Week notes w/c Feb 15 – Using design thinking to connect children living with serious illness

Week notes 3

I have just finished running a fast-paced innovation sprint for children’s charity Over the Wall (OTW).

Over the wall run residential camps for children with serious illnesses. We ran a design sprint to rethink options to better connect the children with each other, and extend OTW’s virtual services through COVID and beyond.

The sprint was made up of core members of the OTW team. To inspire fresh thinking around audience needs, several external experts from a wide range of backgrounds also joined the group (their backgrounds include technology, diversity and inclusion, education, health and operations).  

I built the sprint around three sessions:

Session 1: Empathise

We stepped into the shoes of OTW’s beneficiaries to better understand what they think and feel, and their needs and pain points. Hearing stories direct from children and their families helped to bring their lives to life. The three teams then synthesised their learnings using empathy maps on virtual whiteboard collaboration platform Miro.

Session 2: Ideation to prototype

It was now time to define the opportunity we would be working on and start to look for ways to address it. The overarching challenge was defined as: How might we find innovative ways for OTW to provide world-class services to the most vulnerable children and families in the UK (and potentially beyond).

In our groups, we defined our own problem statement to tackle, then started to  generate ideas. In discussion the teams selected the top ideas, then they began creating paper prototypes for their concepts in Miro. They added images and stickies to their ideas to build them out together.

Session 3: Prototype pitches

In our final session the teams presented their prototype ideas to a panel of friendly ‘dragons’ connected to OTW. This provided invaluable feedback on their ideas.  After the feedback, the teams then refined their presentations.

The concepts included creating a ground-breaking social network for children to connect to each other in a safe way; creating a virtual OTW camp within Minecraft; and working with Well Told Story to create bespoke comics and podcasts for kids by the kids. A core principle of all the solutions was to reduce the sense of isolation and to help children define themselves by their ambition and not their condition.

What next?

The next step is to pull this thinking together into a presentation for a benefactor, with the aim of raising funds and resources to bring these ideas to life.  I wish them the best of luck!