Yesterday was the first day of the first-ever UNHCR Innovation Workshop: an exciting day for us, and a historic day for UNHCR as an organization.
The iFellows, twenty changemakers and problem solvers from around the world, have gathered in Bangkok, Thailand to tackle the innovation process. Throughout the week, they will learn a human-centered design process – from narrowing down and defining challenges, different types of brainstorming, human-centered research techniques and finally prototyping and testing. At the end of the week, every group will have created a prototyped solution to the challenge they have chosen, and will present it to a panel of judges.
Day 1 of the Workshop was a blast. The iFellows met each other and the Innovation Team for the first time, trading stories and experiences from their work and home offices. Valentina, traveling over 40 hours from Costa Rica, met others like Yunesti, traveling in from Herat, Afghanistan, and Alexis from Khartoum, Sudan.
Joel, our trusty leader from the Global Learning Center, led us through a number of different exercises. We started by using UNHCR Ideas to choose the challenges that each group will focus on throughout the week. The twenty iFellows then split themselves into teams – based on diversity of nationalities, backgrounds, and specialties. After learning a bit about team work and innovation methodologies from the Marshmallow Challenge and IDEO, the fun really began when the teams made there way out into the streets of Bangkok to use different human-centered interviewing techniques to tackle some core questions of their challenges.
We have four days left to tackle the challenges! What will happen? Stay tuned to find out!
Outside the workshop, things are getting exciting.
Using UNHCR Ideas to brainstorm challenges facing UNHCR.
Joel, our faithful leader, wearing his UNHCR Innovation Fellowship shirt and leading us towards greatness.
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