Ashesi D:Lab

Apr 10, 201912 min read

2017 Collaborations

FELLOWS WORKSHOP- STORY BOARDING WITH PAEDICARE AFRICA PROJECT

November 20, 2017

On the 15th of November 2017, the Design lab hosted PaediCare Africa, a project ran by Rosemary Anku. PaediCare Africa seeks to provide avenues through which vulnerable children in society can have access to quality healthcare and proper development.

The session centered around helping Rosemary draw up a storyboard for a health event she hopes to hold to raise awareness and improve healthcare for children. The event will be held on the Ashesi campus. Yoofi, the fellow in charge, led Rosemary and her team through the planning process. They began by drawing up a picture of how they would want the event to look like, with routes mapped out and potential setup points at the venue.

They then got into the finer details of planning the event. Plans were made about how the transportation was going to be, the day the event was going to be held and the duration of the program. They then agreed to bring the event to Ashesi campus because the availability of the existing infrastructure will make planning easier. The final thing which was done was drawing up a tentative program list for the event.

The workshop ended with Rosemary having a framework of the event to work with. She left with that and an assurance of the Design lab’s support in further planning.

D:LAB SERIES- TRANSFERWISE

September 15, 2017

The D:Lab kicked off the 2017-2018 academic year by hosting an innovative and informative talk by Laur Läänemets of TransferWise. TransferWise is a unicorn organization which embodies design.

They have achieved massive success in six years, growing from a startup with 2 founders to an organization with 700 employees as well attracting huge investors eg. Richard Branson. This gave them practical knowledge on How to build a product that customers like, which they were able to share with Ashesi students.

Laur Läänemets, a product lead at Transferwise, inspired students to implement design thinking in their projects even whilst at school. Their efforts and achievement in keeping their charges lower than the banks for transfers are commendable. They have attracted customers and motivated students to think critically on how to improve current systems. Transferwise is also committed to ethical leadership by maintaining transparency throughout the company, showing students practical implementation of ethics being taught at Ashesi.

Finally the company provided opportunities for students of Ashesi expanding their diverse organization with over 50 countries represented. It was a pleasure to host Laur Läänemets and to hear his invaluable insight into how to build a customer centered brand and we are excited about the promising start to the D:Lab programs.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH GN ELECTRONICS IN THE HEALTH SECTOR

August 14, 2017

Team members

Research Team: Nana Ofori – Atta Asomani, Nene Dornu Abayateye, Stephan Ofosuhene, Nutifafa Amedior, Abigail Twumwaa Ayirebi

Electronics team: Justice Essuman, Kofi Anamoah Mensah, Joshua Kasirye, Victor Hazel.

Project Coordinators: Theodore Philip Asare and Carl Agbenyega

Goal

The goal of this project was to do research into the health sector, using design thinking, to find opportunities where GN electronics can introduce products into the Ghanaian market.

Research

The research was done in three phases. The first phase was aimed at identifying 6 opportunity areas where GN electronics could enter the health market with an electronic product. Three of the six areas would be selected after which the second phase of the research would identify 6 possible products, two from each area, that GN Electronics could produce. One of the six would be selected for further research and prototyping.

A stakeholder map was developed to identify the key stakeholders in the health space. General practitioners and patients (the users in the health sector) were identified as the most active stakeholders and were, therefore, the focus of the research. This decision was arrived at because most health problems experienced by patients are sent to general practitioners before referrals are made to specialists if necessary.

Interviews and questionnaires were used to sample the views of the two major stakeholders. The questionnaires were aimed at getting responses from a large section of the stakeholders in order to estimate the major problems in the space. Interviews were then used on a smaller scale to gain a deeper understanding of the identified problems.

The questionnaires used in the first two phases of the research were designed to illicit responses about problems patients and health practitioners face. The questions were open ended thereby encouraging respondents to give more information. The third phase of research was designed to measure the desirability of the vein finder and the vital kiosk in order to decide on one of the two. The questionnaire for this research contained a list of Microsoft reaction words from which the respondents chose those that best described the products. This was followed by an open ended question on what the design may have failed to capture.

