US-India Partnership 2020
What did I work on in a design-thinking and cultural problem-solving project with teams from India & the US?
The Partnership 2020 was a two-year project with most of the activities taking place in 2019 and 2020. In this project, the partnership was namely between Miami University, Ohio and Christ University, Bangalore for Innovation in Health in both the respective countries.
With the theme of 'Innovation in Health' for the year, our project focused on institutional sanitation workers and their needs. We used secondary reviews, primary unstructured interviews, and design-thinking principles to recommend an application design prototype as an intervention for the needs of these contractual workers.
Who did I cover and where?
2
universities collaborated
53
participants we interviewed
1
solution operationalized
This collaboration was a fully-funded project by Partnership 20-20, aiming at leveraging US-India cooperation in Higher Education to harness economic opportunities and innovation. The project goal was to strengthen the strategic partnership between the US and India through collaboration in higher education, research on key issue areas, related economic growth, and people-to-people linkages. I was selected to be a part of this exchange project by the Dean of Social Sciences of my university based on academics, extra-curriculars, professors' recommendations, and an essay. The theme for the year was Innovation in Health, where teams from both US and India were to immerse themselves in each countries' concerns in health, tease out a problem focus, and come up with a prototype of a solution.
My team and I selected the target group of sanitation workers. Based on secondary research and primary interviews with some government-employed sanitation workers, we realised the depth of the problem that these workers face and their reluctance to speak to outsiders; so we decided to start smaller. We narrowed our sample to institutional sanitation workers at the university, who were contractual workers and faced their own unique struggles.
*Unfortunately the US-leg of the exchange was cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic & lockdown on international travel.
What did I do?
What did I find?
We used a holistic-system approach and conducted unstructured interviews with 33 students,19 workers, and the Head of Facilities of Christ University.
Some of the key insights include:
1 - Break time is rare and the structure of asking is inexpedient. It discourages them from asking.
2 - Workers fear repercussion for expressing job concerns.
3 - Quality of supplies was adequate - a contrast to what secondary literature says
4 - There was interest from the general student body to step in and assist
We isolated the program focus to tackle one of their primary concerns: no leave systems exist for these workers.
Our prototyped solution was to have a communication portal between workers and administration for requesting holiday break time and workplace grievances. This would also serve as a volunteer portal for students. This was to meet the needs of those in the whole system: Students in need of service learning credits + sanitation workers in need of holiday = ensuring for management that the job gets done.
We pitched this portal to be added to the existing University Portal so that would require minimum costs for development.
For me, this project was an insightful foray into applied design-thinking and qualitative research.
Project Gallery
