ThinkPlace - Education & Capability

A global honour for empowering young women

Daniel Silkstone — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 04:30:50 +0000

A global honour for empowering young women

Australia

When we look at the challenges that face our world, and some of the longstanding behaviours that created those challenges, there can be little doubt that empowering girls and young women is an important part of the global solution.

As part of its commitment to pursuing action on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals ThinkPlace works to advance gender equality globally.

That’s why we are honoured to be the major sponsor and curriculum provider for the Girls Leadership Network, an ongoing program in Canberra, Australia that helps young women form a network of like-minded peers, develop leadership skills, and learn from inspirational speakers.

And we are incredibly excited to see the network, its founders and the incredible work it does honoured by a prestigious Han award from the Government of Finland.

FINLAND AND GENDER EQUALITY

Finland has recently appointed a 34-year-old female prime minister, Sanna Marin. The other four parties in the government coalition all have female leaders – three of whom are also less than 35 years old. Finnish society has been built with the concept of equal opportunity as a guiding principle.

A strong advocate internationally as well as at home, Finland actively supports individuals and groups working towards an equal future. The Embassy of Finland has just presented The Girls Leadership Network, with the nation’s Hän Award – making the network the first ever Australian recipient, and only the 17th worldwide.

WHAT IS THE Hän AWARD?

In June 2019, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland launched a campaign to show appreciation for the valuable work that is being done around the world to advance equality in society. Finland has presented special recognition – a Hän Honour to individuals and groups around the globe who are committed to advancing inclusivity in society. You can read more about the other honourees here.

WHAT IS Hän?

The award is named after Hän, a special, gender-neutral pronoun used as part of Finland’s written language since the year 1543. Its use, commonplace in Finland and celebrated internationally, is a powerful example of how language can positively impact on gender and other forms of inequality. Male, female or non-binary in identification, anybody can be referred to by the pronoun. Using Hän in official discourses of government and business helps underscore that opportunities and rights apply equally to all.

MORE ABOUT THE NETWORK

ThinkPlace provides design thinking coaching and resources to the Girls Leadership Network as well as donating its studio space to host regular classes.

Tis the inclusive Finnish pronoun that stands for equal opportunity.

As part of the program, young women are also encouraged to create their own initiatives. One such program is Girls Run the World – created by the then 19-year-old co-founder of TGLN, Asha Clementi, and 18-year-old Imogen Brewer-De Nicola, a TGLN inaugural participant.

The pair built upon an initial collaboration with the Embassy of Finland in 2017 to launch a broader program for young women. Girls now have the opportunity to experience life and leadership experience with a number of embassies.

For Finland, network participants helped design an itinerary for a Finnish trade mission. For Canada, they took over the embassy’s social media for the day. For Thailand, they created a plan to encourage voting Thai citizens living in Australia during ng elections. These initiatives and many more drive learning and created positive mutual value.

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Why I'm optimistic about our future

Daniel Silkstone — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 02:49:04 +0000

Why I'm optimistic about our future

New Zealand

If you read the daily headlines or cast an eye over the political gridlock that surrounds many of the world’s most pressing challenges it can be tempting to feel dispirited. To believe that things will not change for the better.

I’ve got the perfect antidote to that feeling.

Imagine a week-long design sprint with people from 162 countries united by their passion to make a real impact on the Sustainable Development Goals.

I have just been to UNLEASH, in Shenzhen where I helped as a facilitator for a second time. UNLEASH is an incredible innovation lab, bringing together a thousand talented 18-35 year olds from around the world with 150 facilitators. Imagine a week-long design sprint featuring this collection of brilliant young minds, all united by their passion to make a real impact on the 17 SDGs!

UNLEASH is an event that helps restore your faith in the possibility of better futures and generates incredible excitement when you see the possibilities opened up by genuine global collaboration. For us, as ThinkPlacers, it also underlines the global connectedness of what we do. ThinkPlace provided five facilitators to the event, including design leaders from our NZ, Aust, Singapore and Kenyan studios.

