LEARNING LAUNCH

Challenge

I am a student currently doing my BE in Mechanical Engineering. Now that almost the entire world is  under lockdown due to COVID 19 pandemic, I thought this is the right time to apply design thinking and  solve some problems faced by common people. One of the worst hit people during this pandemic are  the daily wage workers. All of their family members depend on their daily wage. Now that the entire  nation is under lockdown, all the daily wage workers are jobless and do not have money to feed  themselves and their families. I thought this is the perfect problem for me to apply design thinking.

Selection

The design thinking tool I choose was LEARNING LAUNCH. Learning Launch is an experiment meant to  quickly test an idea and prototype.

Application

The first thing I did was to interview the daily wage workers. I asked about the problems faced by them  and their priorities. Their first and major problem was inability to buy essentials like rice and milk due to  lack of money. Some of them even had small children who had been starving for 2 to 3 days. This really  broke me down. As a design thinker I wanted to do something for these people. I immediately started  collecting money using crowd funding. Crowd funding is basically collecting small sums of money from  multiple people for a business project or social cause. I was able to collect Rs.76000 in 2 days. These  amount came from the donations of more than thousands of people. They were people from different  states, different religions. That day I found out that humanity has no religion. I found that in spite of all  the religion disputes, when there is a problem we all come together. I contacted a local grocery owner  and ordered the basic essentials that were required for the daily wage workers. I planned to give a  grocery kit which consisted of rice, milk, oil, salt, and dal. With the money collected I was able to buy  125 grocery kits. I rented a mini van started delivering these kits to the daily wage workers.

Insights

The happiness in their faces were priceless. I felt relieved that I have did something for the society. This  wouldn’t have been possible without design thinking. The LEARNING LAUNCH was the ideal tool for this  problem. The results were on the expected lines. This problem was one of the most difficult problem to  solve. I felt proud of myself that I had solved it using design thinking.

Approach

Next time I am planning to do the same project on a larger scale. I will interview more people and try to  understand their problems deeply. I would still use the same tool again. I want to  involve more and  more people to join me in doing this.

