Proportion Global Community | Live session #11 | Digital meets HCD — Written by Albertina Manuel and Thomas Schuurmans Coronavirus has highlighted the need for digital solutions all over the world. Entrepreneurs and companies have doubled their efforts to respond to the lack of communication and in-person collaboration created by the spread of the virus. With that has come an infinite number…

Proportion Global Community | Live Session #10 | AI meets HCD Written by Munyala Mwalo and Thomas Schuurmans “Ekitela lives in Kaeris, a village in the far north of Kenya. I listened silently to her as she mumbled about her aspirations of an ideal life. Her idea of prosperity was…

Proportion Global Community | Live Session #9 | M&E meets HCD — Written by Maha Salman, Thomas Schuurmans and Ayah Yacoub The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of programs within international development programs is a process that has increasingly become more similar to human centered design (HCD). So what makes them unique despite these similarities, and what are the latest trends within M&E…

Proportion Global Community | Live session # 8 | Design, When Everybody Designs — Everybody designs Everyone has some capacity to design solutions. Design education or training doesn’t build this from scratch, it builds on innate capabilities to analyse problems, generate concepts and manifest solutions. This could feel like a threat to design professionals, but what if design experts embrace it and adjust their…

Proportion Global Community | Live session #7 | HCD Training — Written by Thomas Schuurmans and Ayah Yacoub The world is full of complex challenges that are not easily met. It requires a deep understanding of the root cause, as well as understanding the behavior of people and the system in order to overcome them. Luckily, human-centered design (HCD) is currently…

Proportion Global Community | Live session #6 | Storytelling — Written by Josemarie Nyagah, Thomas Schuurmans and Ayah Yacoub Christina and Diana live in Deep Sea, a slum surrounded by affluent communities in Nairobi, Kenya. At the time these images were taken, they were at risk of losing their homes because they were marked for road construction. The road was…

Proportion Global Community | Live session #5 | Hackathon — Written by Agudor Kwaku Agabas, Ahmed Saalim Iddrisu, Thomas Schuurmans and Ayah Yacoub A young university freshman from Ghana, Mr. Agudor Kwaku Agabas, who knew nothing about e-waste, human-centered design, or hackathons now runs his own company called AppCyclers, a platform that connects people who sell their e-waste to product…

Written by Thomas Schuurmans and co-created with Innovators Team which is a group of innovation leads of international NGOs. If you are working at an NGO and you are in the front line of developing new innovations, you might know that often a new innovation is only successful to the…

Social Behavior Change | Proportion Global Community | Live Session #4 Written by Fahad Ameen, Thomas Schuurmans and Ayah Yacoub As human-centered designers, we are normally hired by companies to design a user-friendly app, product, or service. But what if we desire to create a deep social impact on our…