I was fortunate to be working with a passionate and brilliant group of young people on SDG 13: Climate Action. There could scarcely be a more important challenge to assemble our combined creativity around. This year all our travel was offset to be carbon neutral.

CLIMATE ACTION IS DEEPLY PERSONAL

We all live on this precious planet so all of us there were impacted by climate change. But one thing that immediately jumped out at me: quite a number of the people in our group were living with significant and immediate impacts now.

Everyone there was awake to the need for climate action now but many had personal and urgent experience of that need.

Among them, Diwigdi from Guna. Due to rising seas his islands are disappearing and likely to be gone within the next 20 years “I’m going to have grand kids and I’m going to have to tell them ‘we used to live on Islands’,” he said.

There was Joseph from Zambia a performer/composer who was inspired to compose an awesome song “We have the power” during the week and Will, a facilitator from YellowKnife Canada, where a local doctor prescribes climate action for eco-anxiety as locals experience all sorts of effects up north such the permafrost collapsing under buidlings and methane bubbles rising under the ice.

Together, we came up with a couple of hundred ideas during the event (some of which will be realized, other which won’t). You can read more about some of the most promising ideas here.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about in this blog post. The real gold, I believe, will be from the powerful, committed and talented network that was created. This is what will really generate positive ripples of difference across our planet.

INSPIRATION IS A MULTIPLIER

A large part of the value of an event like this is bringing people together and creating new collaborations and relationships. But another huge benefit is giving changemakers from around the world, who are early in their journeys, access to inspirational figures who would normally be out of reach.

We were fortunate to have two Nobel Peace Prize laureates speak to us all (imagine such a thing!). Both inspired us with their experience, their ability to make a a real difference, their belief and their courage. But even more importantly, they challenged each of us to follow their example and follow through with our ideas.

One of these was Leymah Gbowee, Liberian peace activist, social worker and women’s rights advocate. She is Founder and President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, based in Monrovia.

Leymah shared a number of her experiences, including how with a number of other mothers she started a peace movement to stop the war in Liberia by borrowing $10 to place an advert in the newspaper, appealing to women and mothers to join them in stopping the war.

“Never, ever despise humble beginnings,” she told the participants. “If you are a dream bearer, you are also a dream carer.”

Leave a signature on this planet and define your own life. And never walk on tiptoes. – Leymah Gbowee

Leymah not only inspired us but challenged us to stand for what we believe and also speak the truth (especially to power).

Then there was Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and creator of micro-finance. He started by just giving small amounts of money to local people in extreme poverty as he walked past them on the way to his teaching. It was all they needed to lift themselves a bit out of poverty. He kept doing this and then people started paying back the loans. Grameen Bank now lends billions of dollars to those in dire need and have 99.5% pay-back rates.

Muhammad Yunus stressed he knew nothing about banking at the start of his journey and this helped him immensely as he flipped everything about the conventional banking system, such as lending money to women as well as men (most loans are now to women), lending to people with no identity papers and not situating outlets in the cities – they are all in rural villages.

Don’t follow the old voice. See things with your own eyes. – Muhammad Yunus

These were powerful words and they really captured the spirit of what UNLEASH is all about, harnessing the energy and creativity of young, motivated people and multiplying the power it can have via collaboration, mentoring and inspiration.

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An exciting partnership for design education in Singapore

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 01:05:05 +0000

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An exciting partnership for design education in Singapore

Service

Experience & Behavioural DesignDigitalEducation & Capability

People

Sector

Vibrant Communities

In the right hands they are powerful tools but misapplied by the inexperienced they can be little more than buzzwords: User experience design, design thinking, gamification.

And in Singapore, as with many other worldwide markets, there is growing demand for these services.

THE CHALLENGE

When the Republic Polytechnic in Singapore recently decided to expand its suite of adult education services into design thinking, gamification and experience design they didn’t have to work too hard to decide who they needed to partner with.

