May 2016: Case Study of Design Week with UNICEF Canada

Canada ranks at only 17th of 29 industrialized countries on overall child well-being, a fact that UNICEF is tired of. Over the past two years, UNICEF Canada has been exploring the possibility of opening an Observatory for Canada’s children that would aim to improve the well-being of kids in Canada. They started working with Kitchener’s Overlap to explore what this could look like and how it could work. There are many observatories for child well-being around the world, and when UNICEF Canada started out, they figured it would take the same form—an organization much like a think-tank that would monitor, analyze and report on the state of children in Canada.

So in October 2015, Overlap tested how this might work by running what they called Design Week with UNICEF Canada. For six days, Overlap brought together around 25 experts in child well-being, measurement, storytelling, and design to tackle questions like, “how might we measure child well-being in ways that are relevant to children and youth in the context of Canada?”

In this talk, Delaney Swanson of Overlap will describe what they were trying to achieve in the project, how they used Design Week to prototype part of the Observatory, what they learned from it, and where they are in the project now. This will touch on what they learned about facilitating design processes with non-designers, and the value of a design sprint in getting things done fast, especially in traditional institutions.

About the Speaker

Delaney Swanson is a service designer at Overlap, a research and strategy firm in Kitchener that uses human insights to improve services and systems, and integrate new ways of thinking into big institutions. She believes in the power of good design to influence behaviour through policy, services, physical spaces, and products. She thinks most of the time, real life gets in the way of the “ideal” behaviour most things are designed for—instead, she’d rather things be designed for the complexity of real people. Delaney helps organizations understand the needs and experiences of the people they serve (and employ), and align their strategy to meet these needs

Please register for this free event

Thursday May 26, 2016
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Area 151 at the Communitech Hub
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