RSA : 5 — Ideation and Concept Generation
“One idea lights a thousand candles”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
With the brunt of the research done, and shouldering a very solid understanding of the mechanics of sex trafficking in Ireland to boot; it came time to ideate.
Hip Hip Hurrah!!!
Considerations
After presenting, and validating our key insights with our primary expert Linda Latham (Head & Founder of the Anti Human Trafficking team for the HSE) we asked her to highlight the most pressing areas for development.
- Detection
- Education and outreach
- Long term monitoring
This was very much in line with what we had learned in the TIPS, Europol, Interpol and OSCE reports.
With those three areas as focal points we set about building a plan to develop concepts.
— Enter Design Sprint Stage left
Design Sprint
What is a design sprint?
A Design Sprint is a process of framing the right problem, creating tangible solutions, prototyping and testing them with real users in a period of 5 intense days of work.
As the original definition by Google Ventures goes,
- “A Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers”
So we thought, why not do three… in 5 days…
Mapping
“The map appears to us more real than the land.”
— D.H. Lawrence
Long term goal
Healthcare should be the primary form of interaction between victims and the state; rather than Justice.
Justice should only be involved to the extent of the patients need for assistance.
Mapping the areas
Within our three problem spaces, we mapped out the current processes and grouped the supporting insights we had gathered around each.
Sketching
“I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing.”
— Vincent van Gogh
Once we had each area mapped, we created How might we questions to frame the problems in order to move into concept generation.
Brain Writing
To get started we did a bit of brain writing with our peers. It’s essentially a way to outsource idea generation. You get a group of people, the more the better, to individually brainstorm around each how might we question.
The result was a big bag of ideas, mostly chaff, but there definitely were some nuggets.
We aggregated the most interesting ideas and with the help of a bit of socratic dialogue, (picture lounging in togas eating grapes) developed three solution spaces and sketched out the systems.
Detection
Voice are like fingerprints. Not only are they unique to you but there is also a lot of useful metadata that can indicate health. At any one time there are between 800–1000 active prostitutes in Ireland. The Guards monitor those by hand which is very costly and time consuming. The two major studies done on numbers of prostitution in Ireland have been done by the Immigrant council in Ireland in 2009, and by Prime Time. Both very resource intensive and time consuming.
How could we make cold calling and vocal identification more effective and efficient in detecting victims of human Trafficking, by using vocal featurisation and machine learning combined with computer vision?
Education & Outreach
The information in order for victims to get help, is not very human centred and difficult to parse. This is a big problem for people in extremely vulnerable positions. The first step to recovery is understanding what help is available to you.
How could we represent more visually and in different languages the rights somebody has and the services they have access to in order to inform them better on the process of escaping and healing?
Long term monitoring
Love & connectedness to a purpose filled life is the most important aspect of long term recovery. These are very difficult things to track and measure over lengthy periods of time, due to resource limitations and memory.
How could we create a non-invasive and human-centred system for women that can track their progress over time to inform them and their therapist about where they need help?
Deciding
“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!”
― Mark Twain
In order to decide on what we exactly we should prototype, we created a scenario surrounding each solution space with an accompanying storyboard.
Detection
Every month, a script takes all the data from Escort Ireland — Name, Age, Picture, Number and runs two operations. Firstly, it cross references the images with missing persons to check if there are matching links.
Secondly, it takes all the numbers and calls them and Emma (a voice bot) asks a series of questions in order to monitor and extract vocal features that might indicate trafficking (fear, anxiety, stress, PTSD, depression).
If any of the tests come back positive, an alert is sent to the Gardaí and the HSE in order to investigate further.
In the Doctors office, the same technology could be used to signal to the practitioner during a screening that there are possible indicators of trafficking.
Education & Outreach
A solution to educate the public and victims about all aspects of Human Trafficking, from indicators, reporting, support services and legal advice.
It consists of many different forms of awareness campaigns from posters to announcements to social media trends. The mothership of this information will be a website with a multilingual chat bot.
The website will display all the relevant information in a clear and accessible manner for both civilian and victim. The chat bot will be a 24hr support service to give the user specific information accurately and instantly.
Long term monitoring
Once somebody has been identified as a victim of human trafficking they are worked with to develop a personalised health plan by the HSE.
As part of this plan, the patient meets a doctor/therapist & is given a Amazon Alexa to bring home.
Their account is set up & personalised.
They receive a tutorial in its operation and how it works and can create further personalisation settings to fit their needs.
Every night before the patient goes to sleep, they are able to interact with her. It asks a series of questions about her day in relation to mood, goals & feelings so her progress over time can be tracked and summarised for herself and her therapist.