ThinkPlace has strong capability and global profile across all three areas. We also have a thriving Singapore Design Studio and a strong track record of working with government and non-government organisations in the city-state.

That’s why ThinkPlace and Republic Polytechnic signed a memorandum of understanding to make this new partnership official. The MOU coincides with the opening of Republic Polytechnic’s new Experience Design and Gamification Centre.

This major partnership between ThinkPlace and the Polytechnic cements our role as a global leader in education around design thinking, user experience and gamification.

OUR RESPONSE

The XGD centre will focus on promoting awareness, and developing capabilities and expertise in UX and Gamification via projects, consultancies and training. 

It will help businesses to develop and adopt UX and Gamification solutions that foster innovation and enhance productivity and competitiveness. 

The centre brings together a powerful alliance of industry, private and public sector. This will open up spaces for consultancy work as well as advanced training in methods that ThinkPlace is a world leader in.

There is a growing demand for user experience design services in Singapore and this partnership will allow the building of new capability that allows the Polytechnic to provide the technical support Singaporean businesses are increasingly demanding.

HOW WE'RE DOING IT

Gamification is more than just leader boards, badges and rewards. Designed well, it engages and motivates people across all activities and organisations.

Gamification has immense potential in engaging customers, improving loyalty and shifting behaviours. It has the power to spur motivation of people and influence behaviours. Customers are not the only group of people that organisations need to motivate and engage. In fact, employees can significantly benefit from these programmes to retain, recognise and spur engagement of staff beyond compensation.

ThinkPlace has long been a leader in this emerging space and a gamification company - Pentaquest - is a part of the ThinkPlace global network.

THE IMPACT

Through both the new XGD Centre, and the broader ThinkPlace-RP relationship, we will be engaging with organisations on User Research, UX, Design Thinking, Service Design, Serious Games and Gamification through: 

Projects - An opportunity for ThinkPlace and Polytechnic staff to collaborate on projects for clients where differing skillsets make this desirable and to share access to labs and facilities. 
Consultancy – A joint effort to establish gamification in Singapore, and realise its benefits for both private and public sector
Industry collaboration - Driving Singapore's industry transformation roadmaps, working with employers and employees alike, to achieve change at scale across sectors
Training – A new platform to provide continuing adult design training for adult learners as part of our collaboration

ABOUT THINKPLACE SINGAPORE

ThinkPlace is a global network of strategic design studios, founded in 2005. Our Singapore Studio opened in 2014 and is led by General Manager Bill Bannear.

Building on ThinkPlace's global reputation as a provider of education and training we have established strong credentials in providing design thinking training and education to public organisations over the past four years. Increasingly, we are seeing interest from the private sector looking for partners that could help them develop and embed design capability in an effort to unlock strategic competitiveness and innovation.

Continuing education is a critical part of building human capital in Singapore and aligns closely with the Government’s plans for workforce transformation. The Singaporean Prime Minister also talks about how design thinking will be instrumental in the nation’s continued development.

There is plenty of ongoing interest in these methods right now. We see this as an opportunity to extend our footprint and to collaborate with the polytechnic to offer a design thinking training programme. Beyond that, we want to introduce new programmes through the centre such as design thinking for specific industries and gamification design - Bill Bannear

“These are areas where we have clear expertise and we can help, not only Singaporean businesses and organisations to flourish but help to build the capacity for innovation across the nation.”

ABOUT REPUBLIC POLYTECHNIC

Republic Polytechnic is the youngest polytechnic in Singapore, offering diploma courses in Engineering, ICT, hospitality, management and communications to interested tertiary students.

ThinkPlace has previously worked with the Polytechnic to embed design capabilities with their staff and lecturers. We have also accommodated students from the Polytechnic’s Diploma in Design for user experience as interns, while maintaining a close relationship to support them in their design growth. The new centre and the memorandum of understanding that create sit are a logical next step in this partnership.

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Teaching scientists to do human-centred design (& why)

Daniel Silkstone — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 06:50:22 +0000

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Teaching scientists to do human-centred design (& why)

Service

Education & Capability

People

Sector

Vibrant Communities

Scientists are excellent at carrying out research. It’s what they do. But what kind of research?

