4: Case Story Germany: Team Kleefeld (EN)In this section you can follow the Design Thinking process for a Community work case for Hanna and her team of Social Workers in Kleefeld, a suburb of Hannover.
Here you can see what methods was chosen by the facilitators from our partner VNB to lead them through the Design thinking process and what problems they set out to find solutions for.
Hannah and her 2 colleagues are social workers in Kleefeld, a suburb of Hannover / Germany. They bring together residents of a district, provide spaces for exchange and education, and offer formats for participation. They act as contact persons and mouthpieces, mediators, and networkers between resident families, schools, housing companies, police, city council and many more.
However, it is difficult for them to maintain the active participation with the residents throughout the year. This applies especially after holiday breaks. They wish they could find a way to uphold a constant and communicative relationship to their local community in ongoing mutual activities, apart from acute situations when they are called upon.
A local teacher suggested to them to set up a Design Thinking process to find a best possible and sustainable solution for the problem. The teacher even organized a spacy room in the local grammar school where they could work as a team.
Hannah formed a preliminary team consisting of the 3 social workers, 2 teachers, 3 residents and 1 representative from the major local housing company. In a first workshop session, they made themselves familiar with the Design thinking mindset and process by studying the d.thinking training platform individually. After collecting opinions regarding the key issue, they formulated the following Design Thinking challenge as a starting point:
Design a participative and continuous collaboration with the residents in our neighbourhood, apart from acute situations.
They agreed to work on this problem in several sessions split in accordance with the Design Thinking process. They even created a team name, calling themselves “the Kleefeld Team”.
The Kleefeld Team applied 2 methods to create a common understanding about the challenge: self-reflection and mind mapping.
In advance of the mutual workshop session, a self-reflection (“silent brainstorming”) was made individually by every team member. Personal associations and stories related to the issue were collected, and a basic desktop research was made. For this self-reflection, guiding questions about the subject were formulated:
When was your last contact to a resident / to the community work in Kleefeld? How did it go?
Did you ever end communication to a group you have previously been working with? Why?
Describe your best day in / with community work: What do you remember?
In the workshop session, the team shared their assumptions and discovered first directions to reach a common understanding of the subject. Additionally, the Kleefeld Team started to link their thoughts and experiences by creating a mind map under a specific headline (“Who are the residents and stakeholders of our community?”), putting the collected information into a context. The mind map helped them to visualize their first ideas about the issue, and the headline was directing them to the next phase of the Design Thinking process.
After collecting information between team members in the understanding phase, the Kleefeld team opened to their community in the observation phase. The aim was to learn more about the people and the context of the challenge.
The team members met one evening, drafted guiding questions, and planned for interviews in person with residents. They used the interview guidelines and the checklist provided by the d.thinking training platform, and divided tasks into different roles: interviewer and note-taker. With agreement of the interviewees, the interview sessions were recorded as well.
After collecting data from 5 interviews, they additionally questioned other experts from the community (a deputy school director and a social worker from the local youth centre). Finally, Hannah made another desktop research on different communication channels and strategies to gain more knowledge about their opportunities. All in all, it took them 2 weeks until they had collected all the data from the interviews and the research.
For the next phase, the Kleefeld Team decided to take a bit more time to share their observations, sort, and cluster them. They met on a Saturday for an all-day workshop, ordered food and drinks, and started unpacking the information by listening to the interview recordings and writing down important findings on sticky notes. Together with the notes taken during the interviews, they presented all the information on walls. They clustered the information under headlines, searching for needs, pain points, contradictions, values, and beliefs of the residents. Based on the clustered information they created 3 personas:
Angel, 21 years old woman, has 1 kid aged 2, lives with her boyfriend in a small apartment since 1 ½ years, is going to start working in a local supermarket after having found a nursery place, asks for a place to meet with other residents informally.
Maria, 61 years old widow, in early retirement, her daughter lives in the US, is taking care of the community garden at the grammar school, is concerned about concerned about vandalism in many public areas
Oscar, 44 years old, lives in a terraced house with his husband in need of care, works remotely for a phone company, is looking for care assistance for own relief. He thinks about working voluntarily in the community when he has more time.
In the next step, the team members formulated the following problem statements related to the personas as points of view (POV):
We met Angel. We were amazed to hear that she would like to get into contact with other residents. It would be game-changing for her if there was an informal place to meet for all residents.
We met Maria. We were shocked about the high level of vandalism in public places. It would be game-changing for her if residents could show more responsibility for community property.
We met Oscar. We were surprised to learn that despite from his work and family responsibilities, he would like to find a way to work voluntarily for the local community.
With these problem statements of different personas representing the residents, the Kleefeld Team felt well prepared to leave the problem space and to enter the solution space of the Design Thinking process.
For this and the following phase, the Kleefeld Team decided again to meet an entire day on a weekend to have more time to ideate in a playful and constructive manner. At first, they reshaped the problem statements into “How might we”-questions. This helped to change the focus from exploring problems to designing solutions:
How might we create an informal place for all residents to meet?
How might we enhance the responsibility of residents for public property?
How might we organize volunteering opportunities for the local community?
The team formed 3 groups and started to generate ideas by using different brainstorming techniques which they found on the d.thinking training platform. It was particularly funny to do the hot potato and the starfish; in this way they managed to create a lot of ideas in a limited time. Afterwards, they used the idea grid to evaluate and filter the ideas, and to make it easier to select the ones to continue working with. Each team decided for one promising idea to be prototyped, keeping in mind that the other ideas might be of use at a later stage:
Group 1 decided themselves for a weekly breakfast club provided by the community workers, where all residents should be invited to.
Group 2 opted for the idea of organizing sponsorships for community property, where 1 or more residents take over responsibility for a particular space or facility.
Group 3 started to develop the idea of a platform run by the community workers, where voluntary services from residents could be managed on a give-and-take base.
With these ideas, the Kleefeld Team felt well prepared for the next phase.
In the afternoon, the most creative part of the process started: The Kleefeld team continued working in the 3 groups to build prototypes visualizing their ideas:
The first group designed an invitation flyer with all necessary information on the kick-off event of the breakfast club.
The second group developed a role play to present a typical situation of a facility under pressure, and how organized sponsorship can be helpful to prevent vandalism.
The third group developed a storyboard to visualize the volunteering platform as a tool to be used both online and offline.
The groups presented their prototypes to the other team members, discussed the outcomes, and decided to test all 3 ideas with the residents and other stakeholders in the final phase.
To engage as many residents and stakeholders as possible in the final phase, the Kleefeld Team decided to combine a public event for the local community with presentations and discussions of the ideas developed beforehand. They invited to a barbecue with live music and dance performed by local artists and set up market stands where the different ideas were presented to the participants.
The residents could vote on the ideas by putting balls in transparent pipes and sign up in contact lists to be further informed and invited to the implementation of ideas. The most positive vote was on the idea of the breakfast club, followed by the volunteering platform. The idea of resident sponsorships received fewer positive votes, so that the community workers decided together with the residents to implement the first two ideas immediately.
All participants agreed that the Design Thinking process had contributed to feasible and sustainable ideas in the interests of the residents. Design Thinking is an iterative approach, and if it turns out that ideas won’t succeed, the Kleefeld Team has still some more options from the ideation phase to which they will be able to step back.
This was the first of two case stories in the category "Community Work".
You can continue to the second case story about ITALY by going to the next section.
You can also go back and review case stories in the categories:
Or you can study some the the methods mentioned in this case in the Course Brainstorms and Energizers.
Have fun.
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