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  • Writer's pictureSovanpidor Ham

Solving Social Challenges Starts with Prototyping

Published on Jan 05, 2016


On December 9th 2015, InSTEDD iLab Southeast Asia (iLab SEA) collaborated with USAID-funded Development Innovations (DI) to help a dozen of civil society organisations to tackle their project challenges.

InSTEDD iCamp (aka Innovation Camp) is a one day rapid prototyping workshops designed to support development actors with the technical design of ICT4D solutions. Participants are paired for the day with iLab designers and developers who assist them in identifying opportunities for ICT integration and in designing technically viable concepts.

Through the InSTEDD iCamp, participants from eleven development organisations presented four challenges related to their work. The challenges were then picked up to analysed, designed, tested, and iterated.

Facilitated by human-centred design (HCD) practitioner Akira Morita and the iLab SEA team, we walked the participants through a process to define their proposed challenges, generated 100+ idea solutions, designed prototypes to test among the participants. The test and show session one day rapid prototyping workshops designed to support development actors with the technical design of ICT4D solutions.

Participants are paired for the day with iLab designers and developers who assist them in identifying opportunities for ICT integration and in designing technically viable concepts.also enabled those involved in prototyping to further improve and validate their early solutions.

Akira said:

“For this iCamp, the focus is on the process of ideation and prototyping, rather than the technology. We were happy to learn participants were very engaged and came up with interesting ideas, and gave us impressive prototypes that described their ideas.”

The mood of the day throughout was playful, exciting and fast. I am gratified to see the participants going home with enthusiasm toward the design process, and a glint in their eyes!”

One of the participants said:

“We got to learn more information including child health, education, and clean energy. All in all, I got to learn more info and get to know more people as well. We got to think more deeply and also learn the structure on how to solve the problem.”

4 prototypes designed during the day-long event:

  • Increase rural people’s access to clean energy

  • Helping women to get reproductive health information

  • Enhancing collaboration within Education CSOs

  • Improving mother and baby’s health

Before be able to design the prototypes, the facilitators help participants learn:

  • identifying problems

  • fishbone exercise

  • asking 5 “why?s” exercise

  • generating idea solutions

  • idea sorting exercise

  • 60-minute prototyping

  • refine prototypes through show and tell to receive feedback



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