When the CSIRO’s Location Index team wanted to draw on staff to create a future strategy and program of work they realised a different set of skills were needed to the ones their people already excelled in.

Location Index (LOC-I) is a project that is vital to the future of evidence-based decision making in Australia. It brings together different forms of data about locations, from street addresses to map coordinates and more, into a single database. This means crucial information about what happens where can be shared, compared and put to use far more easily.

This information has many applications, ranging from how and where to mitigate the impact of climate change, to where water resources might be located. How to generate economic growth without depleting natural resources and how to protect Australia against biosecurity threats.

The LOC-I team engaged ThinkPlace to build the capability of human-centred user research within their team, providing training to inform the future creation and integration of their program of work.

THE CHALLENGE

ThinkPlace was asked to create and run human-centred design training to build the capacity of a highly-technical team to learn the importance of understanding of the individual, human goals and needs.

The CSIRO team’s leadership wanted their staff to be able to conduct interviews to understand the broader government staff perspective that analysis and use geospatial data to create products and inform policy decision making.

OUR RESPONSE

The training started by focusing on building skills of the LOC-I project team.

They began with the theory of why we conduct qualitative, user research and the value of this type of engagement could bring to inform LOC-I.

Then participants were taught how to conduct 1:1 interview, capture observation notes, and how to distil their research into insights. This training was built into their project and with their new capability, staff conducted 50+ interviews.

HOW WE DID IT

The second phase of the training was a hands-on experiential learning workshop created to distil the research into archetypes. This 1.5-day workshop rapidly moved through understanding:

The user archetypes and their roles, needs and goals through user cards templates
The overarching cohorts by clustering the user cards to give the team an eco-system picture that highlighted how cohorts are distinct and have unique functions they enable within the life cycle
The depth of the research to synthesis the motivation, satisfaction and pain points, data use and tools, needs of the role for each user archetype
The persona of each archetype by defining them with a name, user story, role, actions and specific goals.

The above process created the foundations of the archetype personas and experience maps developed out of the workshop.

THE IMPACT

Through this training, ThinkPlace was able to shift the mindset of technical scientists to understand why and how to conduct user research.

The experience maps developed from the team’s research will help guide the development of LOC-I. This work, and the skills and tools that have been added to the organisation as a result of it, will ensure a user-focused product that supports users to integrate data, analyses and ultimately improve workflows and policy recommendations and decisions.

Our design and implementation of this training has allowed this organisation to add valuable capability to take charge of its future and reorient its future program of work in ways that will meet the needs of users far more readily.

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Tuesday, 17 September 2019

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A better digital experience for all New Zealanders

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 05:05:59 +0000

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A better digital experience for all New Zealanders

Service

DigitalEducation & CapabilityResearch & insights

People

Sector

Trusted Institutions

How do you build consistency of digital services and user experience for citizens across more than 20 government agencies? And once you’ve built that consistency – how can you sustain it?

The goal of the Department of Internal Affairs’ Government Information Services was to ‘empower the system’ by building its capability. ThinkPlace was charged with helping bring this empowered system to life.

THE PROBLEM

The lack of seamlessness in government digital services occurs because government agencies are not fully structured to deliver joined up services.

Research and studies have identified citizen expectations that such connections should be the case but several barriers are dissuading agencies from working together. These barriers include strategic, structural and systemic. The Department of Internal Affairs Government Information Services (GIS) is aiming to deliver government information services that are flexible and tailored to New Zealanders’ needs.

To tackle this problem, GIS established a programme of work to modernise the ‘behind the scenes’ of govt.nz – the government website that effectively enables citizen’s digital engagement with the government.

The programme is charged with providing all government agencies with the capabilities, tools, ways of working and technologies to enable a consistent experience and level of digital engagement for New Zealanders engaging with government information and services. ThinkPlace was asked to help deliver insights about the experiences of agencies at the heart of this challenge.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace partnered with DIA team members and took an emergent and action-learning approach to the problem. We shaped an all-of-Government Strategy for a Digital Public Service and built the programme as we went.

