Reflection – Visualization

Talaat Mohmmed

Challenge and Selection

As noted during the course, “visualization uses imagery to make abstract ideas more concrete and  public.” During the innovation process, it’s easy when explaining an idea like a crowdsourcing platform  to colleagues for it to take shape in various divergent ways in their heads. Though divergence is often  helpful during the ideation phase of the innovation process, it sometimes is necessary to be able to be  able to achieve a mental match, and the visualization is most effective in doing so. An idea can only  move beyond the conceptualization stage, only when consensus is reached. I tend to use visualization  during every stage of the design thinking process. As you move throughout the process, the visuals  mature and a concept become less abstract, kind of like an image becoming less pixelated.

Application

During a recent design sprint, throughout the problem-framing and ideation phases, my colleagues and I  thought we had narrowed down who was the end user was for a crowdsourcing application for the  humanitarian sector. We were being tasked to solve why local and indigenous knowledge of eco-system  based early warning indicators of floods are not integrated into disaster risk reduction programming,  despite the awareness that they work. Several problem trees led us to the root cause of the problem,  which was that humanitarian aid workers lacked the documentation and validation of insights from local  knowledge holders on utilizing nature-based indicators for flood prediction.

Insight and Approach

Only by drawing out a diagram connecting the information providers (indigenous and local communities  of natural hazard prone areas) to disaster risk reduction practitioners (humanitarian aid workers), we  realized that a major and obvious component of our solution was missing and that we indeed had two  end users. We were focusing all our energies on developing the data collection tool but neglected to

think the method through which crowdsourced information would be housed and could easily accessed  by humanitarian workers to “co-design” their programs.

This course reinforced my belief that visualization is one of the most helpful and crucial tools to use for  design thinking.

I have a background in international development and humanitarianism, and always firmly believed that  programs should be designed with and for affected populations. Design thinking provides the structure,  tools, and frameworks to be able to do just that.

