“This is not working,” I thought as I looked at the struck through, scribbled out training agenda on my table that was already on its fourth iteration. We were nearing the lunch break on Day 3 of a 5-day design bootcamp in which 40 individuals had been chosen to participate, 12 of which were going to be selected to do a 10-week design sprint tackling the challenge of income in Jordan as part of the Mahali Lab.

The week started off with one question: How can we ensure that vulnerable households have access to sufficient, predictable income that does not expose them to risks? These 40 participants were split into 8 teams, each prompted to look at the challenge question with a more focused lens based on topic preferences they had ranked prior to the bootcamp. During the first couple of days of the bootcamp, the teams explored their chosen topic, conducted design research, and synthesized learnings. By that third day, they had begun brainstorming potential solutions. Given their nascency, the ideas at this stage were not particularly unique or groundbreaking. Yet somehow, participants were reluctant to share them with others.

A strong sense of idea ownership, coupled with the competitive environment (participants knew there was a selection at the end of the week) made it really hard for us to facilitate an environment where everyone was comfortable seeking, giving, and receiving feedback. All of our efforts up until that point — whether through having team share-outs, structured feedback sessions, or gallery walks — did not receive the embracing response we had hoped for, despite our repeated assertions on the importance of cross-pollination for innovation.

Gallery walk session prompting everyone to leave written feedback on a feedback capture grid, though the majority of comments were left by the Mahali team.

So we reviewed the plan for the day. We thought of an activity that we hoped would get participants to think of ideas as building blocks that can be combined, separated, and rearranged at will, hopefully to form a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. We based the accompanying worksheet off of a simple yet effective metaphor: mix a set of unlikely ingredients to make an interesting new recipe. Participants were tasked to go around and “shop” for ideas or components of ideas anywhere from the other teams wall artefacts, select at the very least five of these ingredients, and combine them into a new solution.

And shop around they did. The activity finally clicked with participants. Now they were up, moving around, browsing their peers’ stations, asking for clarification on existing ideas, discussing new ones, and trying to think of the best meal they could make.

Bootcamp participants noting down the different ingredients they picked up before mixing them into the pot at the center for their new solution.

This exercise is one example of a number of tools and activities that we created. Going into the bootcamp and subsequent 10-week design sprint, we reviewed existing curricula that could serve as inspiration, including from the Stanford d.school, the Jordan River Foundation, UNICEF, and others. While there are a plethora of design and social innovation-related resources out there, not many are available in Arabic. Fewer still are available in an Arabic vernacular that would make sense to Syrian refugees and vulnerable Jordanians. And even fewer are concepts and frameworks that translate — beyond the language — into the local context, whether in terms of level of abstraction, relevance to cultural and educational cues, or closeness to prevalent mental models.

In developing our curricula and tools, we also had to make sure that we, as a team, were speaking the same language. We created a glossary of common human-centered design terms, in Arabic and in English, to reconcile disparate terminology found in the literature, and propose a new language that is both consistent and accessible to the intended audience.

However, like with any new language, it took time to learn. None of our participants had any exposure with design prior to engaging with Mahali. During the bootcamp, using this vocabulary felt a bit awkward, tough, slow-going. But by the time we started the design sprint, everyone became more comfortable and fluent.

When it comes to design, our goal wasn’t just that it becomes something that is natural for our participants to speak, but more importantly something that is natural for them to do. Weeks later, during the design sprint, we had another “this-is-not-working” moment. While brainstorming, participants couldn’t get past conventional, very much inside-the-box ideas, despite trying to expose them to different things that could bring about inspiration, from visits to local entrepreneurs, startups, the Zaatari refugee camp (home to countless frugal innovations), external guests, and speakers.

So we dedicated a morning to conduct what we called the hardware store challenge. With very limited time, budget, and access to a store whose products were unfamiliar, the participants were given a challenge similar to the one they were working on, and asked to explore the store and buy the materials necessary to create a prototype for a solution to said challenge. Immediately after, the participants were to build and present their prototypes, right there in the parking lot in front of the store. In addition to preparing them for the prototyping and testing phases of the design sprint to come, the main goal of this exercise was to get participants to “build to think,” find inspiration in unlikely objects, and ideate on the fly.