Design Thinking an Idea to Help End Human Trafficking

A few semesters ago I took a class on Design Thinking. For those of you who don’t know what that is it is a different way to go about solving a problem. The idea is to used human centered design to help solve a problem. You follow steps to help you reach a solution

1. Empathy (understanding the problem from every angle)
2. Define (based off of your knowledge you define what the problem is)
3. Ideate (you come up with solutions to your defined problem)
4. Prototype (come up with an smaple/example of your idea)
5. Test (go test your prototype and see how it works out)

By laying it out in this manner it sounds easy but sometimes you have to repeat steps. It’s quite the process. Anyways my group went through this whole process and the idea I came up with, that the group ended up going with was to put the human trafficking hotline number onto bobby pins. We would have these bobby pins available for free in public restrooms, and we would have posters explaining what we were doing on the inside of the stall doors so victims would have the opportunity to read them.

The reason we went with bobby pins is because they are small, easy to hide, and are completely useful (especially if you need to pick a lock). Now we didn’t completely figure out all the logistics behind how we would pay for the bobby pins but I felt like this idea was too good not to share.

Anyways, I designed the prototype photos and posters and here they are. I did not take any of the photos posted. I did edit the photos shown.