What was the project's challenge?
The United Way of Southeastern Michigan had a dilemma: They knew the 30 Million Words initiative worked: speaking 30 million words to a pre-schooler before they reach their third birthday ensures 90 percent of healthy brain development. The United Way had gone as far as establishing Early Learning Centers throughout Detroit to foster reading habits in young children and their parents. Now, how do they get young mothers there?
What did we make?
Experience Models + Pilots Workbook. Getting moms to the early learning centers was only a part of the United Way's educational mission. Instead of building a solution, we wanted to build our clients tools that they could adapt and easily use themselves in the future.
We built experience models, like the one above, to make a clear process map of the current system, identify gaps, and, pinpoint opportunities. We built three base maps, with the idea that our clients could use them as worksheets and add in more depth and detail when they crafted future iterations.
Then, we wrote pilots. In the world where problems are becoming more complex, the ability for anyone to accurately guess on one solution to a problem is increasingly impractical. We can use tools like value webs and experience models to help us become good guessers. Then, instead of writing one big solution, we wrote lots of guesses and test them out.
Our team wrote nine pilots for the United Way. Because they were low-budget and low-risk, the United Way was easily able to quickly run one of our pilots that involved hiring the influencer moms who were the power users of the early learning centers to recruit new moms at the hospital, right after they've given birth. It worked even better than we had imagined.
Who was on the team?
Led by Patrick Whitney, the team, of Knowl Baek, Masha Safina, and myself further explored how value webs and activity systems can influence the structure of non-profits with our conference paper and presentation at The Infrastructures of Creativity Conference.
What did I do?
Crafted "Better Forms" concept, field research, value webs, interviews with cultural probes, illustration work.
What tools did we use?
We hacked Michael Porter's classic business school tools of value webs and activity systems to understand all of the stakeholders in the early childhood education system and values they exchanged. Our belief was that value exchanges weren't balanced were opportunities to innovate.
Iterating on value webs happened throughout the design process. We used them with our client partners as a workshop tool. We first drew the systems together, in person, on a whiteboard. Since the tool was shared, it was then very easy to send iterations of future states for easy client feedback.
By delightful accident, the value web also became a powerful research planning tool. We had an extremely limited research time, we trusted the value web as the "big picture" and then investigated areas of uneven exchange in a targeted day of interviews and observations.
It worked: Our biggest insights and opportunity space came from the place where the value webs were most misaligned -- with the mothers and children already using the early learning systems.
