Special feature | Design thinking and gender equality Pt. 3

Design thinking is a user-centred method of finding solutions to complex problems. It has revolutionised the process of innovation, and the companies that have applied it – including Apple and other tech giants in Silicon Valley –?have rocketed to the forefront of their respective fields. In this special feature article, we take you behind the scenes to show how IKEM is applying the same process to take on some of society’s greatest challenges, including gender inequality.

In 2018, IKEM and Ellery Studio began working on an innovative toolkit to shake up the conversation around gender equality in the workplace. In the years since, a team of engineers, designers, illustrators, lawyers and copywriters from more than seven countries have worked together to create EQT: The Gender Equality Toolkit for Working Women and Friends. The process was guided by the team’s commitment to breaking down the remaining barriers to gender equality – and by the four steps of the design thinking methodology.

Step 3: Develop?

The first product developed for the EQT toolkit was an infographic poster.?

‘The idea of having a poster came from our research,’ Stabon said, ‘because we found that there’s not enough knowledge out there. So we did more research and read about the history of feminism and collected information on women from the past, and decided we could put out an information piece showing how all of these women behind us have paved the way.’??

The team’s research showed that, if progress continues at its current rate, the gender gap in the EU won’t close for another 61 years. In North America, full gender equality will take even longer: a staggering 168 years. A poster chronicling the achievements of the past 150 years could give women – and their allies – hope that continued progress is possible, the team reasoned, despite persistent problems like the gender pay gap. The team included these and other statistics in infographics on the front and back of the poster.??

On the front of the poster, Stabon?sketched?a timeline composed of four foam-capped waves, representing the ‘waves’ of feminism. Each wave consists of a patchwork of hand-lettered summaries of individual milestones, illustrated by Ellery artists Domingo, Lucía Cordero and Hannah Rasper. The timeline stretches from 1848 – the year of the first women’s rights convention – to the present day.?

In 2018, the finished piece, titled ‘Women making waves: a brief history of female empowerment,’ won the Equality and Woman’s Promotion Main Award in the print category at the Malofiej International Infographics Awards.??

After the handbook text was complete, artists and designers at Ellery – including Gaja Vi?i? and Hannah Schrage, in addition to Domingo and Cordero – began work on illustrations and formatting. In the handbook, the text and illustration combine to present the content in a creative way: one chapter explains common barriers to women’s career advancement by representing the ‘glass ceiling’, ‘sticky floor’ and other concepts as a series of traps hampering progress through the darkened corridors of a haunted house.?

Meanwhile, the IKEM-led research team – which included Nicolaas Ponder, Steinkraus and Camier as well as Kate Miller and Dàmir Belltheus Avdi? – analysed reports and other available materials on gender inequality, then compiled their findings into a 46-page?companion booklet. The handbook?presents key findings and compelling arguments that can form the building blocks of a productive discussion on gender equality.

The text breaks content down into eight chapters, each covering a specific aspect of gender inequality. One chapter, for example, debunks common myths on the gender pay gap, from ‘There is no gender pay gap’ to ‘Women earn less because men are better at negotiating higher salaries’. The title of the handbook,?Gender equality: all aboard!, refers to the toolkit’s objective – to inspire women and their allies to unite behind gender equality – as well as to the train ride that set the project in motion.???

To create the game, the team combed through the earlier interviews, condensed each scenario into a few lines of punchy text and developed a title for each that included creative wordplay. After creating 50 of these Situation cards, the team developed another 50 Reaction cards and added two jokers, then illustrated each of the 102 cards in the style of a colourful comic.??

Alex Steinkraus, who began to work on the toolkit soon after joining IKEM in 2019, views the card game as a unique aspect of the toolkit. ‘It allows EQT to be more than something that was only built to be read and consumed,’ she said. ‘With the card game, we were able to make it interactive – something that people can actually try out and have conversations about.’??

The comic-style graphics and humorous text make the game playful – but it doesn’t hand players easy answers. Instead, it provides them with a framework for what Stabon refers to as ‘guided solutions’.

‘The card game is an active exercise that leads you, in a playful way, to kind of find your own solutions,’ she said.??

The team designed the game to inspire constructive conversations that would encourage women to share their own experiences of sexism and discuss possible ways to respond to future scenarios.

‘In the course of the project, we very quickly realised that every woman or femme-presenting person has their fair share of these experiences,’ Riedel said. ‘That’s why, in the role-play game, we give a lot of exposure to different scenarios and create the conditions for people to be able to exchange opinions and share their thoughts.’?

These exchanges were also incorporated into the game to address one of the problems the team had identified in their interviews on sexism at work: women blamed themselves for the situations and kept their stories to themselves, which often prevented them from gaining the confidence to take action.

‘That feeling of isolation is also very important to address and to change,’ said Nicolaas Ponder. ‘That’s why the game is a kind of community-building exercise. It leads you to connect with your peers and makes it clear that is a real-life thing and you’re not the only one going through it.’?

Players bring?their own histories to the game, which shape the conversations that develop around each situation and reaction. This makes the card game more inclusive, Stabon said, because ‘it puts users at the centre of the experience and gives them visual cues to inspire conversations led by their own values, perceptions and opinions.’

It also means that the game can offer a fundamentally different experience every time it is played, depending on the specific players taking part.??

In the prototyping phase of the project, the team hosted a series of workshops at the studio, where they divided participants into small groups, handed out prototypes of the cards and then gathered feedback on users’ experience with the game. Following these ‘beta tests’, the team met internally to discuss how to implement the feedback they had received.

