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- Under 25 Summit Panel Discussion
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Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane was part of a panel discussion on “Design for Social Impact” at the Under 25 Summit, India’s largest youth festival. Leaning on his experiences working in the development and humanitarian sectors, Kevin highlighted the key role of the design thinking process in driving both innovation and impact in the work Quicksand does.
- Channel News Asia’s “Field Guide to Innovation”
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Senior Design Researcher Rikta Krishnaswamy was featured in Channel News Asia’s premiere episode of the series “Field Guide to Innovation”. Along with our partners on the project, Rikta discussed our recent work in Cambodia to reduce the use of plastic bags in the country, whilst also advocating for a human-centered approach to designing new, innovative solutions to longstanding problems and challenges.
- Scotland Design Sprint
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Babitha recently participated in a design Sprint in the beautiful Scottish village of Anstruther on the Fife coast. The sprint was anchored by Mozilla Foundation and Prof. Jon Rogers of University of Dundee, to explore open IoT, especially in the rural context of this Scottish fishing village.
The sprint brought together artists, technologists, makers, designers, researchers and others from all over the world for a week to simultaneously learn from fishermen, farmers and teens in the village and to then think of IoT products and stories that sought to build on this understanding. While most such endeavours tend to be focused around the same-ness of city living, the week in Anstruther yielded rich learnings for the whole group. It also provided an alternate way of thinking about innovation, in a slower, more deliberate, thoughtful manner that is an important counter-point to the pace and approach of hackathons.
The sprint was also the third in a series of events that kicked off with the UnBox Caravan at NID in February 2016.
To read more about some of the projects that emerged from this sprint + other events: https://github.com/openiotstudio
A book that offers a glimpse of the week: https://issuu.com/tommyperman/docs/oiot-digitalbook/1 - Boatcamp 2016: A Social Entrepreneurship Workshop at Sea
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Building on our relationship after working together on our plastic bag project, Excess Baggage, Fondazione ACRA engaged Quicksand to facilitate one of the working groups on Boatcamp - a four-day workshop for budding social entrepreneurs. Boatcamp took place in the context of a cruise between Rome and Barcelona, and addressed the unique problems faced by eight business cases identified internationally from a diverse range of contexts. Fondazione ACRA - in association with OPES Impact Fund and Compagnia Di San Paulo - invited over 300 participants, established mentors and expert speakers in social entrepreneurship to innovate on the development of sustainable high-impact business models.
Quicksand was asked to facilitate the leadership of the groups addressing one of these eight business cases. We worked with social entrepreneur, Biko Evarist, to analyse the unique problems facing his business, Education and Entrepreneurship (E & E) - an educational organisation to support young people in rural Tanzania who had missed opportunities to continue their learning beyond the age of 13. Rishabh and Tom worked with Biko and their 34 allocated participants to study Biko's business case, deconstructing it collectively, identifying high-impact areas for improvement and reconstructing the business case as a compelling story attractive to potential funders.
In addressing the challenges facing E & E, the team were fortunate in being able to make use of the expertise of experts such as Jack Sim from the World Toilet Association and Martin Burt from Fundacion Paraguay. Following E & E's board meeting the day after returning to land, Biko reported that the company has received follow on funding to continue the expansion of their operation.
- Brown Paper Bag Presentation, World Bank: Using Human Centered Design to Address Development Challenges
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With international development facing increasingly complex challenges deeply dependent on a web of inter-connected issues pertaining to behavior change, technology and policy, approaching these problems with the right framework is essential for global development actors. Human Centered-Design is a tool that can help bring the human perspective to the design and planning of holistic, innovative programs focused on basic service delivery such as healthcare, sanitation or waste management. Ayush presented Human Centered Design as a tool to address some of the most pressing development challenges, pulling examples from healthcare, water and sanitation, and waste management. Case studies included rethinking sanitation services in urban slums in India, improving diagnostics for detecting malnutrition in the remote parts of war-torn South Sudan and reducing plastic bag waste in one of the fastest growing economies of the Indochina region, Cambodia. The presentation was followed by a discussion on the existing World Bank projects involving an innovation mandate in a variety of areas.