Opportunities for Design-Led Innovation - Humanitarian Sector

Opportunities for Design-led Innovation

Opportunities for Design-Led Innovation Humanitarian Sector

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Opportunities for Design-led Innovation

The principles and processes of human-centered design and design thinking have found resonance in ever-increasing professional contexts. A methodology predicated on putting the beneficiary at the forefront of the design process translates to impact and sustainability. There is a clear need for this approach to be championed in the humanitarian sector.

Man-made and environmental crises are developing at a scale that far exceeds what we have ever faced. This puts considerable strain on the resources available to address them. It is imperative that a new approach be utilized in order to attempt to address these crises and save lives.

This document is a manifesto of sorts that builds off of Quicksand’s expertise in human-centered design as well as our experience in the humanitarian sector. It is a provocation that posits a panacea for ills that plague millions of people in the world today. The intention is for this to elicit an interest in partnering with Quicksand to drive sustainable change in the sector through holistic and thoughtful approaches that attempt to overcome some of the challenges of the current humanitarian eco-system.

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We have long asserted that our human-centered design approach and the processes employed therein allow us to work with any partner in any sector, and add considerable value to any engagement we are a part of. This has afforded us opportunities to work with corporates, nonprofits, multinationals, government agencies, funding bodies, and other players looking to design or revise products and services for end-users and beneficiaries in emerging markets throughout the world.

In the first 10 years of Quicksand’s practice, this has led to a robust portfolio of clients and projects, particularly in the social development and corporate spaces. Beginning in August 2015, the studio has been working in the humanitarian space with on-the-ground engagements in the fields of malnutrition and education, while also contributing to capacity building in design and innovation for staff both at headquarters and in the field for the organisation we partnered with.

Malnutrition Quicksand worked with a leading humanitarian and crisis response agency to develop a system of tools for identifying and tracking severe acute malnutrition. The system of tools was designed to be intuitive enough for use by healthcare workers lacking literacy and numeracy, and portable enough for implementation at the household level in remote areas throughout Africa. The project team led a design thinking workshop in Mali with staff from the organisation’s headquarters as well as various country field staff members from across Africa to understand the challenge and to build design capacity amongst their team.

Several iterations of the composite artefacts of the toolkit were proxy tested in India, capitalising on Quicksand’s access to this context in order to rapidly test and refine the tools with practitioners in the malnutrition field before taking them to South Sudan for in-context evaluation. Changes were made to the tools based on feedback from beneficiaries, health care workers, and organisation staff whilst in South Sudan to take advantage of the opportunity and to ensure that the best possible iterations of each tool emerged and could be tested in real world settings. South Sudan was identified as the most challenging context, and its beneficiaries the most atrisk, so it provided the most salient set of circumstances to conduct the toolkit evaluation and refinement. A design team from Quicksand

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embedded themselves with field staff at a remote field office on South Sudan for a month in order to conduct this testing.

Education Quicksand was commissioned to conduct a landscape review of existing innovative educational interventions in refugee settings and to subsequently innovate on education programs in refugee camps in Africa. The intent was to capitalise on insights gleaned from this engagement by designing new programmatic interventions that could improve and expand upon the educational experience generally, and the social emotional learning of primary school students specifically.

The design team spent several weeks engaging with a litany of stakeholders (e.g., teachers, students, caregivers, community leaders, NGO staff, etc.) at one of the largest refugee settlements in the world to understand the context, interview beneficiaries, and work with staff there to identify challenges and opportunities. These, along with the landscape review research, acted as the foundation for a week-long workshop in which the organisation’s staff from headquarters and in the field worked alongside the Quicksand team to merge the most salient opportunities into several distinct programmatic opportunities that could be deployed in crisis settings throughout Africa and beyond.

