Richard Perez, founding director of the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town, speaks to Benito Vergotine on The Honest Truth show on SmileFm about design thinking and the upcoming d.confestival. Listen!
The Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town, together with the Global Design Thinking Alliance (GDTA), will be hosting the third d.confestival, previously hosted in Potsdam, Germany in 2012 and 2017.
This year’s event will run from 12 to 14 October. As Africa’s first Global Design Thinking event, this three-day conference-meets-festival will take place at the HPI d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town. The hybrid event will be hosted live and will also be accessible to virtual participants.
Themed “Design thinking matters now,” the d.confestival will bring together international innovators, design thinkers and change makers from business, government, education and the social development sector to exchange ideas, share best practices, and map the future direction for design thinking practice to deliver value and impact in our world. Keynote speakers include German entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) Prof Hasso Plattner, Stanford d-School co-founder and executive director, George Kembel, and UCT Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng.
Director of the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at UCT, Richard Perez says that the d.confestival is an incredible opportunity for us to connect the global design thinking community, who are curious about design thinking as a human centred framework and mindset to solving complex problems., “To officially put us on the global stage as leaders in Design-led Thinking on the continent. Africa is a continent brimming with creative potential and this, together with design thinking’s human-centred problem-solving approach, has the potential to birth powerful responses to the challenges we face not just on the continent but around the world”
UCT’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng says that since the d-school was established at the university “we’ve seen how design-led thinking can unleash graduates’ potential to lead in diverse contexts, work across disciplines and tap into their creativity to respond creatively to real-world challenges.”
People attending the unique event, which will merge the rigour of an academic conference with a festive interactive experience, will also be able to experience the brand new Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika building, situated on UCT’s middle campus.
An architectural focal point, the building has been designed in such a way as to allow people, who may not be entering the building as students, to interact with the building, pass underneath its big, curving glass roof, and feel the energy and passion of what is happening inside and around it.
Designed by KMH Architects in Cape Town, the project began in 2017 and had to meet strict sustainability requirements from the beginning to fit in with the university’s sustainability goals. A major target was for the building to be granted a 6-star Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of South Africa.
To be certified and become the greenest building in academia on the continent, the d-school will have to prove sustainable across nine categories, from adopting environmental management principles during construction, to encouraging the use of alternative transport and improving surrounding socio-economic conditions.
“So, it’s an awesome building,” says Perez. “But it has an awesome purpose and responsibility too. From the start, we imagined a building that would become a birthplace for the teaching and learning of the mindset that leads to the bright ideas needed to secure a better future for Africa and the world.”
Positioned as the centre of excellence in design-led thinking in Africa, the d-school has empowered people with design thinking capabilities since 2015, enabling them to create human-centred solutions to problems faced by an ever-changing world. UCT is one of just three institutions in the world to have a d-school, the other two being Stanford University in the United States and Potsdam University in Germany. Together with 22 other educational institutions that teach, research and further develop the methods and mindsets of design thinking, the d-School is a member of the Global Design Thinking Alliance, established in 2017.
Bad news about Africa abounds. In fact, the Africa Narrative Report published earlier this year has helped to quantify just how much and how bad. It shows a persistent bias in both the global and local media towards a misrepresentation of the continent that ignores much of the innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship that’s here – and the role of women and youth in particular.
This is a narrative that also reinforces a belief that solutions to the continent’s many challenges will come from the top down, requiring the leadership of academics and governments and perhaps a dose of foreign aid, when in reality, it’s the people who are grappling with these problems every day that often hold the seeds of the solution.
Take the community of Doornbach in the Western Cape for example, where a recent project led by community leaders in partnership with the City of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, has helped solve a persistent and nagging problem of waste management in informal settlements. How did they achieve this? By giving the people who lived in that community the agency to co-design a solution that met their actual needs.
Thousands of these novel bins have since been rolled out across Doornbach – with plans to expand to other areas across the Cape Metropole – setting an example of how a human-centred design approach can fundamentally change the way we live our lives and solve problems that shape our daily tasks.
