In a new Spring quarter course at the Stanford d.school, Designing Liberation Technologies, small interdisciplinary student teams will design new applications of mobile communication to improve access to health in Kenya. The course is an experimental collaboration between Stanford, the University of Nairobi, and the Nokia Africa Research Center.
As with other d.school courses, the emphasis is on developing new designs through understanding and empathy with the people and settings for which the innovations are intended. When the students and the potential users are continents apart (both geographically and culturally), this presents many challenges. In this course, we will be experimenting with methods for collaboration with researchers and students in Kenya. Their activities will provide a basis of local understanding, both for initial need finding and for testing out the ideas that are generated.
Student teams from the School of Information and Computer Technology at the University of Nairobi will start the design process by going into health provision sites where they anticipate that there will be opportunities for innovations. Through ethnographic and contextual studies, they will develop an understanding of the possibilities and the problems. They will communicate a set of design challenges based on their findings back to the Stanford students, who will then develop initial design concepts. In an interactive process throughout the quarter, we will take advantage of computer communication to enable local input for critique and testing as prototypes are developed.
At the end of the Spring quarter in mid-June, the prototypes will be assessed, and for those judged promising we will be able to provide an opportunity for the students to spend time during the summer in Nairobi, doing deeper studies and testing their designs, working with Nokia and the students there. We believe that as with other d.school courses in the past, they have the potential to come up with new designs for innovative services or products that can bring meaningful changes to health care.
The Stanford course will be limited to around 20 students, who are submitting applications. From those submitted so far, we know that the students will be extremely varied in educational background, and that many of them already have substantial experience in development projects around the world.
For the U. of Nairobi students, the projects will tie into their ongoing studies as well. We are working with Samuel Ruhui who teaches ICS 315 – Human Computer Interaction, during the coming term at Nairobi. He will be modifying the project component of his course to tie it to the need finding activities and challenges we jointly develop. This will also be the term when their third year students (who will be the majority of those working with us) need to formulate their capstone projects, which comprise a major part of their activities for the following year. We anticipate that some of the students who participate in our course activities will use it as a basis for their project.
In order to prepare the Nairobi students (who are from computer science) for ethnographic observation, they will have a short training course in user-centered research given by social science researchers at the Nokia Africa Research Center. They will then go into the field during the month of March and do extensive observation and discussion with the relevant stakeholders. We are jointly developing a set of tools for them to convey the knowledge and the challenges they identify in a variety of media and methods, including video and audio, the development of personas and scenarios, and structured analyses and reports. These will be the starting point for the teams in the Stanford course when we begin in early April.
The Nairobi teaching team, led by Peter Waingaro Wagacha, includes Samuel Ruhui, Daniel O. Ochieng, Janet W. Ng’ang’a, and Judy Wawira (MD). At Stanford, the course will be led by Professors Terry Winograd (CS) and Joshua Cohen (Political Science, Philosophy, and Law), who are affiliated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) and the Liberation Technology Project of the Center for Development, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). We will be assisted by Lucky Gunesakara, a student from the School of Medicine who has extensive experience in developing mobile applications for health in Africa.
Funding for the travel and communication expenses in this course are being provided by a gift from Nokia Research. Nokia is also generously providing efforts of their research staff in Nairobi, led by Jussi Impio, who has been an active partner in all aspects of the course.
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