AKF’s global initiative to design better programmes

By embedding the principles of Human-Centred Design into the its operations, AKF aims to make its programmes more impactful, sustainable and to nurture a culture of collaboration and innovation

The context for a new design-driven innovation ecosystem

Today, the global development landscape is facing unprecedented change. Climate change, conflict, urbanisation, automation, artificial intelligence, and environmental degradation are all having a massive impact on the complexity of the challenges communities face.

This is the context in which AKF’s over 4,000 staff are currently working, and whilst inclusivity and co-creation of solutions has always been a central tenet of AKF’s approach, this raft of new challenges has highlighted the need for new and creative approaches that deliver greater value and impact — at scale.

This rationale has underpinned the development of Accelerate Impact. Through this new initiative, AKF not only formalises its inclusive approach, but also applies design-driven innovation to its programmes, ensuring creative collaboration across the organisation, the ability to scale local solutions where applicable, and deliver even greater impact to the communities it serves.

“We need local solutions that can scale to answer global questions.”
Munir Ahmad
Global Lead for Innovation, AKF

Led by AKF’s Global Lead for Innovation, Munir Ahmad, Accelerate Impact was launched with a mission to equip AKF staff, partners and communities with the competencies, mindsets and resources to create impactful next-generation solutions, systems and strategies. By giving everyone the power to put their creative ideas into action and working with communities to co-create solutions that are relevant to them, AKF hopes to to create a vibrant collaborative innovation ecosystem across the entire organisation that will nurture creative problem-solvers. In this way, AKF aims to significantly increase the measurable value, impact and scale of its interventions.

Human-Centred Design — a strategy for innovation

Mature organisations are designed for control and predictability. Yet innovation requires embracing ambiguity and tolerating risks. Moreover, social impact is a complex domain that requires collaboration between diverse stakeholders.

Design methodologies, such as Human-Centred Design (HCD), offer a structured process that can help to reduce this discomfort, ease navigating such complexity, and create the necessary creative confidence so that better and more impactful solutions can emerge from bringing local stakeholders and communities together to be part of the solution.

In recent years, leading players in the field of design — IDEO, Stanford d.school, MIT, and others — have introduced a number of new design tools and methods that are increasingly being applied in the field of development. They have demonstrated that it is absolutely critical for organisations to have a deliberate, clear and structured innovation process to ensure that innovation ‘happens’ effectively and systematically.

HCD is one such framework that can drive collaboration that cuts across organisational and sectoral boundaries as well as ensure a systematic approach to innovation. This ‘human’ approach to problem solving incorporates insights about human needs and behaviour into project design and delivery, thus increasing impact through empathy. It is both a mindset and a framework for creative problem-solving.

AKF has always empowered communities to participate in the design of solutions to their own problems. Now, informed by these global methodologies, as well as surveys and research conducted with staff, Accelerate Impact aims to offer a new strategy to incorporate design methodologies and innovative problem-solving approaches — such as HCD — to enable internal teams, local partners and communities to design more impactful programmes. This includes setting up internal programmes and systems, and external partnerships to address not only the needs and concerns of AKF staff but also to accelerate AKF’s leadership in social innovation.

How does Accelerate Impact work?

DESIGN
Strengthening collaboration between diverse stakeholders, and spurring new ways of solving problems using design as a strategy for stimulating the development, experimentation and testing of innovative solutions and programmes.

CAPACITY
Equipping teams with skills on how to design innovative programmes using approaches like Human-Centred Design and co-creation. Empowering staff from all organisational levels to become more innovative, creative, adaptive and entrepreneurial.

ECOSYSTEM
Fostering an enabling ecosystem where innovation is open and accessible to everyone. Providing opportunities for talented, creative people across the organisation to have the necessary resources to take smart risks and apply their knowledge to test new ideas.

PARTNERSHIPS
Building partnerships with the private sector, foundations, and non-traditional actors to bring and leverage new ideas, expertise, technology and funding.

LEARNING
Promoting a culture of continuous learning through cultivating user insights to better implement, share, and expand on knowledge.

EVIDENCE AND SCALE
Using evidence to identify the most promising solutions and provide additional support to innovations that prove their impact, cost-effectiveness, and potential to scale.

Currently Accelerate Impact is being embedded into AKF systems at an organisational level through:

• Identifying and nurturing ‘Innovation Champions’, who are rigorously trained in HCD methodology, to strengthen programme design and promote innovation in-country;
• HCD workshops, bootcamps and learning experiences for staff and partners;
• Blended Learning Courses to share resources with development practitioners and other stakeholders;
• Innovation toolkits to support implementing the HCD process during programme development;
• Communities of practice to strengthen relationships and encourage peer-learning;
• Strategic funding to support programme innovation;
• Community-driven innovation through flagship programmes such as Local Impact and Schools2030.

Spotlights — Accelerate Impact in current AKF programmes

Schools2030
Schools2030 is a new globally informed, locally rooted 10-year research and learning improvement programme working with 1000 schools across 10 countries, with the aim of finding ‘what works’ to improve holistic quality learning for all. In order to empower schools to be at the heart of their own solutions, Schools2030 — with support from Accelerate Impact — will roll out a Human-Centred Design toolkit that will enable preschool, primary school and secondary school stakeholders to co-identify their challenges, develop new solutions, apply for funding, and implement classroom-level strategies.

Local Impact
Poverty and conflict are multidimensional. Having a long-term impact requires a multi-sector approach and community ownership in both defining the problems they face and creating the solutions. Local Impact was created as a joint initiative of the Aga Khan Foundation and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The innovative framework puts local communities at the center of development for meaningful, sustained impact. Local Impact is currently working in Central Asia with a focus on Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

There is, of course, much work to be done to truly embed a culture that nurtures social innovation into a large and mature organisation like AKF, but progress is underway. As part of its remit, Accelerate Impact will monitor and evaluate its progress both organisationally and through the impact of its programmes. We look forward to updating you in the near future.

Please visit the Aga Khan Development Network or the Aga Khan Foundation UK for more information on our development work.

Accelerate Impact — AKF’s new global initiative to design better programmes was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the course of 2020, the Accelerate Impact team has been working to support the launch of the Schools2030 initiative — a globally informed, locally rooted 10-year learning improvement program working with 1,000 pioneering preschools, primary schools, and secondary schools across 10 countries on four continents.

Working very closely with Dr. Andy Cunningham, the Global Education Lead for the Aga Khan Foundation, as well as two design consultants, Katie Krummeck and Gray Garmon, we developed a comprehensive Human-Centered Design Toolkit for Educators to support their work to design solutions to improve outcomes for their students. To learn more about Katie and Gray’s approach to leveraging Human-Centered Design to solve problems in the education space, check out this interview.

While the initiative and the scale of potential impact were exciting to us as designers, the real question for us was: how do we co-create a set of tools that can help produce meaningful design work led by those closest to the challenges they were facing? This article tells the story of the development and deployment of these resources, as well as the early signs that they are making a difference.

Schools2030’s six-step program is designed to empower local educators with the opportunity to design solutions from their local classrooms and schools. This will then inform national and global systems-level approaches to improving holistic quality learning for all.

