Design Thinking approach for Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) program for Kenyan peripartum adolescents
Problem Statement
We began by making sure we’ve got the right kind of problem to work on. Through a series of workshops we explored known problems and previously unexpressed needs. The discussions culminated into a final problem statement: “How might mental health services be designed to deliver the best possible service, at minimal cost and greater accessibility to pregnant teens and teen moms through the antenatal care (ANC) and postnatal care (PNC) stages?”
The Process
We recruited 22 individuals to participate in the Design Thinking Workshops (Focus Group Discussions), including 5 pregnant adolescent women, and 3 postpartum adolescent women. All 5 of the pregnant adolescents gave birth during the course of the 6-month workshop series. Among the 39 key informant interviewees, there were 17 pregnant adolescent women, and 22 postpartum adolescent women.
After making sure we’ve got the right kind of problem to work on, we followed the design thinking process that needs to answer four questions — What is? What if? What wows? What works? — each representing a different stage of a problem-solving experience.
1. What is?
Immersion: Rather than start off looking at existing data, the we took the ethnographic approach and walked through the adolescent's experience, thereby gaining deeper understanding and uncovering unarticulated needs.
Sense Making: Our group next collected the observations and data considered most important, then invited key stakeholders i.e., the Adolescents, to note the problems and issues they consider most essential and group them by major themes.