While this may sound a little unconventional, it enabled the team to be highly responsive to the environments they were observing, and the key learnings from a range of stakeholders. The team spent the bulk of its effort on building, testing, and learning from initiatives and prototypes.

HOW WE DID IT

ThinkPlace guided the team through an end-to-end process using the ThinkPlace Design System™. In order to understand the context of digital information and service design in government and beyond, we reviewed a range of resources, including white papers, case studies, models, and strategy frameworks. Initiatives for empowerment were developed, informed by the accumulative research.

We completed a series of one on one interviews to complement the insights from the literature review, and to gain an understanding of the current context of digital capability in government. Our interviews explored what worked well and where the gaps were that required support.

This was followed by co-design of new initiatives and some evaluation activity from those who are immersed in the system, both government and non-government agencies.

These initiatives tackled specific problems identified within government, and aimed to increase digital capability across all of government, and all roles, not just those with a digital focus.

We facilitated three workshops, two with government staff and one with vendors (those digital agencies working with government), in order to test the 23 initiatives. During these workshops, attendees prioritised the initiatives and chose those that stood out as the most beneficial for agencies. These initiatives were then further developed by attendees, who added information such as risk factors and measures of success.

THE IMPACT

To support the Strategy for a Digital Public Service, GIS has initiated the Digital Service Design Framework as a way to frame how the various pieces of work the team is focused on fit together. The framework brought together the selected seven initiatives and showed where they fit within the wider government digital strategy.

The initiatives we prototyped act as foundational pieces supporting the understanding, uptake and implementation of the DSDS and web accessibility standards and facilitating the use of the core tools provided by the Design System and Content System.

Experimentation of prioritised initiatives is taking place in a live prototype phase, allowing the DIA design team to learn quickly what works and to iterate their ideas in the context in which they will exist.

ThinkPlace will continue to guide the DIA to develop these experiments from opportunities we identified during the process and grow the prototyping capabilities.

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Monday, 16 September 2019

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Bespoke education for Australia's public sector leaders

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 04:28:23 +0000

Work

Bespoke education for Australia's public sector leaders

Service

DigitalEducation & Capability

People

Sector

Vibrant Communities

For government, and for citizens, the world is changing rapidly. We live in an era characterised by rapid digital transformation. In this context, the nature of what government ‘could do’ is in danger of outpacing questions around what it ‘should do’.

Questions of how to deliver most efficiently for service users must be balanced with strategic intent at organisation level as well as public concerns about privacy and other ethical questions.

For government departments and agencies there is a clear need for leaders who understand these challenges and who have the tools and mindsets need to flourish in this context.

And for citizens, who rely on government to meet their needs and protect their interests, it is vital that present and future public sector leaders are up to the challenge.

THE CHALLENGE

Within this context, the Australian Government established the Building Digital Capability Program to transform the way it delivers services to citizens, businesses and other users.

As part of this program the  Centre for Leadership and Learning a t APSC engaged ThinkPlace to develop and deliver an executive leadership development program. This ‘Leading Digital Transformation Program’ was needed to position SES to lead digital transformation in their agencies, and across the wider public sector.

The APSC sought ThinkPlace’s curriculum development and subject matter expertise to develop existing program learning standards into an engaging course complete with knowledge, practical activities and course materials.

APSC also required an initial program pilot, the learnings of which would then be used to iterate and deliver the program to 12 additional SES cohorts.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace partnered with Adapt2Digital to deliver three services including a digital mindset assessment, a one day workshop and the curriculum review and design.

Key stakeholders from APSC and DTA worked closely with ThinkPlace to co-design the approach for the review of existing curriculum material.

Over a three-week series of intensive agile sprints, the core design team deployed a Digital Leadership pre-course assessment tool and then curated and reviewed pilot self-directed learning materials on Canvas (an online Learning Management System).