We are excited to share the story of this work thus far for several reasons. Firstly, as design educators with over ten years of experience training and coaching people to take up design as a new way of working, we were thrilled to be able to apply the knowledge we have gained to help set up this initiative for success.

Secondly, the scale and potential impact of Schools2030, while daunting, is deeply motivating and inspiring. If we can support 1,000 schools in such diverse places as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Portugal, and Brazil to do meaningful design work that leads to better outcomes for children, then we believe we have a model that could make an even bigger impact over time.

Most importantly, we have developed a strong set of values and beliefs that inform our work every day, and which resonated especially strongly on this project. We believe that educators are designers. Every day, teachers create experiences for their students through developing student goals, considering different student needs, iterating between lessons, and impacting student learning outcomes. We believe that empowering educators with foundational design tools and methods will not only amplify the work they currently do, but it will also amplify the learning potential of their students.

As our work began in the fall of 2019, we started with the goal that any teacher in the world could pick up the Schools2030 Human-Centered Design Educators Toolkit and go through it, page by page, to complete a locally-driven design process with fidelity. They can use it to create human-centered projects that will improve the holistic learning outcomes of their students. This was a collaborative process, and Munir Ahmad, AKF’s Global Innovation lead, shared his perspective on why the Foundation chose to focus on design as their tool for change:

Today, the global development and education landscape is facing unprecedented change. During the last months we have all seen the largest disruption of education systems in history due to COVID-19. In this context, social innovation holds the promise to offer a new framework and mindset to help the education community (students, teachers, parents and others) to collaboratively create more impactful and affordable solutions to solve some of the most pressing problems in their communities and schools. Design methodologies such as human-centered design offer a structured process that can help navigate this complexity, and create the necessary creative confidence to enable all actors to become active change agents. For AKF it is critical that we invest in nurturing a community of creative problem-solvers equipped with design and innovation competencies in order to sustainably improve the lives of people living in poverty.

As we dug into this complex project, we established our work on three main pillars: Design Principles that would guide the development of the project in a human-centered way, Design Tools that would enable educators to practice design thinking, and Design Training that would build capacity in local teams to guide the work of the school teams.

Design Principles

In order to develop the design principles that would steer our work during this project, we interviewed educational leaders from each country. These conversations provided context that informed the creation of the toolkit and the training sessions in a human-centered and user-friendly way, while also staying accountable to our stakeholders and clients.

The Design package must…

• Support a design process that is driven by those on the ground, with the goal that they will build evidence and conviction toward solutions that will create holistic quality learning for all
• Support a design process that generates solutions that make sense in the educators’ context
• Support a design process that is grounded in data gathered through the offline app Promise and/or the aspirations of the school leader and educators
• Support stakeholders to identify challenges and solve them using a human-centered approach
• Support school leaders and teachers to design solutions that are best for their context while also “not starting from a blank slate” by drawing inspiration from learning and best practices
• Communicate an understanding that “choice” is a key element of local work; educators are not “told” what to do in their communities
• Be broad enough that it is applicable across a wide variety of contexts
• Not have hard-to-translate jargon
• Provide a simple enough process that it can be completed with minimal coaching and time investment
• Include train-the-trainer supports with a “trickle-down” structure of capacity and expertise
• Include appropriate design research techniques for preschoolers as well as students in primary and secondary schools
• Support a process that eliminates power structures in the work
• Support building local capacity so AKF is needed less over time
• Assume participants will be working in teams while also creating tools that can be used independently

Once we developed these design principles, we were able to share them with the team at AKF to get feedback and refine them. After the process of refining these principles, we continuously returned to the principles as our northstar for the project.

Design Tools

We created a collection of resources for educators, school leaders, and facilitators. The main resource is the Schools2030 Human-Centered Design Educator Toolkit. This 184-page workbook outlines a ten-phase process. Teams of educators in local schools use the toolkit to identify, research, and prototype solutions that will lead to improved holistic learning outcomes for their students. The toolkit is supported by facilitators from the AKF and regional Schools2030 partners. Every phase of the design process is a cycle that can be completed at a self-directed pace and redone as many times as needed until the team is ready to move to the next phase.

Our goal was to create a tool that could be adapted to many different contexts of culture, language, school, and team. We researched many other toolkits, method cards, websites, and videos aimed at providing introductory resources for human-centered design, but in the end we felt that none had the necessary explanation and support needed to empower someone to navigate an otherwise ambiguous and open-ended process.

We leveraged our experience as both designers and educators to scaffold the toolkit using the best practices of adult learning. We edited repeatedly for clarity, accessible language, and user experience.

Design Training

The final pillar of this work was the training of Design Trainers. We started in Nairobi, Kenya in early 2020 with AKF’s Schools2030 staff and partners from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania and a team from the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI), a network of more than 80 civil society organizations throughout East Africa dedicated to improving the quality of learning for all across 26,000 schools.

Halima Shaaban, the Schools2030 National Coordinator in Kenya, participated in the in-person training in Nairobi. For her, “The best part [of the training] was having an opportunity to experience the human-centered design journey with my program team [as well as] seeing the culmination of the work we had put into refining the journey and toolkit.”

The Schools2030 participant journey, focused on an in-person Train the Trainer model.

Halima also shared that her most important new insight was “the realization that the process should focus on awakening the teachers’ (already existing) design instinct, and to avoid presenting it to teachers as a new concept, because they already experience design in their everyday classroom.”

Halima sees the very high potential of the toolkit for empowering teachers as design thinkers in the classroom:

The toolkit is a comprehensive guide for the teachers on navigating the human-centered design journey for their contexts. I especially like two things: 1) The format of the toolkit with the introduction, main tools and the transitions pages. The transition pages are of particular importance as they give teachers an opportunity to consolidate their thoughts and work [summary], discuss and agree as a team on the next steps [alignment], and finally have reflections on activities that were difficult and how they may support each other to work better as a team. The reflection page is also important for me as it gives me an idea of where teams are struggling and may need support. And 2) the mindsets outlined for each phase — through them, the teachers are made aware of the potential mental blocks they may face while designing and the tips [mindsets] to navigate these blocks.

The work is now spreading. Halima and a team of colleagues recently started training new teams in the design process while leveraging the Schools2030 Toolkit. For her, the best parts of that process have been “having the teams see the process as a journey and making the links between the phases, having the teams discover the human-centered design process as a structure where each phase provides a foundation to build the next phase on.”

Throughout this journey, Halima has learned “the power of empathy. As a facilitator who has gone through the same journey, I am more understanding of the challenges and uncertainties the participants face and therefore am able to support them better (partly by sharing my own journey and struggles with them).”

Continuing the Training During the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

In the face of global shutdowns and school closings from COVID-19, we decided to pivot to an online training model. Over the summer of 2020, we hosted 13 online sessions using Zoom and Mural for all 10 countries in the Schools2030 initiative. Although at first we worried that it would be inferior to the original in-person training, it instead allowed us to build a more cohesive and diverse global design community of AKF leaders and educators who were learning and designing together across regions. We began to see that the struggle of parents in Kenya was similar to that of parents in Tajikistan. The team from India inspired us all with the creativity of their prototypes.

