Tenakas Tribe
Internet Marketing in Randburg

Tenaka's Tribe designs print and interactive media that aligns with your marketing needs.

Amid the world of design thinking resources available to anyone who’s interested, IDEO has shared a series of courses, one of which was to facilitate a human-centered design workshop. They provided the course materials, including a presentation, facilitator’s notes and guidance throughout the preparation stages. Interviewing Deeza about human-centered design workshops at Tenaka’s Tribe. C: So, you pulled off a human-centered design workshop at Tenaka. C: What exactly is this thing you call human-centered design? D: It’s an approach to solving problems that puts the people we’re solving the problem for at the centre of the process. This gives us some insight into what real people see as challenges and what we should be focussing on to help tackle those challenges. Sometimes, the interview might lead you in a different direction, and that’s great. It’s important to be open to taking the process in a new direction if new insights arise. There was a little trepidation, but, you know, strangers are humans, too, and many were totally open to stopping for a quick chat. For example, (our overall challenge was around health) we found that a lot of people felt the struggle to be healthy was exacerbated by all the misinformation around food; that all the people we spoke to who go to gym were in a hurry; that a lot of older people see being healthy as a state of mind, a way of living, rather than an extra conscious effort you have to put in. Sometimes, of course, you might prototype an environment or a service, which you’d probably do some kind of role play for. The thing is, by doing it that way around, we spend a lot more time and money coming up with something and having to make big, expensive changes after it’s gone to market because it’s not what people want. Another reason is that some of us don’t want to imagine that we don’t know all the answers. We live in a world that rewards knowing, rather than an openness to learn, where admitting you don’t know is seen as some kind of flaw. C: So, this workshop sounds like an awful lot of stuff to get through in one day with people who have never come across this approach before. It’s almost like you were prototyping the workshop. We got so much out of it, and we feel really strongly about spreading the word on human-centered design. D: Thinking like a real human-centered designer now, hey? We had 10 participants at one workshop and about 16 at the other. The IDEO framework was so helpful because we’d never done a workshop like this before, but as we go forward, our own learning around human-centered design will no doubt have a huge influence on the workshops we run. There’s a lot to discover and a lot of fun to be had doing it. That way, you’ll get a mailer when there’s a workshop coming up. We don’t want to confuse people by giving it a different name when the principles and methods are basically the same, we just want to say that we are taking an effective approach to problem solving and making it even better through continuous practice and learning, and adding our own unique Tribal touch to it.