Talent

Re-defining design talent: There is such a diversity in design practice, and much or our understanding and application is borrowed from traditional design methods that were founded primarily within spaces of UX, interaction, product and business design. However, given that many practitioners on the African continent are applying design in the development sector, our design applications have had to evolve to cater to service, programme and policy design. How might we redefine what it means to practice “design” and what skills and talents are required to address our unique needs and challenges on the continent? 

“I struggle to communicate what we do to people who don’t work in design. How can we think beyond the social and business models that exist and define our unique practices?”

Sectoral integration: Development work cross-cuts sectors, and many practitioners in the space have benefitted from upskilling specialists across sectors skills and talents with design knowledge and in practice. So far, this has happened very opportunistically and has resulted in a uniquely developed talent pool. As design within development is still quite novel in the African region, and given the scarcity of design schools in the region, compared to other parts of the world, how might we create spaces for more communal educational forums in the region in order to nurture homegrown talent in a systematic way?

“I struggle to communicate what we do to people who don’t work in design. How can we think beyond the social and business models that exist and define our unique practices?”

Method innovation

Methodology: We have benefitted from the tools and frameworks generated by the pioneers of Human Centred Design and other design practices. Over time, we have had to modify tools to fit the different models and contexts that we work in. The COVID-19 pandemic, has forced many practitioners in the region to re-think their design toolkits  and incorporate more digital and virtual tools to connect with communities. Despite this progress, there is still room to continue to evolve our methods and tools to account for factors such as illiteracy in order to effectively collaborate with communities with a better understanding of their creative processes.

How might we actively share evolving knowledge about our evolving design methods and frameworks on regional and global platforms?

How might we use our learnings to transition from methods to the mindsets required to incorporate indigenous and local design culture in our toolkits in an ethical and sustainable way?

“The way we need to evolve our craft, a lot of thinking and framework is still defined loosely by product, service design. We need to change our tool box, haven’t seen any convincing frameworks to do systems design at scale in the way it is needed. What is used currently, is still informed by traditional design skill sets. How do we improve on solving for complex multi stakeholder problems, means we need to evolve our tools.”

Thought leadership

Voices and stories: Given how closely we work with minorities and marginalised communities, it is important that the voices of the people whose stories and outcomes are shared. There is still a gap in the telling of these stories, with researcher bias still shaping a large part of the narrative and imposed donor/funding priorities.How might we use tools like visual ethnography to amplify the voices of communities in our storytelling? 

Partnership and ethics: Design research sits at the intersection of academic research and Human Centred Design. Is there a need for a community of practice to standardise our approaches to conducting design research ethically given the sensitivity of the issues we explore in this work?.  

Business model innovation: Aspects of our definition of equity-centred design hinges on co-creation, skills-sharing and more rigorous contextual adaptations. These require time and effort investments that may go beyond a single project or design sprint. Our business models however do not always incentivise or accommodate greater investments in equity and community-centered approaches. 

How might we create space to invest in more meaningful engagement to co-create or experiment alongside communities – and not simply on their behalf?

Agenda setting: For many participants, the focus of our work in the social impact space is heavily influenced by trends and priorities in the development sector. These trends reflect important issues but do not always reflect priorities at the community level. 

Can we explore pathways to bring community-level priorities to the surface? What investments can we make to provide gateways for this?

Competition: There is much to be said for organisations that are often competitors in this space coming together to share during this event. 

How can we continue to leverage our pooled skills to grow our design practice as collaborators?

“It seems we are still sprinting on problems that are actually

marathons :-)”

“We all have the same ‘trade secrets’ so let’s be brave and generous about sharing so that we can all do better together.”