The Humanitarian Hackathon was a 2-day hackathon whose intent was to bring together humanitarian aid workers, academics, tech startups, designers, and developers to create solutions addressing the ever growing need for vital humanitarian assistance across the world.
Client:
The UN World Food Programme and the Belgian Ministry for Development Cooperation, Digital Agenda and Telecommunications
World Food Programme (WFP) collaborated with the Belgian ministry to create an opportunity for humanitarian aid workers to create and prototype ideas that can leapfrog the usual project cycle in NGOs. Both organizations enlisted the expertise of Hack Belgium Labs to organize the event and created a productive experience for participants. The event took place in Brussels, Belgium January 15 – 16, 2019.
Problem:
There is a wealth of knowledge to transfer from the humanitarian aid experts to participants. How can we create an environment & process that eases that exchange and will inform the design / prototyping process for the participants?
Role:
lead EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
My role was to understand who the myriad of users would be and how that impacted their journey through the 2 day event. This eventually led to tightly designed program that had people working from the jump.
Techniques employed: user personas workshops; user journey mapping; ideation and program design.
Solution:
By structuring the 2-day program into a lean suite of tools and sessions, we created an easily accessible version of the design thinking process that people unfamiliar with it were able to fully participate and prototype their ideas.
Results:
20 projects were pitched at Humanitarian Hackathon and a final 4 projects are currently being supported by the World Food Programme to take into the next phase.
5 HUMANITARIAN CHALLENGES
There were 5 core humanitarian challenges proposed by The World Food Programme. View the full challenge descriptions as defined by WFP.
Smallholder Farmers - Feeding the world
School Feeding - Decentralized procurement platforms for school feeding sourcing
Climate Change - Move from information to action
Emergency Response/Humanitarian Aid - Earth/satellite observation for population monitoring
Beneficiary Data Management - Digitally disbursing benefits and empowering the people we serve
Humanitarian Hackathon Video
PROJECT CHALLENGES
How can we get participants up to speed and using the humanitarian knowledge and data sets as quickly as possible?
How might we foster cross-pollination between teams to give meaningful critique that informs their prototypes?
AUDIENCES
Individuals could choose to follow two different tracks during the event:
Tech Track - Teams in this track focused on prototyping ideas in code using real data; they are usually teams from the private sector who then have others such as designers, academics, etc join their teams to round out the experience.
Connect Track - These teams move along a more conceptual path to design overall systems, services or campaigns that fulfill the needs of people on the ground.
Even though participants had to choose a track they however were not siloed within those tracks. We encouraged cross-pollination by designing time for people to actively get up, visit other teams to listen to their ideas and give critiques.
Participants arrived from a range of backgrounds and were invited or chosen specifically for what they could bring to the table. The types of profiles of participants were:
Belgian and International humanitarian NGOs and Non-Profit organisations.
Technology startups and companies of all sizes
Academics
Scientists
Professional designers, developers and engineers
Subject matter experts / Mentors from the WFP and other humanitarian aid organizations
IDEATION & DESIGN
WORKSHOP FOR User Personas & User Journey Mapping
After the challenges were outlined, I was brought in to lead a workshop to determine the core users. We soon discovered the many overlapping qualities of individual personas especially when considering the Tech vs Connect Track possibilities.
DIGITAL USER JOURNEY MAP
After the workshop, I converted the user personas and experience map to a digital version that was accessible to all parties. Team members on both the Hack Belgium Labs and WFP side used it to plan and guide their interactions with the hackathon participants.
PROGRAM DESIGN & TOOLKIT DESIGN
The ideation workshops at the beginning of the day were the foundation for the rest of the conceptualizing during the hackathon. They were structured as a session where the humanitarian aid experts from the WFP could download their knowledge to participants. People were ushered through creation exercises with a design facilitator to rapidly create ideas before sitting down to work as a team.
Debriefing the facilitators.
Teams working through the tools together.
DESIGN THINKING TOOLKITS FOR TEAMS
We designed a custom social business model canvas to guide participants through the process of thinking directly about the social impact of their idea. Teams were also given user journey maps to understand how their product or idea would work in multiple scenarios. This was especially aimed toward those teams in the Tech track who may not have been familiar with the humanitarian aid sector.
SPACE DESIGN
The venue was Palais d’Egmont, one of the European Union centers of business and government collaboration in Brussels.
5 Breakout spaces for the 5 challenges were created where subject matter experts could hold information sessions followed by ideations conducted with design facilitators.