In some cases, this meant throwing out certain cards and creating new ones, or tweaking the wording of the text.?The team worked extensively on the titles of the cards in order to strike the right tone for the English and German versions of the game – a major undertaking, they found, considering that the wordplay could seldom be translated directly from one language to another.???

In the feedback sessions, some participants said they were embarrassed to find that certain Situation cards reminded them of something they had said or done in real life, without realising at the time how it had come across.

Others expressed scepticism that the scenarios portrayed on the Situation cards would occur in real life, arguing that some of the behaviour was too extreme to be realistic.??

‘I noticed that a lot of people saw the cards and said, “Oh, my gosh, does that even happen?”’ Nicolaas Ponder said.

The team could respond by referring to the interviews conducted in the Discover phase, which provided the material for the scenarios. ‘All of these situations have been carved out of those interviews, done with so many different people from all walks of life and industries and jobs. These situations are all based on real life experiences,’ she said. So we can say, wholeheartedly, “Yes, this?does?happen.”’?

Based on input from workshop participants, the team fine-tuned the toolkit. They added several blank cards to each deck, for example, making it possible for players to supplement the existing cards with a scenario drawn from their own lives.??

Steinkraus views the workshops as a key step in the creation of the toolkit. By integrating workshop participants into the process of developing and fine-tuning the toolkit, she said, ‘we were able to talk to a lot of different women from a lot of different backgrounds and make sure that co-creation was really a centrepiece of the toolkit.’??

This was essential to the team’s process, she explained, because each participant contributed expertise that played an important role in the project’s creation.

‘While we can’t speak for everyone, workshopping allowed us to incorporate as many different voices – as many different perspectives from women in all different kinds of workplaces – as possible,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think that that inclusivity would have been possible without something like design thinking and this workshop co-creation approach.’?

Step 4: Deliver?

With the prototypes complete, the team turned their attention to delivery. They began to prepare for a crowdfunding campaign – an essential step in funding the production of the final product. The?EQT Kickstarter campaign, which?launched on 19 May, raised more than 14,000 Euro. Even before the campaign got underway, the team had begun fielding requests for workshops that were based on the toolkit. In early 2022, for example, Stabon, Nicolaas Ponder, Steinkraus and Camier shared insights from the toolkit development process with representatives of Ukrainian women’s rights organisations.

The workshop, which was organised by Cultural Vistas, was ‘a great experience,’ Nicolaas Ponder said. ‘In our presentation, we were very honest about our experience, about the fact that, before we began this journey of creating the toolkit, we had not necessarily known that certain things we encountered were based on gender bias or sexism or inequality.’

She was pleased with the results of the workshop: participants were enthusiastic about the potential for the toolkit to spur positive change. ‘We got so much positive feedback,’ she said.?

The team plans to offer additional kinds of workshops focussing on different aspects of gender equality. Some workshops can explore ways for employers to tap into additional employee brainpower and increase worker satisfaction by implementing gender-equal practices in the workplace. Nicolaas Ponder also hopes to create workshops that draw on IKEM’s expertise in sustainability to examine the intersection between gender equality and climate change.?

Riedel said the game can be played in workplace trainings as well as at casual meetups – which offers many opportunities for it to drive change. ‘There are so many settings where you can use the toolkit to explore this topic and see what happens,’ he said. ‘We’ve already had a lot of events where people have been really intrigued to try it out, especially in progressive conference formats.’?

‘I think the toolkit has the potential to be part of a grassroots effort to improve lives, at work and beyond,’ added Camier.?

For the creators themselves, the toolkit has already had an impact.??

Riedel observed this impact firsthand. ‘I could see the development of a lot of personal growth among the people in my team,’ he said. ‘Through their work on the project, the team gained a lot of?background knowledge and deepened their understanding of the topic. And being exposed to that through the project really emboldened them, which was amazing to see.’?

Stabon sensed that change in herself.?‘Before I started to work on the toolkit, I didn’t?really?feel close to the world of feminism,’ she said. ‘Working on the toolkit and?meeting so many talented people along the way?was a real eye-opening experience. I learned that?so?many women before me had paved the way to create the opportunities I have today as a young professional.’?

For his part, Riedel hopes that the toolkit will inspire others to develop innovative formats to address other inequalities. ‘Our goal is for other people to see the concept, understand it, and then start to be able to imagine similarly creative approaches to other issues as well. We want to encourage people to cross these mental borders that they might set for themselves,’ he said.???

The toolkit can have a far-reaching impact, Steinkraus said, because it equips women and their allies to advocate gender equality in so many different ways.

‘You can use the toolkit to arm yourselves with the facts,?learn more about the issues?and practise your reactions. This combination of elements really makes it possible to find your voice,’ she said.

This step-by-step approach is essential to initiate sustainable change, said Steinkraus. ‘In this toolkit, we’re looking at the workplace specifically. We’re looking at things that we can start to advocate for as individuals, from one day to the next. And I think?that’s a starting point for a lot of people, and it addresses something really important.’?

But Steinkraus sees this as only one step in a longer process – a process which, like the development of the toolkit itself, can only be successful with effective collaboration.

‘As with any inequality in society, it’s?never going to be up to one group to drive change. We need those who have power to do something about it,’ she said. ‘We need everyone on board. Everyone needs to be part of the conversation and act as allies to drive change.’?

By: Kate Miller

Thank you to everyone who supported the EQT fundraising campaign. Thanks to your support, we raised more than 140% of our goal.