Capacity Building Quicksand engaged with a humanitarian organisation to provide training in the use of design thinking tools and activities in an effort to upskill senior staff and field representatives in human-centered design processes. The organisation had identified the need for creating innovative solutions that had both resonance and impact, both in the short and long terms, with beneficiaries. This was done through a series of workshops that utilised actual program challenges that the organisation was facing as the basis for the training exercises. This enabled the participants to better understand and appreciate the processes and activities, along with the ideas and concepts that emerged.

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Challenges The humanitarian space is unique in terms of innovation landscapes for manifold reasons. Chief amongst these are: • The immediacy and exhaustive nature of beneficiary needs (i.e., food, shelter, clothing, security, access to information, etc.), • The scale of crises in terms of those impacted and the severity of the issues/challenges, • The sociopolitical and cultural nuances that need to be considered, • The fluidity of the situation(s), the physical danger inherent in most cases, and • The need for balancing both short term obligations and long term objectives.

A failure to take into consideration any of these inputs can seriously, and negatively, impact the effectiveness of any intervention being designed irrespective of its perceived saliency.

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There needs to be a holistic approach that can address immediate needs while also laying the groundwork for long-term, sustainable solutions. The provisioning of goods and services aimed at solving the most immediate concerns are clear needs, but these need to be coupled with educational outreach and capacity building to ensure that the beneficiaries of programs have the requisite skills, wherever possible, to tackle the challenges afflicting them in the long-term.

The key challenge in developing a holistic solution, or set of solutions, is the transient nature of many humanitarian crises, whether they be natural disasters or human ones. The ever-shifting populations in refugee camp settings, the relatively short-term displacement caused by weather-related crises, and the ebb and flow of political realities that dictate what can and cannot be done need to be considered and tackled with scalable solutions that match the challenges in the fluidity of their application(s). Temporary, multi-use infrastructure, revenue-generating activities and opportunities for beneficiaries’ continued sustenance, law enforcement adequate for creating safe and secure environments, and adequate and inclusive information-sharing systems are all basic elements that need innovative solutions for the humanitarian context.

Moving from Challenges to Opportunities Taking a human-centered approach would allow for a greater understanding of not only the challenges affecting individuals, but also the systems they are attempting to put into place in order to address them. This contextual problem-solving could help design better, more sustainable solutions, while also providing a sense of inclusion and agency that will help to ensure ready and early buy-in.

Design Thinking has been interpreted in multiple ways, but in its most basic framing, it is understood to have five core stages that move from deep understanding of a context and its constituents towards ideas, concepts, and solutions in the real world: Empathise – immersion in an issue or challenge to experience it from an enduser’s perspective, Define – building off the empathic insights, structure both the problem and a solution,

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Ideate – take the problem statement and proposed solution and craft a viable intervention, Prototype – create a tangible or even physical manifestation of the arrived at intervention, Validate – re-engage with end-users to evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness A key aspect of the approach is the manner in which it embraces iteration and flexibility with regards to insights, ideas, prototyping and testing. This means that the process is more cyclical than it is linear: even a product or service that is deemed to be the most impactful at one point in time greatly benefits from a re-evaluation through a reapplication of the process. Reengaging with end-users or beneficiaries throughout the life-cycle of a product or service will help to ensure it stays relevant and valued, and may even extend the life-cycle itself by ensuring its saliency is in tact.

Quicksand’s internal articulation of the design thinking process is threefold: Meeting People – engage with people in their context and immerse ourselves in their daily realities to the greatest degree possible in seeking a holistic understanding of the challenges they face, and the opportunities that are present, Telling Stories – framing and narration of insights in a manner that drives empathy and inspires imagination and creativity in designing solutions, Crafting Experiences – a well-designed product or service is a standout experience first and understanding its place within a user’s daily life will allow for greater impact and resonance It is our opinion that the humanitarian sector could greatly benefit from the more thoughtful and holistic approach that design thinking and human centered design would facilitate. This approach is empowering for organisation staff of all levels, provides the beneficiaries a voice during all stages of a program’s development, and helps to accelerate the process at which programs are rolled out and evaluated. All of this translates to greater impact, and in this sector that means potentially saving a lot of lives.

