How might we…design for change?

We Love Reading: Refugee-led Reading Circles
“Reading aloud is an important tool to plant the love of reading in children”, said Rana Dajani explaining her idea, “We Love Reading,” in the innovation platform: Open IDEO.
We Love Reading is an initiative to hold read-aloud sessions in refugee camps that encourages women, men and youth to be leaders in their communities by setting up read aloud sessions. These sessions are done by the people of the camp themselves within the vicinity of the tents. Children not only enjoy the storytelling experience in their own language and culture but, it is also a capacity building tool for adults in the camp that give them a sense of purpose there.
[pullquote align=»left or right»]Design thinking is a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. [/pullquote] You might have heard about this initiative because it has been elected by UNESCO as an effective education program and they also participated in the WISE Congress last year.
The initiative already has a pilot in the Zaatai refugee camp of Jordan, where thousands of Syrian refugees live and it is one of the top ideas of the OpenIDEO challenge: How might we improve education and expand learning opportunities for refugees around the world?
What is OpenIDEO?
Along with the challenge of refugee education, on OpenIDEO you can find many other calls, all of them starting with How might we…? OpenIDEO is a design thinking methodology platform where “people from all corners of the world, no matter who they are, collaboratively tackle some of the toughest global issues bringing their experience and unique perspective to the conversation and development of ideas.”
What is Design Thinking?
In Tim Brown’s words, it is “a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos”. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products, services or experiences that will improve lives.
Design thinking tools include empathy and getting out into the world to be inspired by people, diverged and converged thinking, synthesis as a capacity to frame insight, using prototyping to learn with your hands, creating stories to share ideas, visual thinking, joining forces with people from other disciplines.
Some of its principles include working by building on the ideas of others, collaboration, bridging the knowing-doing gap, interdisciplinary teams and a systematic approach to take challenges through inspiration, to ideation, to implementation of the idea and iterating along the process.
Wrapping up the story
OpenIDEO is a tangible opportunity to apply the design thinking framework to global problems at this critical point where rapid change is forcing us to look not only to new ways of solving problems but to new problems to solve. All Jesuit and Ignatian-inspired initiatives around the world are facing these challenges in their own communities. Design thinking methods and resources could help frame and respond to these challenges.
Along with the We Love Reading idea, on OpenIDEO you can find 400 research contributions to the challenge of improving refugee education, 376 ideas were developed collaboratively and the 7 top ideas will eventually be funded. The impact of these ideas will take place in refugee communities but it also has an inspirational impact on the ideas of others that we are not yet able to measure but we should not underestimate.
 
Research and sources:
Brown, Tim 2009. Change by design: how design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Tschimmel, Katja 2012. Design Thinking as an effective Toolkit for Innovation. In: Proceedings of the XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation: Innovating from Experience. Barcelona.
http://www.academia.edu/1906407/Design_Thinking_as_an_effective_Toolkit_for_Innovation
Brown, Tim 2008. Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, June, 84-95.
http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/thoughts/IDEO_HBR_Design_Thinking.pdf
OpenIDEO challenges.openideo.com
We Love Reading Project www.welovereading.org
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