Design Sprint - Child Labour

HELPING THE VICTIMS OF CHILD LABOUR

Children are taken away from their families to work in hazardous conditions for long hours and are paid next to nothing or nothing at all. Child labour mostly takes place in developing countries due to poverty. More than 200 million children are child labourers. Whats worse? The fact that child labour is not only occurring third world countries. Its us too. Many first world companies use child labour but keep it a secret (for obvious reasons).

These children are

• Depressed
• Frightened
• Underage
• In danger
• Helpless

We can create charities to provide money and education to the poor families and their children. A way to do this is to create a partnership with stores and companies to fundraise and advertise this issue. Not only can we partner with stores, but we can unite with organizations that are already working on this issue such as: ILO (International Labour Organization) and Free the Children.

Advertisement will be very effective in getting people involved. Many people do not fully understand what child labour is and through advertisement we can change that. We can help the children.

Through fundraisers, we can build communities where people can be educated and can get real jobs. (Real jobs being people who are not underage and are not working in hazardous conditions with reasonable pay).

Well, what about the children?

Organizations can be put into motion that can rescue and return the children from their site of labour.

THE PROCESS OF MY IDEA

I used a step process called Design Sprint. We started off looking at the process of design; empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and then testing.

In the design sprint we went through many different steps to develop and further understand our topic and a possible solution. We used the steps; selecting a problem- what breaks your heart?, picking a problem, understanding the users of your solution, empathy-who is being affected by the problem, define your problem, ideate-crazy 8s, refine-partner crazy 4s, ideate-write in sections to sell your idea, prototype- have a group critique your idea, and lastly testing it in the real world. These steps may not make much sense but I have explained them a little further below.

Empathy; understanding your problem and the people who are affected by it. Grab a partner, interview them, and make them answer as a person who is affected by your problem. For example, I interviewed a “child labourer” and the “parents of a child labourer”. This really gives you the opportunity to understand the problem on more than just a factual level, but a human level.

Define; Who is the user who is being affected by your problem? And how might we help?

Ideate; searching your brain for ideas. We used a strategy called Crazy 8s. There are 8 boxes on a piece of paper and you have 40 seconds with each box to come up with a creative solution to your problem. It is harder than it sounds but I really enjoyed it because one of my best ideas came when I was struggling the most (towards the end).

Prototype; writing out your possible solution on a paper to “sell” it to your audience/user. Once you have “sold” your idea, a group of other designers gather around and critique your idea to help you make some changes.

The next step would be to test your solution in the real world but we are doing a modified version of that; posting our ideas on our blog!