Each country had a design team that learned the human-centered design process by using the tools to solve a pressing challenge. Because of the complexity of different contexts across the globe, teams were able to choose between two design challenges: How might we support learning from home? Or, how might we reimagine school reopening in the times of COVID-19?

The country teams developed unique ideas for improving holistic learning outcomes that met specific needs for their community. The idea that was developed in Kyrgyzstan focused on teaching student self-efficacy through hygiene and hand-washing.

The project idea from India focused on a physical box of learning resources that would be mailed to families in order to support hands-on learning. The contents of the boxes would be generated by partnering with local women’s self-help groups that were also making masks during COVID-19. By drawing on what the team learned from their design research, and taking inspiration from companies like KiwiCo in the US while also emphasizing the need to make their solution more affordable, locally relevant, and aligned with the local education curriculum, the team came up with a creative and sustainable solution. Arjun Sanyal, Senior Program Officer — Education and interim coordinator for Schools2030 at the AKF in India, shared his thoughts about the potential of the toolkit as well as his own learning experience during the online course.

According to Arjun, “The best part of the online workshops was being able to virtually get together with colleagues from other countries and listen to their ideas, experiences and challenges during COVID and their design journeys. Though we were at very different stages [of where the countries were in terms of COVID], it was great being part of this global community designing solutions for continuing learning against all odds.”

The potential of the toolkit, for me, is not in the solutions we bring out each year. The main learning from the toolkit is within the process itself, and all the skills one can acquire while going through the process. Understanding children and parents through empathy interviews, learning how to ask open-ended questions, continuous observation and reflection, active listening, collaborating with others, critiquing positively, taking failure in one’s stride — all are great learnings, and would benefit the area of teacher professional development. Even if that teacher’s designed solution does not work as we expect, at the end of the year, she/he will still be a better teacher.

For Arjun, “The best part of the design work experience is that I got to be really hands-on, especially during prototyping and testing. In a situation where all work was moving online and we were glued to our screens, cutting cardboard boxes to make prototypes and engaging in something tactile helped me feel, helped me think differently. The best insight I gained from this process this time is that our ideas do not need to be complicated; keeping it simple works.”

For their team, he reflected, “A big challenge in implementing our solution about Learning at Home kits/Box of Bold Ideas is how do we make it really affordable? Can we make a home-based learning kit for less than $2 USD that can be distributed through the mail? This challenge in itself is really exciting as we have to treat each round of implementation as a learning for the next one. We have to be creative about how we make a box, what is in the box, who makes it, how it is delivered, etc. Each decision will save a few cents, but those few cents become critical. Great challenge to really push our creativity.”

This is a decade-long initiative, and 2020 is just the start. It was already an ambitious program, and it had to pivot once because of an unprecedented global pandemic. However, we were able to use the strength of design’s adaptability to create a toolkit aimed precisely at facing ambiguous challenges. This summer we’ve gotten a glimpse of the possibilities that could come from applying human-centered design to school-based challenges, letting grass-roots decision making guide the development and funding of solutions. More than half a million US dollars were distributed for the 10 ideas generated from the 13-week course — funding solutions that were previously not on the global radar of what should be done in response to the educational crisis of COVID. These seed grants came from the Schools2030 program and will provide critical roots for further evidence generation and locally driven innovations that have an impact on learning. We are hopeful that this new way of working will create solutions with better outcomes for students. We know for certain that the toolkit and trainings have already had a positive impact on local education leaders.

Dr. Andrew Cunningham, global lead of education at the AKF, reflects:

At the heart of the Schools2030 approach is a recognition that schools are the center of social change, not the target of change. Rarely are school leaders, teachers and students perceived as reservoirs of innovation, or invited to listen, reflect, and self-discover the wisdom that lies among them. Even rarer are instances where invitation, dialogue and self-discovery lead to community actions and external investments, guided by data that the school collects, processes, and uses to achieve holistic learning outcomes for all. The Schools2030 Human-Centered Design Toolkit provides the global education community with a profoundly unique and refreshing new opportunity for approaching education improvement through a more empathetic, inclusive, and empowering lens. Together with 5,000 educators, 50,000 students, and 1,000 school communities, Schools2030 is on track to now continue prototyping and iterating the Schools2030 Human-Centered Design Toolkit as it supports teachers, school leaders and communities to develop thousands of new, locally rooted innovations about how best we can support children’s equitable and quality learning for decades to come.

We know that there is not one single solution that will fit all schools and communities. A process like the one supported by the Schools2030 Human-Centered Design Educator Toolkit from the Aga Khan Foundation will be able to empower individuals close to the challenges facing their communities to create solutions that have a far greater impact.

This fall, as teams prepare to launch the Toolkit with their schools, Krummeck and Garmon are continuing to support the implementation of the process while also gathering and synthesizing feedback from participants this summer. A new iteration of the Toolkit will be shared on the Schools2030 website in the coming year.

To learn more about the Schools2030 initiative, please visit their website: https://www.schools2030.org/

As 2020 comes to a close, the Accelerate Impact team is excited to continue to support the Schools2030 initiative as the ten country teams prepare to launch the Educator Toolkit, now translated into multiple local languages, and begin facilitating design projects with local educators.

Portions of this article originally appeared in the Journal of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas.

One Design Process. 10 Countries. 1,000 Schools. Endless Opportunity was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We were driving to run field tests with young mothers in the remote villages of Netrang in Gujarat, India. Netrang, like much of rural India, has been struggling against the scourge of malnutrition. Despite India’s 50% increase in GDP since 1991, more than one third of the world’s malnourished children live in India. Mothers give birth to malnourished children who end up dying from famine or give birth at a young age to more malnourished children. This is a self-reinforcing cycle that causes malnutrition to persist.

In the backseat, we had prototypes made of cardboard, pipe cleaners, construction paper, and straws. These odd-looking objects had been constructed in a couple of hours, and could have been mistaken for the remnants of an afternoon arts and crafts class with a group of 5th graders.

How could such a complex, deep rooted, critical challenge be addressed with such a seemingly simple approach and only a few days worth of work? What exactly were we doing? How could these colorful, ad hoc artifacts help break generations of poverty?

Finding Solutions for Malnutrition

The drive to Netrang was part of a five-day workshop on human-centered design. Staff from the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) and Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) came together to find innovative ways to explore and come up with solutions for malnutrition, one of the most severe challenges facing India today.

The intrinsic goals for the workshop were to (1) introduce participants to the human-centered design process and (2) prepare them to run their own design process for their own specific challenges. This is done most effectively through a live design challenge, framed as an open-ended question: How might we create greater awareness, access, and use of best practices in nutrition for young mothers and their children?

Although the workshop in India was framed around the challenge of malnutrition, the main goals of the workshop was to bring awareness and understanding of the design process itself.

During the drive to the field, Jairam, one of our workshop participants, asked, “What exactly is human-centered design (HCD)? Aren’t all products and services designed for people?” For a few seconds, I paused and reflected on this insightful and practical question.

Human-Centered Design

The term human-centered design (HCD) was coined by Don Norman, the Vice President of the Advanced Technology group at Apple in 1990s. Although a new term and concept for the world, HCD draws from the expertise of many traditional and well developed and diverse professions including anthropology, psychiatry, investigation, architecture, engineering, and storytelling. HCD is a thoughtful process that brings together a diverse team and gives them a methodology to navigate complex problems to create change.

