When the tsunami hit the Maldives in late 2004, Sahu was at school in Malé. Within two hours Sahu, a ten year old girl, saw her town flooded and friends and family displaced. Sahu did what she could to help her family and friends. She provided first aid to younger children, collected food for older people, and worked with the older women in the community to help cook for those who could not. Within two hours, the Government declared a state of national emergency and deployed a special task force to provide aid and supplies. Within hours, the taskforce took control and Sahu’s contribution was discredited. Unfortunately, this is an all to common scenario whereby children find themselves sidelined by troops and international aid agencies that take control of relief work.
We propose a concept that connects and empowers children and young people through learning and taking action before during and after a disaster. We call this concept, Connected Kids. However, for connected kids to become a reality, we must first ‘connect’ with the kids. Connected kids is an idea that will help build relationships between youth, both, before during and after a disaster, to better respond in such an event. We do not know what connected kids will look like, or how it will feel. We do not know whether Connected Kids is a service or a product, or even a program. What we do know is, that to realize connected kids, we first must connect with the kids. To realize the connected kids idea, we propose a series of participatory design workshops as our submission idea. We want to engage and co-create with our end user. We want to avoid designing a product or service first, without fully engaging and understanding what our user group feels they need. The connected kids workshops will encourage youth to offer their personal insight through activities and workshops on issues such as food, water, emotions, roles, responsibilities, needs and more. This is to ensure we are designing to meet real human needs. Our connected kids workshops will encourage and engage UNICEF program developers and Chairs to be involved in this process so we can better understand how such a program, service or product can be scalable and transferable. Our idea – a series of workshops that engage real people, to generate real insight, to create and realize a real idea.
JOINT SUBMISSION BY
RACHAEL KOFFEL &
ALEN KEIRNAN