Overview

For our challenge with IDEO and Acumen Academy for the course Introduction to human-centered design, we choose to focus on newcoming immigrants who have a hard time socializing, and connecting with the local community and find it hard to belong in a new community. We, as a team and immigrants ourselves, see the room for a service that will bring locals and newcomers closer, by offering fun and exciting cultural experience opportunities. Xpand is a service that holds cultural events around the city. It has an integration feature for Google Maps showing Xpand cultural events/exchanges around the city. Once you activate Xpand, you can see all the different places around the city that will give you a digital badge and a physical memoir once you complete the exchange. Businesses work with Xpand to provide a place for the cultural experience to gain customers. Incentives for people are to collect as many flags/badges as possible to earn rewards such as discounts on food and drink.

Problem & Solution

At the highest level, we thought about how could we create an engaging way for people to share their cultural differences and build a network of support. In a very engaging and exciting way possible. Goals/Requirements : Our goals were driven by a research study based on understanding what newcomers would experience as barriers before, during, and after arriving in a new country. Problems such as the ones listed below were what we uncovered throughout the entire study. • What is the reason people decide to move to a new country? • Do people struggle to share their own culture, as well as adapt to the new one they are integrating into? • What form of support would help them gain knowledge on integrating successfully?

Process

The process we took consisted in brainstorming on ways we could build an effective script for conducting our user interviews based on the goals set above. We ran an affinity diagram to then sort out our findings and convert them into valuable insights that can be used for crafting a solution now and for future iterations.

Next, we gathered our insights and reframed our main area of focus based on the user's pain points and what arose as the most frustrating issue.

Results

The storyboards are based on the struggles of the same immigrant before and after arriving in the country of choice. From a confused state with zero to no information on the new place to learning new things through connections from expats and local communities via Xpand.

Takeaways

- At the end of this project we learned that the immigration experience is very culturally sensitive. Both immigrants and locals have to engage with each other for integration success. People want to learn about each other, nobody wants to immigrate and not integrate because of social barriers created via lack of education on different cultures. - As takeaways we could say that Immigration could be a highly educational gift to the local community, it could provide fresh experiences to locals making it almost a privilege to the host country. Because everyone simply wants to feel wanted and accepted for who they are, which makes them feel proud of who they are at the end of the day.