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Opportunities for Design-led Innovation

Opportunities There are significant needs to be addressed in humanitarian aid contextsboth in the immediate and tangible (e.g., housing and related infrastructure, delivery systems for distribution of foodstuff and medicines, addressing safety and security concerns) and the long-term and intangible (e.g., providing systems for emotional support, providing a sense of hope and purpose, developing a roadmap for transitioning from a state of impermanence for those in camps or temporary shelters to one of stability.

This foundational support and addressal of the most basic needs and shortcomings in refugees’ lives is a critical building block to layer in additional levels of support.

The diversity and robustness of needs is daunting, but it also presents an incredible canvas for innovation exploration. This canvas could manifest in specific programmatic interventions, in building innovation capacity amongst sector actors, in driving multidisciplinary collaboration/breaking down siloes, in reimagining funding models, or other areas in clear need for improvement. Contained within the challenges of this space are innumerable opportunities as well.

One of the most glaring needs in the sector is information-sharing across organisations and areas of interest. Funding models and a fundamental sense of competition amongst, and even within, organisations limit the quality and timeliness of information-sharing. Detailed research reports, months or years after the fact, share results that often focus solely on positive results of interventions. This limits the amount of incremental innovation that could take place whilst the intervention is being piloted; and an avoidance of sharing failures unnecessarily subjects other programs to the same fate. While this might help keep organisations competitive with each other, it does so at the cost of human lives, literally. Fostering a more open environment for collaboration and exploration could lead to the development of more impactful solutions in an accelerated timeframe.

Toolkits and other collateral capturing the steps taken, challenges faced, and solutions arrived at, along with an honest assessment of effectiveness will be critical, if humbling for organisations working in the space.

Engaging with beneficiaries to ensure that their needs are met, and their expertise capitalised upon, is another critical shortcoming and opportunity.

The ones most affected by a crisis likely have a deep understanding of how

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best to provide assistance in addressing it. Therefore, working to understand beneficiary perceptions and behaviours, as well as to take into consideration their thoughts on potential solutions, should be considered a mandatory step in every stage of a program’s development, even after implementation.

Modularity and scalability in a program’s design can help to insulate it from the impact of change in dynamic environments, while also enhancing the reach and scope of an intervention. For instance, a temporary structure utilised as a place of education, to house families, and to act as a meeting hall can address many needs simultaneously while also retaining value should population densities fluctuate. Designing interventions with multiple applications adds a level of complexity but also provides a better opportunity to holistically utilise funding and enhance impact.

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Program Thoughts - Starters (Systemic) a. Incremental Innovation Addressing the immediate needs often leads to sacrificing long-term objectives. Conversely, developing an intervention which requires certain levels of existing support systems (e.g., infrastructure, technology, capacity) without taking into account the practical, immediate barriers to implementation could be disastrous. Bridging the two realities with initiatives that can scale up both in terms of reach and in complexity, technical or otherwise, could help lead to immediate impact that can be sustained moving forward.

An example of this is a toolkit of learning materials that are initially analog but have clear digital manifestations for future application across multiple locations. The initial tools could be produced easily and cheaply in a multitude of contexts, and provide skill training for future use once the infrastructure and capacity are in place for digital applications.

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b. Cross-sector Collaboration One glaring shortcoming of funding and organisational models is a siloed approach to sectors and related grants and other funding mechanisms. This leads to a very deep approach that is very narrow in its scope. While a particular symptom may be treated in an exhaustive manner, if other drivers to the problem or challenge are left ignored the overall impact will be muted. Looking at a challenge to the greatest degree of holism as possible, and designing interventions that take as many touch-points into account, will drive greater impact.

