Day 02. Activating Civic Futures
Building a Future of Global equity
Tuesday June 23, 11:00am EDT
🔌 Talk, 45 minute session
A consortium of designers, anthropologists, behavioral economists and global health experts led by Sonder Collective, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, immersed themselves in the lives of some of the most vulnerable populations in the world to orient the field of global health toward a deeper understanding of social and environmental vulnerability. The project, called Pathways, has as its primary goal to create new inputs into the field of global health’s long term thinking by going beyond biomedical or tech-driven solutions. To achieve this, we have used creative design methods, anthropological research and data science to iterate and create artefacts that will help health system actors at all levels speculate on the future of community well-being and design interventions that are more intentionally equitably and future oriented. Co-designing and speculating on potential futures with stakeholders in the field was a fundamental aspect of our project approach, but it was not without challenges.
For our talk we will delve into how we adapted our methods and reflect on some of the assumptions we sometimes make when we approach users, humans, collaborators, or interlocutors. In addition to our in-field considerations, we will discuss how our outputs need to simultaneously help predict micro futures for concrete interventions locally, as well as animate macro discussions at the global level about what a future world could look like and how to responsibly intervene in and participate in creating it. In delivering tools and artifacts at these different levels, we have faced questions such as who gets to imagine and manifest interventions that can support equity? As well as concretely how can we portray the complexity of the daily lived experience at a household and community level while engaging with the more abstract societal, systemic and ideological shifts taking place?
Chloé Roubert
Anthropology Lead, Sonder Collective
Chloé is an anthropologist interested in how humans make meaning and organize the everyday world around them. She has led ethnographic research, facilitated conversations, developed insights and designed outputs to create and implement more purposeful systems and practices across different sectors and industries. As part of Sonder Collective, a design co-operative that works with partners and communities on global health, humanitarian and social innovation challenges, she participates in co-creating alternative futures and impacting organisations dealing with large environmental and health problems. Among her most recent projects, she worked with civil servants in the DRCongo on the future of their health care system. In addition to her work in applied contexts, she has an artistic practice using urban fauna and flora to investigate and challenge what sustains our modern condition.
Melanie Wendland
Designer, Co-Founder, Sonder Collective
Melanie is a co-founder of Sonder Collective and a senior designer based in Helsinki. With over 12 years of working in the field of service design, she is driven by creating enabling environments for collaboration through iterative research methods and design by using her diplomatic skills and building genuine relationships with project partners. She has specialised in designing for maternal and new-born child health in Sub Saharan Africa and India. In addition to leading complex design projects in global health and facilitating design processes, within Sonder Collective she maintains and develops new partnerships and is responsible for the co-operative’s operational and financial governance. Before founding Sonder Collective, she was Director of Service Design and Innovation at social impact company M4ID. In the past Melanie has worked as design lead with Fjord/Accenture designing and developing digital tools and services for the private sector.
Tracy Pilar Johnson
Senior Program Officer, User Experience & Innovation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Tracy is a human-centered design anthropologist passionate about using innovative methodologies to illuminate the why behind people’s behavior and inspire strategies that improve people’s future health and wellbeing. As Senior Program Office, User Experience and Innovation, at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tracy is responsible for creating a vision for how to best apply a combined human-centered design and behavioral and social sciences perspective to global health and development challenges. She brings to this role over 15 years of experience translating market and consumer insights to inform policy and business strategy in environments and subjects as varied as digital technology, media use; consumer research on food, retail and wellness; maternal and child health; complex intervention delivery, education; and human rights. She is a design leader for DesignforHealth.org and a contributor to the award-winning LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation. Throughout her career she has lived and worked throughout Thailand, Laos, Sri Lanka, India, China, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Panama, France, Spain, Italy, and North America. She received her PhD in social and cultural anthropology from Columbia University.