Human-Centred Design

A workshop with women in East Nusa Tenggara

Much like our approach to immersive research, human-centered design or Co-Design revolves around the concept of putting people at the center of ideas, services and products, ensuring that these solutions speak to the needs, priorities and circumstances of the intended end user.

Our approach links insights from immersion and other qualitative research to HCD processes, providing a strong basis for developing highly contextualised, practical solutions. These approaches can improve the quality of designing policy and programming and help ensure they are not only 'evidence-based,' but also 'people-based.’

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Internal HCD workshop and planning in Jakarta

In 2019, Empatika used this approach to develop Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) strategies for supplemental feeding programs and other nutrition initiatives in Indonesia. Following immersion research across six districts, Empatika carried out human-centred design workshops first internally in Jakarta, and then in each location to explore challenges identified by community members themselves during the immersion.

These challenges were highly contextual and were oriented around areas that people wanted to change. After communities conceptualised and prototyped a solution in each location, they then trialled the prototype independently over a number of weeks.

Researchers returned again to communities following the testing phase to discuss progress, lessons learned so far, potential strategies for continuing/wider implementation of their solution(s) along with a reflection about the overall research and HCD process.

The following are some examples from this study of the HCD process and the solutions generated by community members:

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A researcher helps a posyandu cadre in making real fruit popsicles. This community actually grows a variety of vegetables all year round but our researchers observed poor complementary feeding practices during the immersion. Children had extensive snacking habits, began demanding packaged snacks from a young age, and described many foods to be too ‘boring’. One idea in this location was to encourage kiosk owners and others to sell healthier snacks, and part of this was exploring different ways of making healthy snacks more ‘fun’ and appealing to kids.

In this location, mothers decided to develop a set of posters showing good foods (and amounts) to cook for their small children at different stages, using local and/or readily available ingredients

During the immersion phase in this location, many people described how meals now were usually repetitive and limited to a few ingredients. Some fathers had shared fond memories of their own mothers cooking more varied dishes and wished that their wives could cook like this. During the HCD process, mothers had the idea to develop a cooking club where they could spend time cooking together with different local ingredients. Part of this was recalling and re-creating old recipes from their grandmothers. Some grandmas also joined the workshop and were able to tell how they used to prepare meals.

This photo is from the end of the testing phase in one location where people decided to plant vegetables around their homes. This community is located in a swamp area where people's livelihoods are seasonal and access to markets becomes more limited. Observations had also shown that people did not typically eat much fruit or vegetables, especially during the flooding season.

This is a river of life drawing prepared by a mother in one location where she illustrated and shared some of the significant moments in her life, including the birth of her children and the changes that this brought.