How to celebrate and capitalize diversity through collaborative design in low-resource environments

Summary

During a collaborative design process, the user is met at three key points. First, during the exploration of the problem, that is, when we immerse ourselves in their reality and empathize with the users. Secondly, when we co-create solutions to solve the challenge, and finally when we iteratively put testable solutions in the users' hands. We explore, innovate and evaluate together. We celebrate diversity. Despite the fact that co-design is a critical process in most of the USAID funded Breakthrough Action program and has increasingly become a go-to tool to catalyze new SBC and SBCC interventions, there are cultural biases embedded into the users' context that could pose challenges if overlooked. With ThinkPlace's strategic design guidance, the program has been able to leverage the voice of the unheard in more than 10 different countries in Africa as well as Central and South America. Innovation is a process that undoubtedly demands curiosity and a spirit of exploration. Many times we find our teams working in environments in which culture does not praise thinking differently and conscious observation is not commonly incorporated into the users' daily lives. The exercise of co-design involves more than shared knowledge and a consensual dialogue in order to define the characteristics of products and services. The co-design process establishes benefits as well as challenges that should be considered before deciding whether this is the best approach to bring to the creative process.

Background/Objectives

The design process is an interdisciplinary experience in which each participant has an important role and can contribute to the project, regardless of their social, cultural or professional environment. This is a concept that on paper looks great, but in practice has challenges that are critical to the success of interventions that emerge in these sessions and inform multiple SBC programs. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge and embrace these cultural challenges so co-design sessions make better use of time and money and avoid creating negative effects on users' wellbeing.

Description Of The Big Idea/experience/innovation And Its Importance To The SBCC Field:

This Comms Talk aims to uncover some of the risks of applying co-design poorly and provide recommendations for SBC practitioners to create intentional innovation sessions, emphasizing the importance of: Fostering imagination, complexity, and critical thinking: Leave aside assumptions and limited thinking to open spaces for exploration and cultivate the capacity to question all issues addressed, avoiding biased and hasty visions. Stimulating creativity within constraints: Unlike art, design is developed based on a specific reality, therefore creativity in this case must be developed with a clear focus to reach tangible solutions in a constrained environment. Capitalizing diversity: Integrate experts in various fields that possess specialized, traditional, or popular knowledge as well as those with various empirical experiences (while being conscious about power imbalances that might emerge). The diversity of the work teams allows the generation of integral and different solutions rather than conventional ones. Exploring other contexts and respecting people's ways of finding inspiration: Do not constrain people to conference rooms, post-it notes and sharpies. There are other environments and methods that might spark unique associations to conceive new products and/or services for the user.

Discussion/Implications For The Field

When we design SBC interventions, we are not just designing products, services or new strategies, we are planning future experiences of people, communities and cultures, which are interconnected and informed, something unimaginable ten years ago. We need more comprehensive design practices with approaches that focus on the needs of communities in order to identify opportunities that fit their future expectations as well as our own expectations as SBC practitioners. We should continue innovation through co-designing interventions with users, but conscious of how users interact with the creative process itself.

Abstract submitted by:

Juanita Rodriguez