Between the logical and the creative halves of the brain there lies the commonness of generating thoughts, understanding and cognition. This commonness in practice brings the person to be unique in his/her approach, expression and response. This uniqueness if designed to change the social evils around us, then we could place millions of innovations to tackle hundreds of prevailing problems. Designing for Social Innovation is the interaction between people that takes responsibility for positive, systemic impact. It takes place within the communities and systems it’s working with, not outside them. Here the grassroots organisation plays an important role in hosting the community change development process.
This is an experiential-based learning, sharing and designing story of me facilitating a session with the social development leaders of my Host Organization, Srijan Foundation. Srijan Foundation is the grassroots level organization that works in the communities for the social issues around women empowerment and children rights. Let’s begin this series of a journey into Designing for Social Development through a basic definition of what is a design.
“Designing is an art of understanding, cognition and expression. This starts with a simple mistake and travels to being a silent ambassador of innovation.”
̴Shashi Kumar
The Need
I strongly believe in the saying by Johann Kaspar Lavater “He alone is an acute observer, who can observe minutely without being observed.” To practice this, I keep my senses active to observe and empathetically listen from my ecosystem. Since the very initial days into the engagements with my host Srijan Foundation, I have learnt a lot from the people, processes and field engagements. Into this, with my keen observation, I found that people at Srijan Foundation have a deep connection with the purpose and field implementation.
But they find difficulties in the expression of their ideas through the form of regular documentation, designing and sharing of works effectively. A few of the challenges they face include making structures for writing, sample design demonstrations, lack of feedbacks, no handholding support to try innovations and many more. All this converge towards making documentation and designing a tough and time-taking task, leading to either less designing or no designing.
Social development designers can play a catalytic role in society with frameworks to discover, define, develop and deliver for the social problems prevailing around them. They must be grounded to the people’s needs with the approach of collaborative contribution in disruption to the status quo. The social design should help the practitioner to become mindful of their role in society, to design for self-expression to ease the common understanding & possibilities to bring about social change.
The Planning
In some of the discussions with my supervisor Swapan Manna and guide Rajiv Ranjan, they praised my creative writing skills, designing and technology-enabled work. Also, they highlighted developing and have a session with some of the project team heads. This exactly matched my interest and passion to design a session and facilitate it among team members for effective documentation and introduction to designing through Canva- an online designing tool.
Thereafter I planned a demonstration facilitation session with the following objectives to serve:
- Establish set the significance of content designing and effective documentation.
- Introduction to Canva- online (web and app-based) designing tool.
- Demonstration of designing online with live explanation, tips and solving queries.
With this, I developed the following session resources: A session infographic, online Google Meet Invitation, session presentation, few self-made design samples and feedback Google forms to assess the efficiency and participation.
The Session
Post my planning and session content development, Mrs Pooja, President of Srijan Foundation invited the core team members, every Unit In-charge, Project Coordinators and team members responsible for documentation from the organisation. With the assignment, I gave pre-work to the participants to share their best-designed document, report, presentation or any piece.
Then finally on April 12th, 2021 the session was started with an engaging introduction (sharing their name, the associated project with location, choosing a design from the presented samples and giving a small reason behind) round among the 18 organizational leaders. Then I started the introduction with the definition, noted the challenges the participants faced while designing, the purpose, the journey of designing and the introduction of Canva. The user-friendliness, effectiveness and tools available in the Canva tool were highlighted through demonstration of live sample designing. After this, I took questions and tried to resolve everyone’s queries. This was followed by consolidation of the session through discussing the way forward for the leaders.
Post the session, the participants gave their feedback through Google form. The session was quite interactive, activity-based and everyone decided to design an effective document by the coming week. The suggestions and the feedback are highlighting the fact that they found this worth applying into actions for better designing.
“Shashi, first of all, thank you very much for taking the Canva and Documentation session to the participants in a very simple, live and lovely manner. We greatly appreciate your creativity and innovation in technology. We have received responses from the people that are quite positive, especially it will get you blasted from the feedback form responses.”
̴Rajiv Ranjan Sinha, Manager (Programs), Srijan Foundation
The Follow-up and Way Forward
Post the designing session, I mailed the participants package including the resources developed for the session and useful external links to refer to. The team members had discussions with me for the next couple of days to seek support in their practice for designing and have also shared a few of their designs with me to review. In a way forward, I have initiated steps to register the organization profile on Canva Pro (under free for Non-profit’s initiative of Canva). This will surely support the organization to sustain the designing efforts and work in teams to effectively design their social development activities.
It has been an honour to get a chance to facilitate a session on “Getting Started with Designing” among the senior leaders and professionals of my host organization Srijan Foundation. Being passionate about designing and with my role as a strategic initiatives consultant, I always look for possibilities to empower people around me with the skills while enhancing mine and demonstrations. I am delighted and happily satisfied with the experience of lovely facilitation.