They also developed course workbooks, guide slides and course materials from both the Context Day workshop and a 3 day Digital Leadership Immersion workshop.

HOW WE DID IT

Key project activities included:

Conducting an assessment of course learning outcomes against Bloom Taxonomy, as well as a gap analysis of the self-directed learning framework
Development and facilitation of Context Day (including materials and facilitation)

Creating materials in support of the Digital Leadership Immersive 3 day course
Producing 10 modules of curated content with associated learning outcomes, then engaging participants

THE IMPACT

This work has created a program that unlocks untapped potential within the APS to accelerate the digital transformation agenda. It showcases the ability of ThinkPlace to create bespoke learning experiences that draw on deep expertise, purposeful collaboration and an understanding of the needs and context for public sector leaders.

The program consists of four key areas: a training marketplace; talent attraction; talent retention; and culture. Senior Executives who participate in the Leading Digital Transformation Program are inspired to transform their agencies by building and leveraging digital teams and driving a progressive digital cultures.

Ultimately, the program supports the transformation of government services to be simpler, clearer and faster for citizens, businesses, and internal users. SES-level leaders are equipped to identify potential barriers and ways to overcome them, and learn how to motivate teams to create easy-to-use digital services for citizens.

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Monday, 16 September 2019

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Design thinking education for public librarians

Daniel Silkstone — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 05:04:55 +0000

Work

Design thinking education for public librarians

Service

Education & Capability

People

Sector

Vibrant Communities

Most of us probably think of libraries as a place to borrow and return books. For much of their modern history that has been the way libraries and librarians interacted with the broader public.

In recent years this has changed dramatically as technological and other changes reshape how libraries interact with members and citizens. This means new skills, mindsets and tools are needed by library staff to meet these emerging challenges and ensure that our libraries retain their importance as a critical part of our social fabric.

Public Libraries Victoria (PLV) is the peak body that governs 47 public library services across the State. The Our Future, Our Skills (2014) audit report identified several skills needed for staff to adapt and deliver future services. These capabilities include being able to: identify future global and community trends; explore alternative futures and respond to them; develop capacity in strategic thinking; deliver an excellent customer experience; and design collaborative partnerships and solutions.

THE CHALLENGE

The PLV’s goal was for all library staff to be equipped with these skills in order to deliver a wide range of meaningful and engaging projects to their community. Design thinking was identified as a methodology that could deliver on these skills for library staff, as well as develop creative and flexible thinking. PLV needed the training to be tailored to the library context, be highly engaging, and instil confidence in staff so that they would be able to use design thinking in their work immediately.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace was engaged to develop and deliver a series of day-long design thinking workshops across metropolitan and regional Victoria for more than 100 customer service specialists and senior staff in public libraries.

Included in the development of the training was a practical and bespoke Design Thinking toolkit and a slide-deck containing templates, design thinking theory, and step-by-step practical methods staff could apply in their day-to-day roles.

“I feel confident to go out and approach program planning with a different focus - really drilling down to the needs of the customer, not just what we think they need.” (participant)

HOW WE DID IT

Both the workshops and booklet followed an Inspire, Educate, Work, and Reflect structure.

For Library staff, this meant understanding what design thinking is, the benefits it provides, and the relevance of design thinking in the context of their work.

Participants were then taken through a series of experiential learning sessions which focused on different design thinking methods including identifying stakeholders, developing lines of enquiry, discovery interviews, mining for key insights, ideation, testing concepts, and prototyping.

Staff applied their learnings to real challenges they had identified, completing the training with practice in user research, ideation, and peer feedback on their ideas.

ThinkPlace’s approach was interactive, collaborative, and user-centred. Staff were engaged to be active participants in their learning and build a shared understanding of what design thinking means in their worksituation and in a broader library context.

I LOVE the book and the templates. Makes it so much easier to apply what we learned. (participant)

The program focused on learning the principles and practical implementation of service design theory. This included a showcase of the objectives and outcomes of Service Design, as well as providing an opportunity for staff to identify scenarios and work through a design-thinking process.

