Design Thinking with the Philippine Government
(ILS-DOLE)
(ILS-DOLE)
The TUKLAS team wanted to use Design Thinking as a method to empower diverse communities in the Philippines and help them foster creative thinking, to be able to create innovative solutions for better preparedness in cases of natural disasters.
The challenge to the TUKLAS team was to empower communities in the Philippines to come up with solutions on how to better prepare for natural disasters. They wanted to use Design Thinking as a method to help them foster creative thinking from the grassroots.
Our task was to design and run a program to take participants from diverse communities in the Philippines through the entire Design Thinking process.
We designed a 6-week Design Thinking program where participants spent a week on each stage of the process.
Workshop participants came from different regions of the country and were divided into groups. They focused on helping a specific urban-poor community with their disaster preparedness.
We trained participants in the Design Thinking method and mentored them as they developed their solutions.
The program was designed in away that would enable participants to take the process back to their respective regions and use it to help their own communities.
The prototypes that the participants designed were presented to key stakeholders and investors.
One prototype was a life vest made from cheap recycled materials that were normally found in urban-poor communities in the Philippines where there is substantial flooding.
A manufactured life vest costs upwards of Php 700 while the prototype the team designed costs Php 120 and solves the same problem. It passed the safety measurement tests performed during the engagement.
This solution, along with several others, were subsequently refined with help from the experts for a further two weeks and after the engagement were taken into an implementation phase.
