Human-centered design begins with need-finding, as a clear understanding of the user’s needs is central to the design process. As our first design project focused on foreign concessions in Sierra Leone, I accompanied eight students from Rebooting Government on a week-long trip to Sierra Leone over spring break. Hosted by Simeon Koroma, the executive director…
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As outlined in a previous post, this quarter we are focused on Stanford based prototypes, including a spring course at the d.school. The course is split between two design projects (henceforth referred to as DP1 and DP2), the first working with a civil society leader in Sierra Leone and the second working with the city…
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We spent our fall quarter out in the field testing prototypes for the Governance Collaboratory in Kenya, South Africa, and Jamaica. These prototypes allowed us to test the value of design thinking for a range of governance challenges with a diverse set of local actors — technologists, civil society leaders, designers, and government officials. We…
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One of the big questions we have been asking since starting our work is, “Which questions are amenable to design thinking and which are not, and why?” We wondered if certain types of governance problems are best addressed with alternative methods of problem solving, or how we should use the tools of design thinking differently…
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We’re now accepting applications for our d.fellowship program during the academic year 2013-14. The focus of the application process this year is to identify and select outstanding Edu*Innovators who will work with our d.K12 Lab Network. We’re looking for mid-career professionals and entrepreneurs with the passion and drive to make real change in education. If…
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Throughout our time thinking through the Governance Collaboratory, there is one question that has loomed perhaps above all others: how should we think about supporting innovation from inside government as compared to working with activists advocating change from the outside? We have scoped governance (i.e. our “problem space”) to include challenges that both sets of…
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The following is a guest post from Dave Whiteland and Paul Lenz from mySociety, who participated in a design workshop with us in Cape Town last month. The Open Democracy Advice Centre (ODAC) in South Africa is embarking on a project based on mySociety’s Alaveteli platform. Alaveteli is mySociety’s open source software that runs freedom of information sites around the…
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We just returned from three days in Cape Town testing prototypes for the Collaboratory with mySociety and the Open Democracy Advice Center (we posted a summary of the experience here). Below are some of the big learnings we’re taking away as we continue designing the Governance Collaboratory this year: There is a different level of…
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We headed from Nairobi straight to Cape Town, South Africa for a second week of testing models for the Governance Collaboratory. Our prototype in Cape Town was intended to test an incubator model: working with a pre-existing team that has an idea they are poised to execute. We partnered with mySociety, a UK-based non-profit that…
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The following is a guest post by Mark Kamau, lead of the iHub’s UXLab and our partner for a recent prototype we tested in Nairobi. We asked him to reflect on his experience participating in our design challenge and how it fits into his broader mission to foster a design thinking community in Nairobi. When…
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