Innovation by design is not just reserved for large tech companies building new software. The same principles can be applied to address challenges in the international development and humanitarian space. The beauty of the design process lies in its versatility.

“The design process doesn’t guarantee success but it certainly adds to our ability to navigate the complexity of the challenge, helps us identify what matters most for the people we are serving and significantly increases our chances of creating solutions that can effectively have impact in their lives,” says Munir Ahmad, the Global Lead for Innovation for AKF.

It was integral to remind ourselves at this stage that the “alchemy” of HCD was not in these artifacts, but the very process which brings together a diverse group of experts and gives them a methodology for navigating through an uncomfortable and seemingly insurmountable complexity.

The workshop took place in a “no frills” campus with bucket showers and snake warnings. Yet, the space was more like a sanctuary. Fashioned with sustainable architecture, exotic birds, aromatic flowers, lush gardens, and vegetarian food that made you forget about meat (if you haven’t done that already). With only one building that had WiFi, this oasis undoubtedly brought the participants closer together as they bonded throughout the week. Aside from the intense design workshop, there was not much else to do except tell stories (something that they were unsurprisingly good at). Design teams work exceptionally well together when they are able to feel comfortable, have psychological safety to speak their mind, and the mutual respect to listen to their teammates. They thrive off flat hierarchies and those who are often marginalized are given a voice in a process that really democratizes decision making.

Design Teams thrive off flat hierarchies and those who are often marginalized are given a voice in a process that really democratizes decision making.

Read on to hear about the roles our workshop participants played as they walked through the design process.

The Researcher and Psychiatrist

In a typical design process, the first step is called the Understand phase. In this phase teams conduct expert interviews and desk research to understand the challenge and map what they know already and what they are curious to learn. Due to the time constraints of the workshop, during the first day participants were taken through a quick orientation of the overall design process and the challenge. A local representative was brought in to explain the challenge and presented insights from expert interviews and desk research, and scoped the challenge of malnutrition for the group. This saves a lot of time. The second day is really where participants get their feet wet and it is the part of the process that separates the design process from many other approaches.

During this stage, participants visit the field and speak with the target audience in an effort to truly understand their needs and aspirations, and relevant stakeholders to understand the overall system and its complexity. In this challenge, the target audience involved speaking specially with young mothers and adolescent girls who are at the age of getting married. Participants also spoke with ASHA and Anganwadi workers, frontline government staff who work with women, children, and adolescent girls on health, nutrition, and early childhood development. ASHAs are more like health workers while Anganwadis are also responsible for pre-school education. If we had more time, we would have spoken to government officials, local food markets, religious leaders, elders, and many others to understand the larger systemic challenge.

Often the Empathy phase is critically mistaken for typical user research and community discussions. In reality, a design interview is very different from a typical analytical interview. In a typical research interview, we focus on understanding “what” the problem is, but in a design interview, we are more interested in uncovering “why” the problem exists. We are focused on trying to understand the underlying or implicit needs, challenges, and aspirations that are often not well understood. In our work, it is really important to remember that a design research interview is not a focus group, a survey or even a fact-finding mission.

We are focused on trying to understand the underlying or implicit needs, challenges, and aspirations that are often not well understood.

For our challenge, interview questions included: What are the priorities for your child’s needs? What does nutrition mean to you? Why is this the priority for your child?

The design research interview is a method that requires a skillset that may be one of the hardest to learn in the design process. However, it is a skill that can be coached and improved over time. The following are useful reminders for conducting a good design interview:

• Searching for aspirations and motivations
• Staying curious
• Try and have a conversation
• Look for stories
• Creating a safe space
• Bring out emotions
• Ask open ended questions
• Ask questions that start with “why”

The Investigator

After the Empathy stage is over, it is time to begin digesting what has been learned through the Synthesis stage. During the last stage, we received a lot of information, and while some information may be helpful, most of the information is likely not very relevant.

Synthesis begins with each group member recounting the highlights of the interview by attempting to tell a story from their notes. While this is happening, the remaining group members are writing down what they find most interesting. We are looking for nuggets of information that are surprising, telling or that have some tension or contradiction embedded within them. These nuggets will make us say “that was interesting” or “that was unexpected” or “that was bizarre.” If most of the team isn’t saying this about a particular piece of information, then it probably isn’t what we are looking for. From here, the teams select around 5 observations to take to the next stage.

The participants in India noted the following interesting insights:

• Children were eating packaged, processed foods (chips, biscuits, etc.) for main meals despite the availability of nutritious foods and locally grown crops.
• Premixes and iron pills that reduce malnutrition were widely available yet not taken by children.
• Mothers were not aware of their own children’s health conditions and that they were underweight and malnourished.
• There was a lack of awareness of the benefits and resources of Anganwadi centres. Anganwadi centre is a space in the village that provides multiple services to women, children up to 6 years and adolescent girls, ranging from supplementary nutrition, pre-school education, nutrition education, health check-ups, immunization, and referral services.
• Anganwadi workers focused more on the severely malnourished, thus neglecting the easily preventable cases.

Each team had many compelling observations, but they could only select one to bring forward. This is an important part of the design process where the larger challenge is scoped down into a smaller, more manageable challenge that may be the most critical, or could possibly lead to the greatest impact. Other challenges may be addressed in separate or subsequent design sprints.

The last part of the Synthesis stage is when the chosen observation is turned into a Point of View (POV) and then a How Might We (HMW) question. Here are examples of a POV and HMW that one team came up with:

We met two mothers and adolescent girls accessing services from Angarwari centers. We were struck by the fact that available products like premix and iron pills are taken but not consumed by mothers and adolescents. We wonder if this means that products are distributed without taking into account the needs, cultural habits and feedback from beneficiaries. We see an opportunity to create ways to improve beneficiary adoption of recommended products.

After having decided on their POV, the team brainstormed several HMW questions that could lead to a well scoped solution space. After lots of discussion, the team decided to move forward with:

HMW motivate young mothers to adopt healthy behaviours by providing more accessible information about nutrition?

When creating the POV and HMW, it is important to remember:

• There are no right answers
• Don’t be afraid to take a leap of faith
• Keep brainstorming POVs and HMWs until you feel it is right
• Ensure they are neither too broad nor too specific

The Architect and Builder

After Synthesis, teams entered the creative phase of Ideation. Collectively, they came up with many ideas for solutions. If the ideas are not free flowing or relevant, it is common to go back to the last stage and rephrase the HMW question. Remember the following tips during ideation:

• Ideas should be diverse (products, services, physical, digital, etc.)
• Everyone should contribute to the ideation process
• Use a headline that readily describes what the idea is
• Draw a quick doodle to go with the idea
• Avoid criticism and just get the idea up on the wall

Once ideas are out there and the team feels like they have enough (about 50 or so is a good number). They should select one to two ideas to move forward with. Teams can narrow down the ideas through voting, categorizing, or using criteria to eliminate ideas. Categorizing and identifying design criteria is about understanding what the team values collectively. Key criteria should be brainstormed in the group such as cost, sustainability, ease of implementation, impact, accessibility, uniqueness, etc.

