Societal Shifts
Innovating for Impact: Better Food for Seniors
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Mc Bride, Denise C. Tahara, Xue Bai
Food insecurity is an invisible public health crisis. Everyday 40 million Americans including 8 million seniors struggle to know where they will find their next meal. Our project articulates the advantages of collaborating across disciplines, specifically how to use design to innovate for impact. We provide a cost-effective way to address food insecurity and deliver nutrient-rich food for malnourished seniors. We propose leveraging the existing technologies of electronic health records (EHRs), electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards and (electronic) food prescriptions, to design an integrated medical, social and public health solution, and, demonstrate that this approach can improve the access, availability, utilization, and sustainability of feeding systems; reduce disparities; and improve the health and well-being of communities. Our journey is simple. We document responses to two USDA food security questions at all key touchpoints with the healthcare system, including primary care providers and feeding programs and act on that information. We supplement this documentation to address the need of seniors by including questions regarding biting, chewing and swallowing constraints. And, we design navigation tools to assist seniors in accessing foods that meet nutrition and oral health needs; food pharmacies, congregate meal settings and delivered meals, using their electronic benefit transfer cards with our community collaborators. Finally, we use the power of machine learning to collect data from the three electronic sources to monitor utilization, adherence and health outcomes, and identify best practices to meet the growing needs of food insecure seniors, and scale them to broader communities
'Ya tozhe' (Me Too): A Communicative Tool for Engaging and Empowerment Volunteers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Valeriia Rumiantceva, Tatiana Aleksandrova, Galina Lola
The research aims to share the results of the collaborative project between a university and a local charitable organization. The intention of the project was to develop a tool of communication, a platform that would become a point of interaction between people with disabilities and potential volunteers. Today people with disabilities have more opportunities than they used to have decades ago. However, despite all the effort that charitable organizations have put into the development of the accessible environment the society is not ready for open communication with disabled people. Design can facilitate dialogue between representatives of different social communities, express their interests by forming a message in a visual form providing the possibility of a profound perception not just at the level of data but at the level of meanings. The project 'ya tozhe' is a set of information materials that could be used both for conducting an introductory lesson for the volunteers and for rising awareness among a wide audience. The project considers emotional and rational levels of perception. The objective of emotionally charged content is to strengthen motivation, to develop empathy and to prevent possible rejection at the first acquaintance; the objective of methodical sections is to empower volunteers with professional skills and knowledge. It also contains interactive elements designed to impart disabled people's perception of the world.
Infusing Passion and Equality in Services for Social Justice Activists
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudio Pinhanez
This paper describes and discusses a case of re-design of service journeys for the tech enablement of women’s rights activists. It examines how a group of business consultants interacted with a small non-profit organization to rethink its services and systems for social justice activists, which relied on volunteer advisors from Silicon Valley. The paper also analyzes the outcomes of the re-designed journeys and the positive impact they had in both the activists and advisors who went through them. We argue there were two key elements to the success of this design process: a focus on bringing out the passion which both activists and advisors have for social justice; and the creation of processes which made them contribute as equals. Interestingly, those guiding themes emerged in spite of the traditional, business- and results-oriented mindset of the consultants. We explore this design process in the context of the passionate politics and feminist movements and the historical backdrop of conservative attacks on women’s rights. Based on the results of the study, the paper suggests some guidelines for conducting design work with political and social justice organizations.
