Khemka Forum Podcast Series: Transcript of the podcast with Jocelyn Wyatt

Interviewer: Shivraj Parshad, The PRactice

Transcript

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Shivraj: Jocelyn Wyatt, thank very much for speaking to the Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.Jocelyn Wyatt: You’re welcome. It’s great to be here.

Shivraj: Jocelyn, tell us a bit about IDEO and what prompted the setting up of IDEO.org?

Jocelyn Wyatt: IDEO is an innovation and design firm that was founded about 30 years ago in California and IDEO really started off by designing products and technologies, things like the first laptop and the first mouse for Apple. Over time IDEO realised that they had an ability to design not just products but services and businesses and systems as well, and also moved beyond just working with the private sector to working with social sector and public sector organisations. And through that path we started working more and more with non-profits and foundations and social enterprises and realised that we needed a different kind of business model to more effectively serve those needs. So we started IDEO.org as a non-profit organisation, a little over a year ago, to focus on applying human centred design to poverty related challenges.

Shivraj: So what is human centred design thinking? So what does it mean for the lay person?

Jocelyn Wyatt: Human centred design is a process or approach to understanding people’s needs and coming up with new solutions to meet those needs. So it’s a process where we spend time talking to those people in their homes or at their places of work, doing some synthesis to understand what it is that we heard, brainstorm new ideas, develop concepts; prototype and test them and then ultimately refine them. So we are pushing up with new innovative solutions which will have impact on people’s lives.

Shivraj: So Jocelyn could you give us specific examples of where human centred design has been put into action and where it has been seen to have created some impact and have you managed to really measure this impact?

Jocelyn Wyatt: A few years ago we worked in India with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Acumen Fund and 11 Indian water organisations. One of the organisations that we worked with is Water Health International, which is working in Andhra Pradesh. We worked with them to design a campaign to really attract interest in and increase demand for the clean drinking water that they were selling in rural communities. So the design that we developed with them was one in which people would bring examples of the water that they were drinking at home and they would be compared under a microscope that was connected to a projector, with samples of water from the Water Health International treatment plants and people would then be able to see the difference between the water that they were drinking and the clean drinking water, which then resulted in an eight to ten fold increase in each of these communities of the people drinking that water. So really a simple campaign idea was able to impact very significantly.

Shivraj: What are the top learnings in building what is now being called the Human Centred Design Toolkit (HCDT), where there at any time any major challenges that you saw?

Jocelyn Wyatt: We developed the HCDT a few years ago when we recognised that there was a lot of interest from people working to solve social challenges to understand how to do that using a design approach. What we realised was that people found the methodologies to be really difficult, also had a lot skills of their own to share and wanted to connect with others using the human centred design toolkit. So with that we created HCD Connect, Human Centred Design Connect which is a web platform that allows people to connect with one and another and share those stories, ask each other questions and really improve on the methods they get out of the HCD toolkit. So a couple of things that have really resonated with people, I think the approach to brainstorming and coming up with some solutions has been really powerful. I think some of the methods of research and design research in terms of understanding people’s needs, has resonated with people.

Shivraj: And so for Social Entrepreneurs , always looking at the bottom line, how cost effective is this tool kit and you know there has been this talk of access to open source innovation for non-designers, because a lot of these communities perhaps don’t understand the design lingo?

Jocelyn Wyatt: The idea behind the HCD toolkit and HCD Connect was to make a really cost effective way for people to access the design process and to be able to do it themselves. The notion really was that it would be an open source toolkit and platform that people could borrow from and use and would allow them to implement the design thinking approach in their own organisations. At a very small scale to understand at that level, before looking to broaden it or put in more resources in it, if they don’t know whether or not it is going to have the impact that they desire.

Shivraj: And Jocelyn you know in a lot of communities where literacy is an issue, how effective is the human centred design toolkit for social entrepreneurs wanting to gauge the kind of feedback they want to get from communities?

Jocelyn Wyatt: There are some adaptations which we have made in terms of being more visual or coming up with creative approaches to brainstorming, but for the most part it works well because the social entrepreneurs are the ones really holding that copy of the toolkit in their hands when they are out in the field.

Shivraj: And finally what can our participants expect in terms of key takeaways from the IDEO.org design clinic that is going to be run at the Khemka forum in December?

Jocelyn Wyatt: So participants will be able to get an introduction to the human centred design approach and learn some new methods around design research and observations and interviews, around brainstorming and coming up with concepts around prototyping and actually testing ideas and getting feedback. So basically an overview to the human centred design process.

Shivraj: Jocelyn Wyatt, thank very much for speaking to the Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Jocelyn Wyatt: You’re welcome.

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