Analysis

The analysis for all phases of the research was done with card sorting. This applied to the open ended questions which needed to be categorized for further analysis. The same analysis method was also applied to the Microsoft reaction words which was were used in the final phase. The words were categorized into clusters that eased the process of understanding how users perceived the products we presented. For example, it was possible to determine if a respondent thought a product was desirable if the words selected fall under the category “desirable.”

Approach

The process of narrowing down on a suitable product was iterative and combined the inputs of the research teams and the major stakeholders of GN Electronics. In the first part of the research, 6 opportunity areas were identified of which GN Electronics chose 3 for further research. One of the major considerations for selecting the opportunity areas was avoiding areas that dealt with emergencies. The reason being that more experience in the health sector would be necessary before working with on technologies for use in life and death situations.

The second phase of the research involved narrowing down on the 3 fields and coming up with two ideas for each field to make a total of 6 ideas. The initial intention at this point was to choose one of the products for further research after which a prototype would be built. However, two of the products were identified to have high potential on the market and were therefore selected for further research and prototyping. The chosen products were the vital kiosk and the vein finder.

The vein finder, as the name suggests, is a device that helps phlebotomists’ locate veins in order to draw blood. This would be applicable in situations where veins are not clearly visible. The vital kiosk, on the other hand, was envisioned as a structure capable of measuring various vital signs, like temperature and heart rate simultaneously. This was meant to speed up the process at the OPD as well as provide a basic means of remote diagnosis for under privileged communities.

After the two products were chosen, members of the electronics club were brought on board to build the first prototypes. After the prototypes were presented to GN Electronics it was decided that the vein finder had more potential on the market considering the data collected from both health practitioners and users. It was evident that the vein finder would solve a basic problem that would improve the experience of patients. Currently, a working prototype of the vein finder has been built by the electronics club in preparation for the final presentation with GN Electronics.

IMPLEMENTING A K12 DESIGN THINKING CURRICULUM IN BEREKUSO, GHANA

June 1, 2017

Three months ago, Carl and Philip, the coordinators of the Design Lab at Ashesi University (who also happen to be my good friends), approached me with an idea they needed help bringing to life; they wanted to teach design-thinking to Junior High School (J.H.S.) students in Berekuso in the Eastern Region of Ghana. Having seen […]

via Young Creatives — the challenging process of developing a design-thinking and leadership curriculum — When She Speaks

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE/ASHESI UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DESIGN ENGINEERING PROJECT (SUMMER 2017)

March 5, 2017

Dartmouth Lead: Kofi Odame, Associate Professor of Engineering

Background The objective of the proposed work is to crystallise the relationship between Dartmouth College and Ashesi University College around a concrete, collaborative design project. Both universities share an uncommon approach to engineering education, presenting it as part of a broad, liberal-arts experience. By participating in an undergraduate engineering project that is of mutual interest to faculty in both universities, the hope is to strengthen the institutional linkages between Dartmouth College and Ashesi University College.

Overview The specific engineering project that we will tackle is a solution to aid in the diagnosis of pneumonia by health workers in low-resource settings.

Pneumonia is the single deadliest infectious disease of children under age 5, disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest regions. Early detection and treatment of pneumonia are critical to saving lives, but the gold-standard for pneumonia diagnoses requires biomedical imaging and laboratory testing facilities. These are often not an option in low-resource settings.

To address this problem, UNICEF and WHO have recommended that community health workers diagnose pneumonia based on the presence of clinical symptoms: a cough, fever, and elevated respiratory rate. Unfortunately, these diagnoses are highly subjective, leaving some pneumonia sufferers untreated, while other children are unnecessarily placed on a course of medication.

We propose to apply design thinking and electrical engineering tools to develop a solution that provides community health workers with an objective assessment of the clinical symptoms of pneumonia.

Project Details

Preparation:

Before the start of the 10-week project, Ashesi and Dartmouth teams will identify and commit resources (funding, laboratory space and equipment, materials, IT and classroom infrastructure, student researchers, faculty time, support staff) needed for the project.