An example of this is aligning the efforts of a nutrition team with that of a water, sanitation, and hygiene team to create a program for treating and curing malnutrition. Supplementary food and educational training will only take a program so far if there is a lack of access to basic, safe water and sanitation infrastructure. c. Innovation Capacity-building at All Organisational Levels More of the same is costing hundreds of thousands of lives and wasting millions of dollars in aid money. Creative, innovative solutions need to be developed and explored, and to do so traditional approaches to program development need to be reconsidered and as many voices be provided a proverbial seat at the planning table as possible. Though there is an understandable concern over having “too many cooks in the kitchen” it is as risky, if not more so, to only have representation of a single voice dictating programmatic development. Rarely does an echo chamber develop new and innovative solutions to address problems. There is a clear disconnect between the daily experience of field staff and the approaches being designed at the highest levels of organisation management. The insights and experiences across the value chain of a program’s implementation (i.e., from those at the development level down to the field staff implementing it and the beneficiaries’ experience with it) need to be given equal weight in order to best identify the areas for improvement and impact.

Providing capacity building training in design thinking and humancentered design approaches and processes will lead to more holistic approaches and solutions. The methodologies of a user-centered approach will help to ensure buy-in at the beneficiary level, and empower staff at all levels to collaboratively ideate, prototype, and test

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new solutions in a faster timeline and for less expenditure than traditional methods. d. Information-Sharing Toolkits and Online Forums Organisations are competing with each other for limited funding and therefore putting a high value on maintaining a sense of privacy. We ask ourselves the question - to whose benefit? Delays in reporting program results, a focus on reporting nothing but successes, and the lack of a transparent assessment of processes and contexts is a detriment to all involved in the sector. Funding models that reward transparency and encourage collaboration will help expedite the development of innovative solutions that work. There is no need to keep “reinventing the wheel�.

Developing a project proposal with a toolkit of learnings will help communicate the importance to the funding body, and help to ensure freedom to try new ideas without fear of failure. This repository of learnings could be made available on a shared humanitarian forum developed specifically for this purpose, and to further the development of effective solutions. e. Temporary, Mobile, & Modular Infra The politically sensitive nature of humanitarian contexts leads to severe limitations in what can be provided to those impacted. Refugee camps are places of impermanence by design, however, often the original crises that forced people into them tend to be long drawn, sometimes lasting years if not decades. As such, treating them as temporary, soon-to-beresolved issues oftentimes leads to inadequate and insufficient physical infrastructure. As populations vary drastically, the temporary facilities for homes and other uses are not intended for prolonged use, and there is a lack of materials suitable for properly maintaining what is available.

This can lead to manifold issues, not least of which the discomfort and dissatisfaction of the end-users.

Working with beneficiaries and field staff to develop a quick, easy-toconstruct infrastructure system for deployment in crisis settings that are relevant and plausible, are better than the existing alternatives, and can be utilised for a multitude of purposes (e.g., domiciles, classrooms, meeting areas, community centers) will allow for the alleviation of many immediate challenges in the context. 

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Program Thoughts - Starters (Sector-Specific) a. Health The fluidity inherent in humanitarian settings (whether it be ebbs and flows of refugee populations, availability of resources, an ever-shifting political landscape, or the like) translates to a need for flexibility in approaching the challenges people face within them. It also demands a certain level of creativity in developing responses. One particular shortcoming that we have observed is an inability to mobilise the human capital contained within these contexts. Enabling and empowering people to act as frontline distributors or to be the initial point-of-contact in identifying and treating some health concerns could greatly improve the quality of life of affected populations in a multitude of ways: by providing gainful employment, providing a sense of purpose, alleviating the burden on oftentimes strained medical resources, helping to offset or even negate the impact of adverse medical conditions, and more.

Review of research on health interventions in humanitarian crisis conducted by various public health actors stresses the importance of

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generating more evidence to understand the effectiveness and delivery of interventions carried out in different contexts.