The therapist can focus on specific events or days taken from the patients accounts, also, the therapist can be alerted if there is any strange or self-harming behaviours.
Prototyping
“If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a prototype is worth a 1000 meetings”
— Tom & David Kelley
Once we had a clear scenario around which to prototype, we pulled up our socks and delved even further into the realm of creativity.
Detection — Experience Prototype
The idea is a welfare check bot that can call many women in a short period of time to search for vulnerability, fear and PTSD.
Education and outreach — Wireframes
A website to display all the relevant information in a clear and accessible manner for both civilian and victim in multiple languages. A chat bot will also offer a 24hr support service to give the user specific information accurately and instantly, and to connect women in need to the relevant services.
Long term monitoring — Experience Prototype
Leveraging conversational user interfaces as a less invasive and more personal method to log data over the long term. Home assistants are connected to some amazing technology that could be leveraged to provide better psychological health care monitoring. We created an experience prototype to showcase this potential.
Testing
To test, we brought in the big guns to shoot down our potentially terrible ideas. We went in with the attitude that we might appear as dumb and dumber in front of our experts. People hardened by years of experience in the field…. But to our surprise, we received very positive responses.
Linda Latham — Founder & Head of the Anti Human Trafficking team for the HSE
Detection
Its a great outreach, a new & novel concept of reaching women who are hard to reach
Outreach & Education
Wonderful, very interesting. I like how the service can be hidden behind a phone number.
Education & awareness is so important
Long term monitoring
Using Alexa like this could be like a crutch
Theres moments of truth that don’t occur very often that are incredibly moving… I think this method can tap into those moments.
JP Sullivan — Research, Programmes and marketing manager MECPATHs
Detection
I feel like the dumb kid in the class here its excellent, really great!
Outreach & Education
The language element is hugely important
I think a central place to both learn & report, like your presenting here is hugely needed both by victims but also the Anti-Human Trafficking community
Monitoring
I think this is a tool that can be used in many areas, I actually really like that element
I think your work is very holistic it’s not just identifying one part, its long term goals, its excellent!
Survivors— Advocates & Survivors of Human trafficking
Detection
This is great it will really help women find a voice
Detection is so difficult because the changes in a victim are so subtle its hard for another person to notice sometimes
Outreach & Education
Everything comes back to education, if we don’t educate children on what is a healthy relationship and when is acceptable behaviour then the issue will never end
Long term monitoring
This is awesome, I could use this in my home, our town is very isolated so my daughters trauma therapist is miles away. Gosh this would really help them make the most out of the few sessions they do
My gosh what do I have to get you to do to come over here and talk to the governor of Texas?
The best way to earn trust is to believe and validate these women, you need to meet them where they are and just show them you hear them. Validate their story and any emotions they are feeling, then once trust is built you can begin to peel back layers of their story and really understand them.
This can allow them to feel their emotions in that moment.
Result
So from presenting our prototypes multiples times, we done gone had a brain wave…
We asked ourselves:
How could we synthesise our concepts into one larger system that had a face?
So as a fitting point of inspiration, we chose Emma Nutt a guiding star.
Alexander Graham Bell the Inventor of the first practical telephone, hired Emma away from a telegraph office. She supposedly remembered every number in the New England Telephone Company directory.
Teenage boys worked as telephone operators — after all, they’d worked as telegraph operators from the beginning. But they didn’t do well actually talking to real people. They were impatient, they liked to play jokes and they swore. Customers complained they spoke too gruffly to them.
Emma Nutt, on the other hand, had patience and a cultured, soothing voice. Her success led women to rapidly replace boys as operators.
What we conceptualised was a face that could act as an independent layer and assistant across multiple silos:
- Justice Department
- Gardai
- HSE
- Social Welfare
- Doctors
- Psychologists & Therapists
- Big Tech
By creating this layer we are creating a more human interface for these extremely vulnerable people to interface with the disparate services available to them.
Here is a map of how we envision Emma:
Next steps
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
— John Carmack
Designing Emma is going to be an exciting project. How can we create a culturally astute, dynamic character that manifests in different form across a variety of touch points.
We have outlined three areas of focus:
Emmas Character
Brand Guidelines
Character Development
Trait perception in different cultures
Emmas Knowledge
Co-creation with clinical psychologist
Co-creation with various cultures
Co-creation with HSE
Co-creation with Irish based Survivors
Co-creation with policy makers
Emmas Parts
Design and interaction in different touch points
The tech stack that will bring her to life