Our workshop developed both creative and diverse ideas, including:

• Fortifying nutrients in the local village mill
• A device that shows if your child is malnourished
• A video or skit created by the community showing best nutrition practices
• A kitchen garden
• A plate that helps you remember food groups

From here, it is time to further develop the ideas into Idea Dashboards and Storyboards. An Idea Dashboard gives you the 30,000 foot view of an idea. The key components include:

• What is the solution?
• Who will implement it and how will it be implemented?
• Why is it important?

The next level of fidelity of an Idea Dashboard is the Storyboard. A Storyboard is like a comic strip that highlights 4–5 of the key events in the process.

There are several steps in the design process that are strategically broken into smaller pieces in order to keep the process moving, manageable and ensure the team is aligned.

The Engineer and Scientist

After Ideation, it is time for Prototyping, where participants build something to test their idea with the target audience. The important thing to remember is that we are only building to test assumptions. So first we must brainstorm a list of assumptions that we are making about their idea. Often we live in a bubble thinking our ideas are great or that everyone has the same perspective. This is not only wrong, but is extremely dangerous. Scaling an untested idea to a target group can lead to detrimental effects on the community and deplete valuable resources. Once you have your most important assumptions, build something to test them.

One of the teams chose to create a prototype of a device that would show young mothers if their child was malnourished. We wanted to make sure the device was actually understood by the target audience, so the team listed their assumptions that the mothers would understand what the device is by looking at it, and the information it provided about the child. They could then design and build the device and information that it was providing with the audience in mind. The prototype does not have to be an elaborate or a high-fidelity device; it only needs to be developed enough to test the assumptions. This didn’t take more than 2 hours to make.

It became clear again why these cardboard artifacts were sitting in the backseat on our drive to Netrang. They were mini-experiments in a very well thought out process. In a highly efficient way, these productions were constructed to test one or two key assumptions. If they could either prove or disprove a question, they were highly useful. They would tell us if we were onto something or if we were completely wrong.

If we were wrong, we would need to return to some earlier phase of the process. Did we ask the right questions during Empathy? Did we choose the right observation, the right insight, or the right HMW question during Synthesis? Should we go back and select another idea to test? Did we build the idea well enough to test or choose the right assumption to test? In this way, the process is forgiving as the team finds the most critical problem to tackle and a validated solution to that problem.

If we were onto something and our target audience validated our assumption(s), we can go back and test another assumption further down our Idea Storyboard, do more testing, or slightly improve our current prototype. Each iteration of the prototype gains greater granularity as we reach an effective solution that is ready to pilot, where a larger investment is made to test the prototype with a wider audience. After the pilot, the concept may be ready to scale. The key to building a solution this way is efficiency and efficacy. Over time, these prototypes could be developed, combined, and turned into real products or services or applications. They may eventually become their own entirely new systems, organizations, or enterprises.

The Storyteller

The last day of the workshop is called Storytelling, where participants showcase their process and prototypes. The presentations allow for a deep discussion around the core challenges and provoke further questions to address in the next stages of the design process. Teams articulate who they solved the challenge for, what the core challenge was, what their solution was, what they tested, and what they learned. They also discuss what their next steps are. Typically, they receive feedback from an expert panel, other teams, or other stakeholders.

This lighthearted and engaging stage is critical to understanding exactly what the participants learned and the process they went through. It is important to keep these key tips in mind for presentations:

• Keep it simple and concise
• Act out a performance to engage the audience
• Go over only the key highlights

The most compelling presentations touch the emotions of the audience while keeping things simple. A simple message can be memorable and actionable.

After a few moments of reflection, I was ready to answer Jairam’s question. Designers are those who imagine and develop new products or services based on human aspirations or needs. Many of us consider ourselves as designers solving real and important challenges. However, the reality is that we live and work in complex systems. Organizations do not always allow us to truly understand the aspiration and needs of our target audiences, nor do we have the space, resources, process, and time to test and develop solutions that address these very needs with efficacy. How often are we checking off boxes, reporting to upper management on numbers that are likely irrelevant, iterating existing documents or templates or tweaking designs only marginally? How often do we see the entire process of a product or service being delivered from the initial need finding to the distribution of a well designed and tested solution in the well oiled machine of a large company or organization? All of this leads to products and services that are being created each day that lack deep understanding, reflection, rigorous feedback, and most importantly desirability from the people we design for. We fail to create products and services that are truly meaningful and sustainable for our target audience and we don’t address the many complex challenges that actually exist in people’s lives.

The reality is that we live and work in complex systems and organizations that do not always allow us to truly understand the aspiration and needs of our target audiences. Nor do we have the space, resources, process, and time to test and develop solutions that address these very needs with efficacy.

Human-centered design is a process that brings back the full cycle of design and development into the hands of a diverse team empowered to solve a complex challenge. Along with the process, the team must not only have adequate resources (time and budget) but more importantly they must care deeply about their challenge. Upon leaving this 5 day workshop, participants feel equipped with a super power that allows them to creatively and effectively navigate their way through the incredibly complex social challenges they so humbly seek to address.

Design, a tool for addressing India’s toughest problems was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Above: a time-lapse of the HCD webinar. The anonymous cursors represent 35 people from 10 countries working together to find the best ways to support families and educators to help children learn during COVID-19

By now, it is self-evident just how drastically the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered life as we know it. Each one of us must now seek to navigate new ways of being, new ways of approaching our work, our relationships, what we do for entertainment, how we learn and how we interact with society.

The same is certainly true of the work of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). The past two months have seen all 10 agencies of the network look to adapt, re-organise, and reconsider their work to improve the quality of life whilst also supporting global efforts to slow transmission, provide optimised care for patients, and minimise impact on communities.

The Crisis in Learning

The COVID-19 crisis has impacted families, children and educators particularly hard. Parents have now been burdened with the responsibility of meeting their children’s educational needs with many not equipped to deal with this. Children have been displaced from their usual routines and are denied access to their typical learning environments and the psychosocial support that comes from being physically present at school with their teachers and friends. Educators, tasked with finding novel ways of delivering lessons, are now pushing forward not only for the benefit of their students, but in some cases also as an imperative for their livelihoods.

In marginalised communities, adapting quickly to this new environment is even more crucial. So many of the communities that AKF works in are already vulnerable, underprivileged and lacking in facilities and resources. Finding new ways to ensure continuity of education in these contexts, that also seeks to improve education and make learning more effective, is at the heart of the work being carried out right now by the Foundation. As ever, this work aims to build on the principle that underpins our approach to education — ensure quality, inclusive, equitable learning for all.

AKF’s Global and Local Response

Schools2030 — a flagship programme for AKF and a coalition of eight other private foundations — is a new 10 year longitudinal learning improvement programme working with 1,000 schools across 10 countries seeking to empower the next generation of children and young people with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to interact effectively with the world and become contributing members of society. The programme is reaching school-level stakeholders across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Portugal, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Brazil, and India.

At the heart of this endeavour, not surprisingly, is listening, and learning from frontline educators about ‘what works’ and ‘why’ in improving holistic learning outcomes for the most marginalised children and young people.

With millions of schools now closed due to COVID-19, the Schools2030 programme is exploring how children, caretakers, and educators can be adaptive to the challenges brought on by lockdown in some of the most marginalised areas of the world. AKF has responded with two concrete steps of action.