What’s in a bin, really?
So how different can these bins really be you might ask. A bin just needs to hold your rubbish, and be secured somewhere practical, with sufficient closure to ensure the smell doesn’t permeate your home. Simple, right? Well, informal settlements, which make up most majority-world contexts have many more considerations to bear in mind.
Scattered throughout these communities, refuse bins need to repel rain-water rather than collect it; they need to be secure from theft and those wishing to scrap them for a little change; they should be out of reach from scavenging animals and small children, but accessible enough for older children – generally those tasked with taking out the rubbish; and, their capacity needs to be big enough to be functional for a variety of households, yet appropriately sized to hold city-issued ‘blue bags’. It’s quite a list of requirements, yet how much thought goes to their design?
It was only when we created the space for the community to explain the complexity of the problem that an effective design solution was able to emerge. This is not something that happens by accident, creating this kind of co-design space requires significant time and empathy.
From jargon to communication and trust
One of the difficulties of incorporating new thinking to tackle persistent problems is that it’s easy to get swamped in jargon-heavy concepts. These concepts typically emanate from well-meaning academics, knee-deep in technological language. This language tends to overcomplicate things, and may confuse, rather than clarify, the core issues at hand. More importantly, it alienates key stakeholders.
Using appropriate language can help transform working relationships between stakeholders. Even though communities have the skills to tackle a wide variety of challenges, the minute you speak in jargon, locals think the solutions must come from somewhere else. Speaking in their ‘local language’ – not a matter of dialect, but rather nuancing a more direct, empathetic, and less bureaucratic, style – you can emancipate communities to be the solution-drivers, and take ownership of what matters to them.
The process also requires a degree of flexibility and openness. Because there is a high probability that things might not go exactly as you planned.
For example, when we met with community leaders in Doornbach, one of the first problems they highlighted was entirely unconnected to what we expected to hear – we were there to solve a waste management problem after all. But of more immediate concern for them was that many of their children didn’t have birth certificates. This not only limited their eligibility for child grants, but also scuppered their children’s prospects for employment. We took this problem to the City and a quick resolution helped to gain the trust of the community. This trust then formed the basis of a community-led partnership that could be directed towards tackling other issues.
By suspending our own agenda, we opened a dialogue that ensured the incorporation of local knowledge to drive relevant solutions and prioritise the most pressing demands, rather than simply importing knowledge of supposed best-practices for community development.
Ubuntu by another name
At the heart of this kind of interaction is a respectful recognition of the other. Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal puts it more poetically: “I feel the other, I dance the other, therefore I am.”
This sense of empathy and awareness – recognising that individual success can only really be achieved, or is only ever meaningful, in the context of wider success of a community of others – is an inherently African concept. But globally too, it is becoming increasingly clear that in contexts where some people remain excluded and underserved, nobody can thrive optimally. OECD research has shown that when income inequality rises, economic growth falls.
The bins in Doornbach are illustrative of the importance of shared prospects. Through making it easier to keep a clean space around an individual home, the whole community looks and feels better. Everyone shares in the responsibility, and consequences, of that improved design.
If we can find ways to share this type of thinking and designing more broadly, we could create more opportunity for African ingenuity to thrive from the ground up. Then we all may taste the fruits of this kind of success and start to build a new narrative for the continent.
On a cold night in winter, early in 2022, UK doctor, Helen Mott’s car broke down. She called the Automobile Association (AA) for assistance and was told by a call centre agent that she would have to wait as the AA did not prioritise lone women with broken down cars. She went onto social media and her story triggered a furore in the UK, with a deluge of negative press for the AA. The company was forced to apologise and clarify their position, saying it did prioritise women in risky situations.
Avoiding such a scenario – and providing better experiences for companies and customers alike – is the very reason that Matthew Westaway and Lethabo Motsoaledi, two UCT engineering students, started Voyc. This speech analytics software has been customised to monitor and analyse call centre traffic to identify vulnerable customers, and pick up on complaints before they spiral out of control, and deliver a superior customer service. The company was founded in 2018 and has won numerous awards including the Accenture Blue Tulip Award in 2021 and the KPMG Digital Innovation Matchmaking Challenge 2021.
