Through interviews with other designers at Förnyelselabbet I learned a couple of important facts that led our research:
1. 38% of Sweden’s asylum seekers are under the age of 18.
2. Migrants are currently spending at least 1/3 of their disposable income in order to stay connected to the internet.
3. Safety increases by nearly 60% when refugees have a smart phone with internet connection.
Interviews + problem definition
We landed on creating a service that would cater to Sweden’s displaced youth due to Förnyelselabbet's focus on adolescent migrancy. Our How Might We question that we used as the framing for our new service:
“How can we put technology into the hands of Sweden’s migrant youth within the first 48 hours of their arrival?”
Through research, we discovered that 86% of nomadic refugees already have access to a smart phone - this fact seemingly made our original idea obsolete. However, one of the glaring issues reported by refugees to the UNHCR was that their hardware was too old to run up-to-date firmware and new apps that could make their journey less taxing and safer.
Validating our research
In 2014 the UNHCR reported that 50% of migrants were using an outdated smart phone (prior 2007). Perhaps there was still a way to help migrant youth by putting technology into their hands? This new discovery led us to change our "How Can We?" question:
“How might we put up-to-date technology into the hands of Europe’s nomadic refugees?”
Service diagram
The largest concern we had was having a steady flow of viable hardware. We poled a diverse cross section of individuals in the community to ask how often they update their smart phones as well as if they would donate used phones to a serivce such as this. It’s estimated that 1 in 4 people living in North America have an old smart device they are not using from after 2012.
Sketching + prototyping
I hope to reconnect with Förnyelselabbet and hold a workshop to test this prototype with youth in Sweden to get real feedback from those who will benefit from an app like this. I created a prototype in InVision that you can try for yourself. Click here to give it a try!