Execution:

Week 1: The Dartmouth-Ashesi student team will participate in several brainstorming sessions to establish the scope of the design challenge and the envisioned solution. Brainstorming sessions will be conducted over Skype (or a similar video conferencing tool), with moderation from faculty at both universities.

Week 2: The Ashesi student team will identify sources of primary information and conduct interviews and observational studies with community health workers to identify the challenges of current tools like the Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) Timer, or the color-coded bead counter. The Ashesi team will also explore the social and economic barriers to accessing adequate health care for paediatric populations in low-resource settings. The Dartmouth team will interview clinical experts and will also perform secondary research about point-of-care diagnostics and the economic barriers to their adoption.

Weeks 3-8: Both teams will participate in several iterations of solution design, prototyping, usability testing, analysis and redesign. Usability testing will be performed by the Ashesi students, while prototyping will be performed by the Dartmouth students. The entire Dartmouth-Ashesi team will meet (via Skype or a similar video conferencing tool) at the end of each usability testing phase to analyse test results and to develop an appropriate new design. While Ashesi students conduct usability testing, the Dartmouth team will prototype alternative solutions in parallel – this is to maximise productivity during the 6 week period and to perform as many design iterations as possible.

Weeks 9-10: The Dartmouth-Ashesi team will finalise the solution design, and the Dartmouth team will prototype a final version. The Ashesi team will test this prototype, and both teams will write a joint project report. The project report will include (1) a description of the scope of the problem; (2) problem details and insights that were learned during the Week 2 research and discovery phase; (3) the rationale for the various design choices that were made in the eventual solution; (4) technical documentation that describes all of the artifacts (computer code, circuit designs, 3D drawings, etc.) that were produced as part of the solution.

Evaluation:

After the end of the 10-week project, Dartmouth faculty will review the activities and results of all aspects of the collaboration, including logistics, administration and instruction. The Dartmouth team will come up with a report that identifies – and attempts to explain – the aspects of the collaboration that worked well and those that did not.

Expected Impact

The 10-week design project will teach both universities a lot about the other’s organisational culture, and we are bound to discover many unanticipated shortcomings and opportunities from our interactions. We hope to use this initial experience to pursue a more ambitious, long-term program of a collaborative design course that would formally become a part of the curriculum at Dartmouth and Ashesi, co-taught by faculty from both schools, and open to students from both schools.

For Ashesi students, the impact of such a course would be access to world-class instructional and prototyping facilities. For Dartmouth students, the benefit would be exposure to real, global-scale engineering challenges. For all students, the experience would be an immersive lesson in cross-cultural communication, a critical skill in today’s globalised engineering workforce.

Faculty involved in this course could experiment with different approaches to hybrid distance/classroom learning; they could potentially create pedagogical innovations for teaching hands-on, physical, engineering and design courses at extremely low cost.

For the discipline of embedded systems engineering, the long-term impact of this collaboration is a new design ethos that is highly conscious of cost (materials and sourcing costs, manufacturing costs, running/maintenance costs, end-of-life costs) from the beginning, and at every level of abstraction, of the project.

GN ELECTRONICS PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT 2017 SUMMER PROJECT DESCRIPTION

May 5, 2017 Title: Ashesi Design Lab (D:lab)/GN Electronics Design Thinking Project (Summer 2017)

Overview (GN Electronics):

GN Electronics, a subsidiary of Groupe Nduom, is a Ghanaian company located in Elmina, in the Central Region of Ghana. GN Electronics assembles electronic products including set top boxes, televisions, and soon a variety of household products.

Overview (Ashesi Design Lab):

The Ashesi Design Lab is an initiative which combines the concepts of design thinking and design making; design thinking or strategy design for problem-solving, and design making or fabrication for making things more tangible and building out the creative outcomes of the different processes involved in both concepts.

