A framework for teaching Design for Social Impact
We spent close to a week, speaking to the students of different classes, the class teachers and the principals, the government officials, the social workers, the politicians and the parents of the children. We had prepared our initial understanding of the social space, and identified the broad areas of the problems in the system. As an Indo-French team working on the project, we were the cynosure of the areas wherever we went.
By virtue of being the outsider, we were welcomed (most of the time), and it allowed us to experience culture shock first hand. Our agenda included meeting people, listening to them, field observations, playing and eating with them.
Figure 1: How Wicked Problem usually are
We did this to get the human factor; which is the core aspect of social design, to our project and not just rely on surveys and other research data available. We were able to identify the active participant versus the mere spectator in the designing exercise. The discussions were around expectations, the unfulfilled promises of the government bodies etc. and the current state of education.
We got to know the drivers of education and the motivation behind the children attending school. Interestingly (and sadly) many students come to school only for the food given through the mid-day meal schemes, and to benefit from the various other government schemes [22].
After this we defined the problems and proposed several work axis to get the stakeholders into a participatory approach. The basic idea is to have more face-to-face conversations, randomly start a conversation and share a moment of their lifeworld and life condition together. Knowledge that will eventually inform the design will come.
A need to recruit a local project manager to help manage the project was identified by this research. The responsibility of this person would be to lead activities and conduct oneself as an integral part in the system (as proposed later). This is vital for us as long as we are not based at the location, as would be the case with many Social Designers. The responsibilities of this person would be to conduct activities, collect feedbacks from the users, and maintain a constant supervision of the project.
SECONDARY RESEARCH- WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING
A key aspect of the Social Design Framework we are proposing is the understanding of the work done by others in the same field. We call this secondary research. This could be social entrepreneurs, Non-profit organizations, government initiatives, individuals, grass-root innovators and solutions that work at the bottom of the pyramid. There are different ways in which we propose the Secondary Research be conducted.
Understanding the global context
We do this research phase by exploring as wide as possible, aiming to gather all information relating to the topic the Social Designer is trying to work with. Without restricting in any way, one simply collect facts, statistics, laws, projects, private or government-led programs, issues currently faced, NGOs working on it and so on. While doing this, the original Social Space should be kept in mind. Activities like brainstorming enable the designers to not discard any thought. Each identified area / problem / topic is written down put up on a wall and the cards (or post its) are sorted out to identify the main areas of improvement. An exercise in Affinity Diagramming (Brassard, 1989) [10] or Card Sorting [20] [Figure 2] helps in clearer classification of the collected information.
Figure 2: Affinity Diagram exercise
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