The company is supported by entrepreneurial investors Techstars and is credited with helping its clients achieve an 80% reduction in manual quality assurance work and a 50% reduction in formal complaints. One financial services client reports that since implementing the software, it has been able to reduce regulatory complaints by 22%. Social media complaints have also dropped by 27% and the data has also helped this company identify agents in need of coaching and training and this has improved the customer experience even further. Quality assessors are also able to monitor five times more calls. Voyc software automatically picks up and alerts managers to specific calls where potential problems are identified, allowing companies to get back to a customer much more quickly and preventing a situation from escalating. This means less customers going to an Ombudsman, taking legal action or going onto social media to complain – as Dr Helen Mott did.
Westaway and Motsoaledi attribute the success of Voyc to a single, simple idea: the importance of listening to what your customers want and need. It’s an approach they both encountered at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) of Design Thinking or d-school, where they were part of a sponsored Foundation Programme in Design Thinking in 2016.
"Before learning about design thinking, our thinking was similar to the 'build it and they will come', philosophy," laughs Westaway. "There was not that much focus on the user or the customer, on how they would use a product or why they would want it." They joke that this probably explains why their first few tech ventures were not as successful as Voyc. Changing their approach to start with the customer has, quite literally, been a game-changer.
Westaway and Motsoaledi stumbled upon the idea for Voyc while working on another project where they needed to transcribe and analyse interviews. When they couldn't find the speech-to-text technology with natural language processing to help them, they set out to build it themselves. Realising they had something special they looked at marketing it, and call centres were mentioned as a possible client. This then led them to speak to call centre agents and companies to identify their biggest needs and start fine-tuning the analytics and reporting aspects of the software accordingly.
"Design thinking aims to instil a mindset of finding innovative ways to solve real-world problems," says d-school director, Richard Perez. "Students are trained to become effective problem solvers by learning processes that develop new solutions and outcomes. This involves alternative thinking methodologies as well as tools and practical applications of ideas, like prototyping and model building. It encourages testing and failing of ideas, to promote the development of ideas that do work. But it always starts from a point of empathy for the users. Design thinking encourages collaboration with teams and users, which I believe was how Voyc designers really turned a good piece of technology into a winning product and service that solves real-world problems for their clients.”
"Call centres are under such pressure," says Motsoaledi. "Call agents are constantly trying to put out fires and companies often don't have the capacity and resources to properly monitor and analyse each call that is made". A 2021 US study shows the stress call centres are under around the world. Up to 36% of agents have been violently threatened, with 81% complaining of customer abuse. In the US, up to 1.2 million agents quit their job each year. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been even more pressure on call centres to take over vital customer care interactions, says Motsoaledi.
In addition, government is also in the process of finalising the Conduct of Financial Institutions (COFI) Bill, which will bring enforceable principles to financial institutions, with legally binding principles around Treating Customers Fairly (TCF). Motsoaledi and Westaway believe their product is ideal for companies wanting to step up their compliance, improve customer experience or simply gain more data faster on how customers feel about products and services.
Perez says that there are many examples where design thinking has helped companies exponentially – for example accommodation site Airbnb followed design thinking principles when it set up their global business back in 2008. Early on, the team found out that people were nervous to book on the site due to low quality pictures of the accommodation. They then spent time with hosts to help them take high quality pictures and income went up 100%. According to agency IDEO, testing ideas and understanding customers remain a big part of AirBnb’s business operation and are integral to their ongoing success.
Westaway and Motsoaledi agree. "Design thinking changed how we thought about everything regarding our product; not only the way we were building it, but why and how it would be used. It made us think about who we are as a company and what we wanted to achieve. It really has been a part of Voyc from the beginning and has been woven into every fibre making up the company now. We are confident that it will guide us to keep designing solutions that make our clients smile."