Identifying ways to build context specific evidence that takes into account both human (e.g., cultural, behaviour) and environmental (e.g., availability of water) attributes is vital. This can be achieved by empowering and training frontline workers, health workers, and beneficiaries. b. Education Addressing the immediate needs (e.g., food, shelter, clothing, medical care) of all stakeholders in the education ecosystem must be viewed as a prerequisite for any program in the space. The needs of students, teachers, administration, and NGO support staff must be tended to in a manner that is not just perceived but real in order to ensure both initial and long-term engagement. This can be accomplished by building in incentives for participation in the form of goods and services; a rewards based approach for engagement that acknowledges the efforts of individuals. Irrespective of the approach to building this consideration into programs, addressing immediate needs of all stakeholders must be the point-of-entry that any endeavour builds off of. c. Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) Inadequate or insufficient WaSH resources (e.g., toilet facilities, clean drinking water, soap, etc.) can be disastrous. Lacking this can lead to the spread of diseases like cholera and dysentery, but it is also dehumanising for people already adversely affected by some calamity.

Providing this infrastructure and these products are a potential revenuegenerating and employment activity which would pay dividends in virtually all aspects of beneficiaries’ lives. d. Livelihoods Those displaced by humanitarian crises are desperate for a sense of normalcy in the very least, and in clear need for opportunities to sustain themselves in a tangible manner. Particularly true in refugee settings, there are populations that are restricted from providing for themselves for various reasons. This puts undue strain on the resources of agencies working with and for them as they are forced to take on the role of providing all aspects of daily life to beneficiaries: food, shelter, clothing,

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etc. Providing employment opportunities and fostering an entrepreneurial spirit amongst individuals will help create an environment of self-sustainability and ensure a sense of hope and optimism that will provide much-needed levity and buoyancy. e. Nutrition Taking a full-spectrum view of nutrition, particularly with respect to the drivers behind malnourishment, will allow for a more focused approach in addressing shortcomings. Developing hybrid programs that link nutrition with other focus areas, such as WaSH and education, will help to treat the “disease” itself and not just the “symptoms”. Arguably more than any other focus area, nutrition demands a holistic approach in identifying and addressing the drivers negatively impacting it. f. Telecommunications & Connectivity The mobile landscape continues to expand and include more and more touch-points in our daily lives. Whether it’s for staying in touch with loved ones or facilitating banking practices, the world is greatly benefiting from a more connected world. Conversely, lacking access to such is greatly dispiriting and has a tremendous, negative impact on people’s lives. Lacking unimpeded access to information can lead to distrust in whatever sources of information are available (i.e., from aid organisations). It can also lead to stress and aggravation that would otherwise not be present, making for unsafe conditions. Ensuring people have access to telephony and mobile networks will greatly assist in rebuilding a sense of normalcy. g. Logistics & Coordination The means of providing access to resources such as food and clothing should be explored for other opportunities as well. For instance, a vehicle used to transport food into a refugee camp could be repurposed to transport goods or even people from the settlement rather than simply return empty. Additionally, the deep knowledge contained within logistics units in terms of a country’s infrastructure should be opensourced to allow for serendipitous uses by other groups. h. Access to Information Often people who are caught in the crises are plagued not only by insecurity and uncertainty but also by the lack of information. Innovative

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ways of connecting affected communities beyond the traditional tools such as radio and social media is needed. This can be harnessed by creating an information system which blends different mediums used informally within the communities.  

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Conclusion There is a clear need for change in the humanitarian sector in terms of programming, processes, and approach to problem-solving. The design thinking methodology represents an incredible opportunity to bring innovation and impact to the sector, and overcome the existing challenges.

Quicksand’s 10+ years experience in the human-centered design field, particularly the past several years in the social development and humanitarian spaces, makes us uniquely positioned to provide the design capacity needed to bring about this change.

These artworks were created as part of an independent project by the studio.

They depict still life from the Nyaragusu refugee camp in Tanzania.

Connect with us quicksand.co.in hello@quicksand.co.in @helloqs linked.in/company/quicksand-design-studio

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