Using art, music and film to discover unmet needs

by Antonio on 27/01/09 at 10:47 pm

Ethical trade consultants Impactt are now using creative approaches to help former victims of child labour.

“We sometimes use art and singing to encourage former child workers to dream about a better future not involving factory work. By getting them to visualise their dreams,we can encourage them to stick with school to reach these objectives.”

I love this image, and can see why it works. I’m not a fan of focus groups – they rely on the incorrect assumption that people know, and can articulate what it is they really need. They often can’t.

In 2003 I helped to run a c21Vox project called “Am I Antisocial“, which used these methods to gauge young peoples’ feelings about the anti-social behaviour bill.

Here’s 16 year-old Will Quirk doing some mc-ing about his feelings on the bill. He’s not massively positive about it, as you may imagine. (By the way, he wrote all this in about 20 minutes – isn’t that amazing? I challenge any one of you to get anywhere near that..)

Why’s this important?

Well, I think that the first step in delivering stuff that really works is to find out what people’s unmet needs are. I have Matt Marsh to thank for showing me the light on this one.

Once you have the unmet needs, design becomes a whole lot easier.