health Exchange is a £600,000 funding programme. Funded by the Health Foundation NHS England and NHS Improvement, it offers Q members the chance to develop project ideas and submit bids for up to £30,000 of funding. This brings people from different medical backgrounds in the NHS to work on ideas that can help benefit the needs of patients and understand areas of medical research. This incentive has great power in making a change in the health system and brings ideas together where they can be tested in workshops and other forms of products that can be passed around. So there are 30 teams that share their ideas with the Q community where then everyone can vote on what ideas they wish are a success. This allows a forum of people talking about each other’s projects to share insight on improving the service or product. It brings collective wisdom that can make big ideas become possible to work along with challenges that affect our health system and make the excitement of improving people’s lives.
Workshop Challenge
Through my research, I started to think about how I could apply some of the influence in developing my approach to human-centred design. I feel I need to start by bringing people together in workshops that can help build confidence in sharing their experiences, which may develop friendship circles on discussing the topic of loneliness.
I need to consider a programme that can help those in isolation to attend a focus group in which we can apply team building and social gatherings where people with disabilities can share their stories amongst others. This will be facilitated to help run these focus groups and help advise the groups and individuals to participate. The outcome of this will help to develop confidence in collaborating by showing the individual their strength and weakness which will contribute to a team activity. This can help develop close bonds between pairs or groups of people to express themselves in a creative environment.
The product I’ve developed is called Circle which is based around friendship circles where people will meet, gather and share ideas to create better chemistry and strong friendship groups to help each other on the journey to defeat loneliness. The individual will receive an invitation in the shape of a small box that has a friendship bracelet and QR code which you access the day before to show the location and what to bring with you for the event. The individual will follow the directions of their carers or guardian to the secret location where they will be greeted by a facilitator and their peers who will run the group session. The sessions may be to do with different activities from cooking to LEGO building where tasks can help build relationships and friendships after will have a meal and get together to further people’s friendships and talk amongst each other about what they achieved on the day. This will be followed by sharing their experience through digital platforms like social media or a website that identifies the tasks they enjoyed on the day and be part of a network of people with similar backgrounds to their own.