The bespoke 'Design Thinking for Libraries Toolkit' created for this project included: step-by-step instructions for carrying out design thinking activities; case studies; resource lists; and templates for design thinking activities.

THE IMPACT

Having engaged more than 100 library staff and gained their feedback, it was evident that we had educated and inspired many to apply design thinking in their day-to-day roles.

At an individual level, staff built on their current skills, engaged positively with new methods and materials, and applied design thinking approaches to creating solutions for real challenges in their libraries.

At a broader level, our work was able to inspire fresh thinking, provide mentorship, and equip many local leaders and change agents with tools to create a meaningful difference in their community.

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Friday, 13 September 2019

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Human-centred sexual health services forTanzanian youth

Sashi Surendran — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 06:03:21 +0000

Work

Human-centred sexual health services forTanzanian youth

“In our village, when a girl gets pregnant at a young age, before marriage; you become like a curse to your family and everyone in the village.” The words come from Lorraine, a staff member of Marie Stopes in Tanzania. But the sentiment, and the problem it makes clear, are common throughout rural Tanzania and many other parts of Africa. And that’s why increasing access to services and information around family planning is a crucial challenge for Marie Stopes Tanzania. It is a challenge that ThinkPlace was only too happy to collaborate on. At ThinkPlace, we specialize in designing within complexity. At understanding complex systems and creating interventions that function within those systems to create positive change. And there is a great deal of overlap between this kind of user-centered design and the dynamic, unpredictable and complex nature of adolescents.

Service

Scaled systemic changeInclusive Co-design & EngagementResearch & insights

People

Topics

health

Sector

Healthy Societies

THE CLIENT

Reaching out to adolescents was an important task that Marie Stopes Tanzania, the largest specialized sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and voluntary family planning organisation in Tanzania, wanted to explore.

Marie Stopes had launched rural outreach services that target poor and vulnerable women, adolescents and men, especially those living in rural and peri-urban underserved areas. They asked ThinkPlace to help them gain greater uptake for these services – specifically family planning and sexual health services – from Tanzania’s population of young rural people.

THE CHALLENGE

Marie Stopes and their staff understand on a personal level what adolescent girls in Tanzania go through. For their staff, the importance of building connections with adolescent girls begins very close to home.

“My passion for adolescents started with my own upbringing,” staff member Lorraine says.

“My family couldn’t afford to pay for me to go to secondary school and I met my first boyfriend who promised he would talk to his parents to help once I accepted to be with him. I did and got pregnant.

My father chased me out of home. I was considered an embarrassment … My mother pleaded with her sister’s family to take me in. My life in school was very difficult. Everyone laughed at me. But I was empowered through education, that is why today I am supporting other girls.”

Lorraine’s experience and the environment she grew up in signifies the reality of many adolescent girls living in Tanzania today, a fact that has been instrumental in Marie Stopes setting up their outreach services.

Marie Stopes strongly believed that engaging adolescents was not only possible, but a unique entry point for their outreach services. And they turned to ThinkPlace Kenya to help them create and drive greater demand for family planning among adolescents.

OUR RESPONSE

Marie Stopes’ Outreach program is built upon an ambitious goal of reaching about 2 million new users by 2020.

Through intensive user-centered research, Thinkplace Kenya sought to understand adolescent’s behaviors, drivers, attitudes and needs that would encourage uptake of family planning.

ThinkPlace designers spent considerable time on the ground, turning interactions with young people into insights about their views on family planning and their behaviours in relation to the services and information on offer.

Quite often, we found, family planning services were a last resort for adolescents who were at times influenced by cultural traditions that stigmatised early childhood sex education or terrifying tales of the side effects of family planning heard anecdotally from their peers.

Having no control of their future was a recurring idea voiced by young people, signifying the importance of designing interventions that allow adolescents a feeling of self-determination and help provide them with what they ultimately desired: A sense of security.