First, in partnership with its sister agencies the Aga Khan Education Services and Aga Khan Academies, AKF developed and shared a global review of available tips, recommendations and offline/online learning resources to support families and educators to help children learn during school closures. These were shared across the Schools2030 geographies and with in-country partners.

These can be accessed here:

Four Resource Packages for Educators
Three Resource Packages for Families

“With millions of schools now closed due to COVID-19, the Schools2030 programme is exploring how children, caretakers, and educators can be adaptive to the challenges brought on by lockdown in some of the most marginalised areas of the world.”

Second, to search for and develop local solutions to teaching and learning during COVID-19 that would supplement the global review and materials, AKF and the Schools2030 coalition hosted a number of virtual Human Centred Design (HCD) sessions over the last few weeks.

Now, as COVID-19 forces us to reimagine how schooling might work, representatives from the 10 country coalition are engaging in one of the most important design thinking challenges of our time, ‘How do we continue to provide quality education for all during and after COVID-19?’

To find answers to this, AKF has been hosting initial online ‘sprint design’ sessions for staff and partners of Schools2030 to engage in virtual HCD exercises with the specific aim of addressing the teaching and learning concerns that have now arisen from this unprecedented crisis.

HCD in action during COVID-19

AKF’s Global Innovation Lead, Munir Ahmad, has been leading virtual HCD sessions alongside AKF’s Global Leads for Education, Dr. Andrew Cunningham and Nafisa Shekhova, that bring together over 35 education professionals and programme designers.

The first virtual HCD session began with colleagues presenting concerns and challenges from interviews they had previously conducted with various stakeholders within their communities. Whether it was through WhatsApp, texting, or a phone call, colleagues were challenged to bring local realities to the global conversation about ‘what is working’ to improve learning during COVID-19.

A variety of issues became apparent straight away. Among them: concern for the mental health of families struggling to adapt to these new circumstances; fear for those students who were verging on dropping out; how to know if the children are making the progress that would otherwise be monitored at school; and importantly, how to reach those students whose families do not have access to computers or the internet.

“The mental wellbeing and social-emotional health of students is now amongst the chief concerns of many educators, whereas it may not have been a priority before COVID-19.”

Not every aspect of these conversations was negative, however.

The money being saved by both the families and educators on the cost of travel is one positive. Another is that students are able to spend more quality time with their loved ones. It was also noted that the mental wellbeing and social-emotional health of students is now amongst the chief concerns of many educators, whereas it may not have been a priority before COVID-19. Further, many noted the opportunity of the current learning situation to strengthen social connections between children’s families and educators, thereby building a stronger support network for holistic quality learning experiences over the long-term.

Generating ‘How Might We’ Questions to Address Challenges during COVID-19

Next began the process of collating and synthesising this information. Participants were asked to vote on which concerns they felt were the most important and — from both the positive and negative sides — two of each were chosen to carry through to the next stage of design thinking.

The ‘How Might We’ (HMW) phase then sought to reframe those challenges or concerns as opportunities to design thinking.

So, from the positive side, ‘increased engagement opportunities with families’ became, ‘how might we increase communications between families and educators?’. From the negative side, ‘new constraints created by online and distance learning’ became, ‘how might we support educators to become great online teachers?’.

The week before, participants had also generated crucially important HMW questions from reviewing challenges facing families and students during COVID-19:

• How might we increase caregivers’ knowledge and confidence about educating their children?
• How might we curate and guide caregivers about how to use learning resources?
• How might we support student learning with limited or no internet?

This process paves the way for the following important phase of ideation.

Our Ideation Phase: 15 Minutes and 250 Solutions from 10 Countries

Participants were invited to come up with solutions to the HMW questions developed together about how best to support educators during COVID-19.

Within just 15 minutes, a staggering 250 ideas had been generated.

After unpacking some of these solutions, tangible ideas began to surface.

With one of the biggest challenges being a lack of adequate internet or computing facilities in many communities, some suggested dedicated WhatsApp groups for teachers’ communities of practice and more relevant radio and television broadcast programmes; both of which indeed are already coming into effect in some geographies with the support of AKF and other partners. Tailoring the radio and television broadcasts to encourage family participation was also discussed.

Other participants suggested that shadowing a child as they learned virtually would give parents and educators an opportunity to better understand the challenges children face in this unfamiliar territory. Communities of practice were also proposed to be set up online as a support forum for educators and parents, as well as a virtual mentoring system for younger, less experienced educators.

“What is really striking is just how much work is already underway behind the scenes as teachers, families, and education and development professionals react to our new circumstances”

Next Steps for Long-term Learning, Innovation, and Impact during COVID-19

The final stages, to be completed in the coming weeks, will take some of these ideas and develop them into prototypes to be tested and assessed further. The Schools2030 consortium will also provide flexible response funding to advance these prototypes into meaningful sustained learning experiences for children and students across its geographies. This process will be led through a new virtual course that AKF and its Schools2030 partners have developed to equip colleagues throughout the world with the skills and knowledge to become stronger design thinkers and respond to the ever-changing landscape of teaching and learning in the weeks and months ahead during COVID-19.

What is really striking here is just how much work is already underway behind the scenes as teachers, families, and education and development professionals react to our new circumstances. The level of dedication and the sincere desire to work around these parameters to deliver the best possible learning experience was evident throughout the sessions. Participants were encouraged to reflect on their experience, and, as with every aspect of their work, evaluate its usefulness to learn lessons.

It was pleasing to see just how many felt inspired to deliver sustainable and effective solutions for learning during lockdown, and indeed many were already thinking through how these principles could inform the development of holistic learning methodologies even beyond the pandemic, which is at the heart of what Schools2030 hopes to achieve. It will be exciting to see what new opportunities and schools of practice emerge from these otherwise trying circumstances.

Schools2030 is a new globally informed, locally rooted 10-year longitudinal action research and learning improvement programme working with 1000 pioneering pre-schools, primary schools, and secondary schools across 10 countries, searching for and supporting positive deviance about ‘what works’ to improve holistic quality learning for all. Learn more here.

Designing new solutions to support children’s learning during COVID-19 was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of a series about the Aga Khan Foundation’s Accelerate Impact initiative. Learn more about the Aga Khan Foundation’s vision for innovation.

It is 8am in Aswan, Egypt, and the pressure builds as we anxiously await participants’ arrival. They need to cross the Nile River by boat, their prototypes in tow. They will soon pitch their innovative solutions and journeys to an eager panel of camel and bazaar owners, community elders, residents, and government leaders.

The best way to learn design is through a real hands-on experience. A local challenge is identified in advance of the workshop and addressed by the participants during five intensive days. In this way, the workshop not only builds capacity for design-led problem solving but also tackles a critical local challenge.

As part of the Aga Khan Foundation’s Accelerate Impact (AI) initiative, I had the pleasure of leading this design innovation workshop at the Om Habibeh Foundation (OHF), training nearly 30 staff members on design. The purpose of this training was to build capacity for OHF staff on human-centered design (HCD) so they could use it to drive innovation in their work going forward. OHF is a development organization that works across many social sectors; this training was a precursor to a year-long project aimed at improving the quality of life through economic inclusion for women in rural communities.

