Today we had our first day interacting with SELCO India, a company that works on solar light solutions.
We began with a role-playing activity in which the SELCO employees answered questions as if they were residents in an impoverished migrant community living in tents. We asked about their day-to-day lives and tried to glean the main problems or barriers they faced. The importance and process of engaging a community was discussed, as well as strategies for effective communication.
We broke up into groups and each formulated a problem statement based on the most crucial perceived needs of the community.
Next, SELCO helped walk us through the brainstorming process known as ideation. In a flurry of Post-it Notes, we posed, discussed, and organized potential solutions to our problem and began to narrow the focus.
The "human-centric" design approach employed by SELCO keeps the customers at the forefront of every consideration. What good is a technological solution if it overlooks a behavioral aspect that may inhibit its usefulness?
Tomorrow we will get a chance to go out into three communities and directly interact with these potential customers to begin to flesh out the potential solutions we have come up with.
