Male:We pride ourselves on this holistic
approach and the interaction designers,
and anyone who's going to be
involved in the program,
industrial designers,
visual designers.
Their there from the beginning,
and their there at the end.
When we approach a program,
we have to do our research.
We're really trying to understand
the mechanics of disaster relief.
At the end of that discovery phrase,
what we do is essentially,
put our findings on the table
with a field innovation team,
and started to have those
meaningful conversations then.
That is essentially the core
of what a Frogthink is.
Female:Frogthinks are fairly structured
for focusing conversations.
We make sure that everything
has a very specific about of time
and we run through a series
of activities.
Because, one of the goals was
to rethink the way that
FEMAs perceived on the ground
in these situations.
The Brand Mash-up worksheet
came to mind immediately.
If you can give FEMA the
opportunity to take on qualities
of another brand,
what would those be?
Like in this case,
one group picked FedEx.
One example is
2-day delivery.
You send a package,
it's going to arrive 2-days later.
How might FEMA adopt that kind of
2-day turnover?
What does that mean for them?
The biggest change here is that
you don't wait for a disaster to hit.
The goal is to make sure that
that there's these predetermined locations
that everyone knows about,
so that informal relief and
that formal relief can meet in that same place.
Everyone on the team comes in
and sits in on the workshop.
In this case,
we used it with a bunch of
FEMAs partners both public
and private sectors.
It was really interesting
to see how open FEMA was
to new ideas.
How excited they were to be
working with a design firm
and share whatever documentation
they could legally share with us.
They were happy to bring us into
conversations that were ongoing
with other organizations on
a city level or on a national level.
Their willingness to give us
insight into the problems
was so useful.
Robert:Design is a very appealing
thing right now
to a lot of both industries
and organizations.
But, they don't really know
what to expect out of design.
In this case,
we take people from the
Federal Government, from FEMA,
you take people from the state
to government,
and you're trying to, sort of,
bring them together in an environment
in which they fell comfortable
as part of a creative process,
to shift the dynamics for how FEMA works.