in different fields and industries.
I am grateful for the opportunity as I gained a lot of hand-on research experience learning from great designers; altough I missed being involved across all of the process (not limiting to research), which led to me changing job.
A cool project I worked on here
My personal favourite from my time here: I designed and carried out as facilitator a series of online workshops for professionals working for eastern-Europe municipalities, funded by the NGO GIZ. Our goal was to help the participants analyze and reflect on the current state of digitalization of their services; their goals regarding it; inject notions of user-centeredness and user research; support them in defining a reachable starting point for each of their specific challenges.
Why was it cool to work on this
It's been such a challenge: cultural, background and language barriers made it hard to obtain a spontaneous and lively discussion, together with the fact that participating cities had very different goals and needs. Because of these obstacles, the very first workshop was a bit of a failure - which meant learning a lot. We designed every workshop based on the results of the previous one, making them more effective step by step.
What did I do
I am grateful for the opportunity as I gained a lot of hand-on research experience learning from great designers; altough I missed being involved across all of the process (not limiting to research), which led to me changing job.
A cool project I worked on here
My personal favourite from my time here: I designed and carried out as facilitator a series of online workshops for professionals working for eastern-Europe municipalities, funded by the NGO GIZ. Our goal was to help the participants analyze and reflect on the current state of digitalization of their services; their goals regarding it; inject notions of user-centeredness and user research; support them in defining a reachable starting point for each of their specific challenges.
Why was it cool to work on this
It's been such a challenge: cultural, background and language barriers made it hard to obtain a spontaneous and lively discussion, together with the fact that participating cities had very different goals and needs. Because of these obstacles, the very first workshop was a bit of a failure - which meant learning a lot. We designed every workshop based on the results of the previous one, making them more effective step by step.
What did I do
- Design of the workshops (the concept, structure, the activities, to the realization of digital board we used);
- Research and analysis of case studies + building reports about them for the end user (the municipalities);
- Carry out the workshops as facilitator - online, handling between 5-10 participants each time;
- Write the research reports for GIZ - the client.
Final considerations
To go further with design and implementation of the idea, there would need to be a wider user research and co-design approach, involving policy makers, users and providers from different areas and demographics.
Some mistakes would need to be avoided, in particular:
> drop a new load of responsibility on the "mom" of the network, without a dynamic of mutual support;
> avoid to create confusion and useless bureaucracy for doctors and nurses;
> caution with privacy and treatment of sensitive data, giving full control
to the users.
To go further with design and implementation of the idea, there would need to be a wider user research and co-design approach, involving policy makers, users and providers from different areas and demographics.
Some mistakes would need to be avoided, in particular:
> drop a new load of responsibility on the "mom" of the network, without a dynamic of mutual support;
> avoid to create confusion and useless bureaucracy for doctors and nurses;
> caution with privacy and treatment of sensitive data, giving full control
to the users.
In Oblo I worked as Service designer User researcher
Service design and research agency in Milan, Italy
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In no particular order, we worked with cities' administrators from:
- North Macedonia
- Serbia
- Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Ukraine
- Montenegro
- Georgia
- Moldavia
Facilitating digitalization across Eastern Europe municipalities