The challenge selected for this training on human-centered design was to find new ways to address the compounding garbage problem in the village of Gharb Sohail in Aswan, Egypt. Over the last few years, the beautiful village with its murals and colorful buildings has become increasingly more polluted. The rise of tourism and a growing population add strain to an already overwhelmed system. In human-centered design, we use the phrase “How might we…?” to frame a design challenge. In this context, we asked: “How might we raise awareness to motivate and engage the people of Gharb Sohail to take action to keep their environment clean?”

The challenge was complex: Five different stakeholder groups (camel owners, bazaar owners, hotel owners, residents, and the community association) contributed to the waste problem—each with their own diverse interests, aspirations, and means of communication.

“Can we really address this challenge?” I asked Aga Khan Foundation’s Global Innovation Lead, Munir Ahmad. “Trust the process, Saad,” he replied. “As long as the challenge is human-centered, this process always leads to something meaningful.”

I wasn’t convinced but I thought to myself: Even if we can’t come up with any solutions that might work, at the very least the design process brings together the right stakeholders and creates energy behind solving a problem.

Understanding the challenge

The first step of the design process is to gain an understanding of the situation and context. One of the biggest limitations in teaching design in 5 days is that it is difficult to understand the depths of a challenge in such a short period of time. In a typical design project, the understanding period may take weeks of desk research, expert interviews, and other forms of research. For AI workshops, a local liaison spends many weeks preparing a presentation for participants called a Challenge Brief, which allows participants to quickly gain some familiarity with the complexity of the challenge. The Challenge Brief kicks off the workshop.

Building empathy

Working in teams of five, each group led interviews in Gharb Sohail with the stakeholders. These interviews help build an understanding of the emotions, aspirations, and deep motivations behind why stakeholders continue to contribute to the waste problem. Typically, this is one of the toughest parts of learning the design process. You have to consciously remind yourself that you are looking to hear a good story, to ask “why” a lot, and to be comfortable with awkward silences. This is an unconventional approach, different from a fact-finding exercise or an analytical interview that participants are often used to.This is a very difficult mindset to undo.

“Interviewing community members is the most fascinating phase to fuel our innovation,” says Rania, a participant from the workshop. “We were inspired by their pain points and perceptions. Later, we saw this become a driver for successful solutions.”

The participants came back from the interviews lively and energetic, chatting about what they heard and eager to unpack meanings beyond the words. They were also armed with a much deeper understanding of the ecosystem after empathizing with each stakeholder group. This was not only important for them as they look for solutions but also crucial for these stakeholders in the community because it was truly a unique experience — something no one entity in the community had ever done before.

Time to synthesize

The synthesis stage is about finding the “right” question to answer. The initial design challenge is too broad to try and solve; there are many intricacies and layers of complexity. To be successful in design, you need to find a meaningful and tangible problem to solve — often this requires scoping down. Participants started with storytelling or “downloading” their findings to their team, beginning to pick out insights they find most compelling from their interviews. Some of these included:

• No one actually knows where the waste bins are located
• Small sorting facilities are already created by hotels
• There are some small-scale entrepreneurial inventions for turning waste into revenue
• Burning waste bins is common, which renders them unusable and of course leads to air pollution

Equipped with these empowering insights and many more, the teams came up with reframed “How might we…?” questions that would allow them to tackle their scoped challenges with a fresh perspective.

Creative ideation

With a more nuanced “How might we…?” question, teams were ready to begin the most creative stage in the entire process. Ideation is a fun process that allows people to be creative when traditional approaches, hierarchies, or culture might have prevented it before. It proves that everyone can be creative and there is no one way to solve a problem. Ideation is a vulnerable, bonding experience for teams, where laughter, openness, and a lot of playfulness emerge among the teams. No matter what people’s backgrounds were (gender, race, or experience level), they have something to offer to this process. At the same time, the design process isn’t always easy. There are points in the process where tension can be felt, especially when important decisions need to be made and teams are at a disagreement. When these circumstances take place rapidly throughout the process, a team must grow and learn to work together quickly.

A general rule of thumb we use: If you haven’t come up with enough ideas, you haven’t done justice to the challenge. Collectively, the groups came up with over 100 ideas and then had to select just one each to continue.

Some wild ideas that were put in the “idea graveyard” included camel diapers, green sidewalks, and celebrity awareness videos — just to name a few. Once the ideas were selected, it was time to make them tangible.

Prototyping to bring ideas to life

Equipped with some innate design and engineering abilities, the groups turned their ideas into storyboards and into actual prototypes that could be tested. Prototypes included:

• Representing what a sorting system might look like at a very small scale
• A display booth and hackathon for learning about using waste to create sustainable business models
• Garbage bins that represented the colorful Nubian traditions (ones that you wouldn’t want to burn)
• An accessible and playful map that could be provided to households to find the closest trash bins

The ideas looked great with paper, but it wasn’t certain whether they had potential yet.

One important principle of human-centered design: An idea is not valuable unless the people you designed it for find it valuable.

Testing for the moment of truth

All five stakeholder groups from the community were brought to test the various ideas. Feedback galore was received. Typically, teams struggle with this stage. They often try to elevator pitch and sell their ideas, but this isn’t the goal. The goal is to have the user engage with what they created with the least amount of description possible. It can be disheartening to learn that a user doesn’t understand or doesn’t like your solution. However, it is important in this stage to remember that your prototype is not precious — but the observations and insights that come from it are. You will have plenty of opportunities to go back to any of the earlier stages of the design process and start over or make changes. The faster you fail, the faster you learn.

It was finally the moment of truth: 8am in Aswan, Egypt. We anxiously awaited the arrival of the participants — crossing the Nile River by boat, with their prototypes in tow.

Would the teams make it here on time? Would the stakeholders be happy with their pitch? What would happen next?

Luckily, they made it. In fact, they were 15 minutes early and ready to go! The day before, the teams had learned the art of storytelling as a way of communicating their design process and solutions. Drawing on role-play to build empathy and create suspense, they did a splendid job of communicating their visions. The stakeholders were inspired and said they would also like to further develop prototypes and test the ideas at a greater scale. Furthermore, a few OHF staff members also had the capability of moving forward with these ideas in their own projects.

New pathways for empathy and innovation

With the participants all coming from the same organization, this proved to be a fantastic team-building exercise. The teams were diverse in background, gender, age, disciplines, and life experiences.

Design reaches its true potential when a team has a powerful collective experience and a strong motivation to work together.

With an incredibly well structured, compact, and immersive design experience, we empowered a group that knew almost nothing about design to become equipped with skills in empathy building, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, testing, and storytelling. I saw with my own eyes participants become more willing to take risks, be creative, collaborate, empathize, and inspire one another to take action with design. I saw people work longer and harder with an energy that only comes when you are solving a problem with an understanding of the “why” rather than just the “what” or the “how.” Not only were we successful in teaching the process, but we also made some serious strides toward tackling a real-life challenge (a part of the undertaking that I initially had doubts about).

The environmental and waste management challenges we sought to solve for are not only critical for Gharb Sohail, but also for many parts of the world that could adapt the solutions presented here. In one week, we built empathy for our users and created truly innovative prototypes that both succeeded and failed. But, more importantly, we created new pathways for interventions, change, and understanding. If the local implementation teams continue pushing these ideas a little further, they will undoubtedly make strides that will improve local communities and perhaps will have the potential for global scale.