As a result of the insights derived from this research phase Marie Stopes Tanzania were able to implement immediate changes to their services that resulted in significant increases in adolescent interest around family planning.

THE IMPACT

In addition to designing interventions for adolescents, Thinkplace tested each intervention to determine the most desirable that would articulate the adolescent’s needs.

Evidence shows that many of those interventions are working. But the capacity-building impact of introducing human-centred design methods within adolescent communities has been just as powerful.

“I am now an expert in HCD! I enjoyed seeing the transformation from research,” Marie Stopes Tanzania staff would utter in delight. Following the project, at least seven members of the Marie Stopes team have advanced their careers applying knowledge and tools gained during this work.

The biggest success has been the elimination of bias by influencers around family planning within the communities. This has been achieved by engaging influencers like parents and religious leaders and by better tapping into adolescents’ imaginations via entrepreneurship activities such as soap-making, henna-painting and batik.

Pilot outcomes indicated a significant increase in client visits for adolescents. In the first pilot location clinics improved from 27 clients a day (pre-intervention) to an average of 70 clients a day afterwards. In the second location, client visits increased from an average of 13 to an average of 50.

Adopting the interventions in their service model has enable Marie Stopes to generate more demand for family planning and build capacity within the outreach team, while also allowing team members to gain additional entrepreneurship skills. Success is not only evident in the increased need for family planning, but also through adolescents’ restored confidence and acquired skills, much of it the result of the actions that have been part of this project.

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"My father chased me out of home. I was considered an embarrassment … My mother pleaded with her sister’s family to take me in. My life in school was very difficult. Everyone laughed at me. But I was empowered through education, that is why today I am supporting other girls"

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Friday, 14 June 2019

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5 Essential qualities for a leader of the Digital Age...

Sashi Surendran — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 01:36:50 +0000

New Zealand

5 Essential qualities for a leader of the Digital Age...

Topics

Business design

If you’re a leader in the public or private sector you know by now that a massive digital transformation is underway.

In the near future the ways that governments interact with their citizens will change dramatically. The tools already available, including technologies like artificial intelligence, data mining and blockchain mean that organisations and leaders will increasingly have to make strategic decisions about where they are headed and how they will get there.

And these decisions will be made in the midst of both unprecedented uncertainty and tantalising possibility.

So what kind of leaders will prosper in this environment? And what kind of skills will they need to have?

ThinkPlace New Zealand recently ran a deep dive conversation around leading in the digital age. At our Wellington Design Studio we hosted several government leaders active in this space and UK-based consultancy Adapt2Digital, who shared their experiences about elevating leadership in the UK and Australian public sectors.

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Wednesday, 24 April 2019

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Technology is transforming our most ancient computers

Sashi Surendran — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 02:52:35 +0000

Australia

Technology is transforming our most ancient computers

Topics

transformative innovation

Our attention is fixed on what’s happening in the world of digital innovation. But while the latest Facebook scandal or the challenges of digital transformation hog headlines, some of the most profound advances in technology, are not happening on our phones or our PCs.

They’re happening in the most ancient computer we know of – our brains.

I recently spent a week at Oxford University, studying Neuroethics under Professor Julian Savulescu – a remarkable Australian who holds the university’s Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics. It turns out that the frontiers of neuroscience are a rollercoaster ride of medical opportunities and ethical dilemmas. Questions that came up included:

At what point do you stop being you if your brain is intervened with to the point where it changes your personality and sense of self?
What is the capacity for someone in a coma to make decisions about their own care, if they can answer yes/no questions using an MRI machine despite being in an a vegetative state?
Should neurostimulation be considered to be like doping and be banned from elite sports?
Would it be ok to stimulate or inhibit love as a therapeutic response to relationship breakdowns or domestic violence?

These questions may seem either deeply philosophical or even like science fiction, but in fact they are live dilemmas where the neurotechnology described is either on the cusp of being real-world, or is actively being used in clinical or even consumer settings.

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Monday, 8 April 2019

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