Project Scope:

The D:Lab is exploring a partnership with GN Electronics to conduct Design Thinking Projects aimed at discovering the electronics products within the health sector that GN Electronics can build locally. We propose to apply design thinking tools to develop a solution that meets the needs of users in the health industry. The project will be divided into two periods, the first (6 weeks) will be focused on research and product development and the next (4 weeks) will be a hands-on practice with the electronics club at Ashesi University.

For the first 6 weeks, d:lab interns will do research and identify opportunity areas in the health sector that GN electronics can explore and develop prototypes to be tested. For the next 4 weeks, the electronics club at Ashesi will develop tangible, working prototypes for GN electronics.

Project Details:

Project Start Date: 22nd May 2017

May 22: Research and observations to identify opportunity areas GN electronics can explore. Data gathered will also be analysed using design thinking analysis frameworks. Write a brief report on findings and insights to back 6 areas of need which can be explored by GN Electronics.

June 12 (Presentation 1): Interns present 6 opportunity areas to GN electronics. GN electronics will select 3 opportunity areas for interns to explore further.

June 19 (Presentation 2): Interns will present 2 ideas for each opportunity area identified. There will be 6 ideas for GN to rank.

June 26: Prototypes will be developed and interns will prepare documents for the electronics club to work on. Hand over ideas and documentation of product designs to Nicholas’ team The document will entail product specifications and requirement definitions for the electronics club to use to develop a tangible product or solutions.

June 7: Package shared with GN electronics and the electronics club.

July 10 – August 10: The electronics club work on actual tangible products to present to GN Electronics.

August 11: The electronics club/team travel to Elmina to present their solutions and designs to GN electronics.

Project End Date: 11th August 2017

THE FIRST ASSESSMENT – YOUNG CREATIVES INITIATIVE AT ASHESI

March 2, 2017

On 1st March the Young Creatives team held the 5th session of the program in the McNulty Foundation Design Lab on the Ashesi University College campus. For previous sessions, the team taught the students how to identify problems around them and understand the stakeholders, effects and causes of these problems. We introduced a class charter and some concepts of leadership and teamwork such as respect and core values to the students.

For the 5th Session of this program, we brought the students to the Ashesi Campus. This change of environment revealed a lot about how physical environments can greatly impact the emotions of young learners and hence motivate learning!

We, the team for the day, surprised them with a quiz to test their understanding of problems, causes and effects of problems, and stakeholders, tackled in previous sessions. Some students expressed how this made them feel; in their own words, the experience was ‘easy’, ‘tough’, ‘uncomfortable’.

We watched a short animation movie, “Soar” – by Alyce True, and introduced the idea of observation as a form of empathy in the Design Thinking process and the essence of acknowledging the feelings of others in Leadership. This was when we truly realised that communication and verbal self-expression was a challenge for the students of Fidelity Juvenile School in Berekuso. Our newest challenge now is: “How might we enable a reluctant, unsure, maybe shy junior high school student to communicate effectively and express themselves intelligently to others?”

The day ended with a display of the arrow head marching formation that the students spent the entire day in school learning, prior to our Young Creatives session.

TEACHING THE K-12 DESIGN THINKING CURRICULUM TO JHS 1 STUDENTS – THE YOUNG CREATIVES INITIATIVE

January 27, 2017

The Young Creatives Initiative is a new project that seeks to teach design thinking to JHS 1 students in Berekuso using the collection of curriculum created by the K-12 Lab at the Stanford Design School and teachers who are using design thinking in schools across the world.

This is an initiative of the Ashesi Design Lab, in partnership with NewLeaf, that seeks to foster creative confidence in young teenagers in local high schools in Ghana. To achieve this goal, young teenagers will be introduced to design thinking concepts and tools, as well as coached in developing excellent leadership and effective communication skills.

The Young Creatives project is led by Carl Agbenyega (Design Making Coordinator of the D:Lab), Philip Asare (Design Thinking Coordinator of the D:Lab) and Vanessa Amoako (co-founder of NewLeaf and Faculty Intern at Ashesi University). The leads together with student volunteers from Ashesi, run the design thinking, leadership and communication sessions with Junior High School (JHS) 1 students at the Fidelity Juvenile School, located in Berekuso of Ghana.