It is moments like these when one resumes hope in humanity’s ability to work together to make powerful changes rapidly that can ultimately improve well being and quality of life. With a group of curious and passionate people and a process rooted in the human perspective, anything is possible.

Design, strategy, and innovation on the Nile… was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aligned with the agenda of the Aga Khan Foundation to support innovation for social impact and to create a more collaborative and inclusive ecosystem, we provided a highly interactive, hands-on immersive learning experience that brought together 24 local leaders and staff from CSOs in Mozambique.

For three days, the Aga Khan Foundation—through a civil society strengthening program focused on learning and innovation (called Juntos!)—ran a workshop to equip CSOs with the competencies, mindsets, and resources to design impactful solutions using human-centered design as a creative problem-solving approach.

Let’s start with the basics

The workshop started by immersing participants into a rapid design challenge that allowed them to get a flavor of the various steps in a typical human-centered design (HCD) process.

We started by introducing participants to the basic steps of a design process through an experience where, in pairs, they would design a new way for their partner to carry their everyday items (such as money, IDs, credit cards) — but with a caveat: they had to create something that would be tailored to answer the needs, context, and reality of their partners’ everyday life.

Working in pairs, each participant would interview their partner and seek stories to understand what they care about, in order to create something that would matter to them. Lastly, they would create prototypes to allow the partner to engage and experience the solution.

Several creative solutions surfaced, from mobile apps, virtual wallets, hidden vests, backpacks, all-in-one IDs, safety belts, and many other gadgetry items.

A new, more complex challenge

Then, a new challenge was brought for participants to work on: Around the world, a large part of the population (including children) are suffering from obesity with severe consequences for our health. What can we do to help solve this challenge?

Participants were challenged to create ways to inspire households to adopt more healthier eating habits. In the next 2 days they would learn and practice using human-centered design as a process to find innovative and impactful solutions to solve this problem.

Understanding the problem

As with any challenge, we always start by understanding the problem before thinking about possible solutions. The participants formed teams and started digging into the problem, gathering existing knowledge and assumptions while identifying what they were curious to learn.

After some very lively discussions, teams put together a research plan and went “out of the building” to interview and engage in conversations with real “users” in order to build empathy for those they were designing for.

Engaging with those we are designing for

Some groups talked to youth, others interviewed women who were selling street food, making sure they included the mainstream users but also the “extremes” — those groups typically on the fringes and more likely to be marginalized by our solutions, such as elderly or ones with existing medical conditions.

Finding the right problem to solve

Teams came back very energized and started to share within their groups the interesting stories they heard. Walls started to become populated with Post-Its that contained quotes, observations, and insights into people’s behavior around food.

Making sense of all the data is usually a very messy process, but it is in this chaos that participants find the gems of information that will spark new ways to understand the problem at hands.

Themes like lack of financial resources to buy healthy food, accessibility issues, not having the time due to a busy work schedule, family power dynamics, and many others surfaced as potential causes for the problem.

Usually, the best insights are contained in observations or something people said that was surprising (“I believe packaged food is the healthiest”) or contradicting (“I only eat what I shouldn’t eat.”).

Participants were asked to create a point of view that would allow them to look at the problem with a new perspective. From there, each group reframed the initial problem — a specific statement that inspired the team to generate ideas and solutions.

One group focused on the query, “How might we help people prepare healthy dishes with local, highly available ingredients?” Another decided to look at the problem from a different angle: “How might we support people with low income to make smarter food choices” Still another understood that the root of the problem was on the flavor and asked themselves, “How might we make healthier food more attractive and tastier?”

The last group went on to ask, “How might we promote dialogue within the family to enable more healthy eating habits?” Clearly this group understood that it is very difficult to change behaviors alone and promoting dialogue within the family could be an effective way to make that change more sustainable.

Brainstorming multiple ideas

Tired, but very motivated to start brainstorming, teams went wild using various ideation techniques to create multiple possible solutions for their new, reframed problem. Hundreds of ideas were imagined and ultimately, each group selected one that seemed desirable, feasible, and sustainable within the context of Mozambique.

Getting their hands dirty

After the very painful process of selecting one idea among 50 others, teams started to further develop their concepts by creating storyboards. Storyboards are like comic book strips that show how the user interacts with their product or service over time. This is a very useful step to let the group work out the details of the solution.

At this stage, participants were asked to make their solution real — to get their hands dirty building prototypes, which are tangible versions of their products or services. Prototypes are a way to bring the future to the present, to allow us to test whether our ideas align with what users want. It brings us closer to knowing what works, what doesn’t, and why.

The moment of truth

The tension was building up, since so far, all ideas seemed great; but the best ideas in the world are worthless until they are tested. Now it was the time to get their ideas critiqued by real users. It was the moment of truth, where we would bring four guests to act as test users to experience their solutions and provide feedback.

Usually this is a painful moment when you realize that your idea is not as amazing as you initially thought and that many elements of it can be improved. I was impressed by how open the participants were to listen and learn instead of trying to “sell their idea.” Testing with your prototypes is probably the best way to learn about your solution and the people you are designing for.

Storytelling

Now was the moment to practice how to present their solution to potential donors or investors. Each group was asked to prepare a pitch. They also had to perform a role play to make their solution more understandable. This was so much fun!

The solutions

At the end of the workshop, the four teams came up with very different solutions. Though all the groups started with the same initial problem to solve, they ended up navigating very different solution spaces.

One group created a TV show with the goal to raise awareness and promote dialogue within the family about healthy eating habits.

Another group created a mobile app featuring accessible food stalls that would make healthier food as easy to acquire as fast food. For example, you order in advance and by the time you get to the stall, the food is ready.

Not all ideas focused on the same target group. While the previous idea was targeting university students and young professionals, the next group focused on families with low income.

Finally, the last group created a concept that focused on elevating existing ingredients that are healthy but somehow are not valued by communities. An example would be the sweet potato leaves. We learned that they are very tasty (if properly cooked), nutritious, healthy, and widely available, but people tend not to use them. The concept was to create community demonstrations of how to cook these ingredients and get them to ‘taste test’ in order to increase adoption.

Ideas are contagious

Ultimately what really matters is not this specific challenge or a particular idea. This was just an exercise to practice how to use some of the human-centered design methods and think like a designer. We hope to infuse sufficient energy and knowledge to inspire these innovators to go back to their organizations and start driving change from within. Ideas are contagious, and I hope the innovation bug has bitten them by now. The passion, the commitment, the purpose, all the healthy ingredients to bring change to Mozambique were there. Now it’s time to put it into action!

As a Global Innovation Lead for the Aga Khan Foundation, I work with hundreds of colleagues and get exposed to a lot of new ideas and project concepts. But even with all that exposure and having facilitated dozens of design workshops, people still manage to surprise me all the time. This amazing group of participants impressed me with their work, ideas, and ingenuity. Human creativity has no limit and we can always find a better way to do things.

And by the way, we still managed to have loads of fun!

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How amazing is human creativity was originally published in Accelerate Impact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.