Humanitarian Design (1/2): Transforming core problems into a culture of innovation
Part 1
Project Context and Framework
The challenges of the 21st century are intricate and multifaceted, often categorized as fourth-order issues caused by systemic or organizational factors. Notwithstanding their complexity, these challenges are the most pressing ones we must address to achieve social and environmental sustainability. We firmly believe that strategic design, with its human-centered approach that encompasses our natural environment, is the appropriate toolkit to tackle these challenges effectively.
When discussing complex problems within complex systems, it is essential to examine all the nodes where contributors and components intersect. This enables a thorough analysis of system malfunctions and identification of opportunities for improvement, leading to a collaborative exploration of potential solutions. Therefore, we strongly advocate for the use of strategic design as a valuable toolkit to address such complex contents. This toolkit remains largely underutilized, despite its potential to be a game-changer in these challenging situations.
In the context of a recent project undertaken by our Iconstorm Social Design team, we will discuss how to identify the core issues and defects in current systems through strategic design and its underlying concepts of forming coalitions, while aligning the actors with a shared vision.
The Iconstorm Social Design team was led by Thomas Jäger (Dipl. Des. specialized in the appliance and research of Strategic design in Humanitarian Settings), who assembled a low hierarchy team of strategic designers with various specializations.
The first post in this two-part blog series, will examine the project context and framework, as well as dive into the complexity of applying strategic design methods to humanitarian settings. The second post in this series will discuss the importance of collaboration, the challenges we experienced, and the creative solutions our strategic design team produced in these complex social contexts, and consider the powerful impact strategic design can have in humanitarian settings.
Researching the Context
Following an intensive reframing of the issue and contextual desk research, we conducted on-site user research and co-creation sessions with all stakeholders involved, including partner NGOs, external partners, and a representative group of users. This enabled us to create value propositions for each room and its function, which were then channeled into guidelines and proposals based on existing resources, making implementation and adaptation feasible for both the NGO and its users. We shared our methodologies throughout the entire process, empowering them to apply this knowledge themselves in the future.
Our design team effectively leveraged a combination of best practices and proprietary design methods to develop well-structured, mentally stimulating workshops. These workshops facilitated a shift in the mindset of the participants, fostering enriched discussions about solutions and problems. Identifying the right context of a problem, especially in the realm of social design, can be a challenge. Social problems can have many layers and perspectives and often, they can only be understood by tracing the lived experiences of people native to these contexts.
To gain a better understanding of the problem, our team of designers conducted numerous interviews, site observations, and workshop sessions together. These sessions generated a rather complex picture of the problems and the contexts in which they reside, often accompanied by a lot of opinionated statements.
Imbibing Complexity
Our team of designers ended up discovering a significantly new set of systemic problems while conducting workshops with our NGO partners. The workshops made use of customized methods to better understand the relationships within this complex system of actors. One key learning we derived while navigating through this influx of new data was to never consider the design brief as the final problem statement. Instead, the brief evolves with the discovery of new information. As strategic designers, our role is to facilitate the effective consumption and discussion of this new-found information by our clients and partners to help them make better decisions.
To be continued in Part 2
