Our Vision

The world is a complicated tangle of challenges, some of which are truly life threatening such as pandemics, climate change and global ecocide - not to mention local pollution, gun control, police violence, homelessness, violence towards women, food insecurity and poverty. Yet, since the advent of the Digital Revolution, even though we have had the means to address these issues by collectively sharing solutions across borders, sadly, we have not figured out how to best leverage technology to support humanitarian initiatives that are free from political and corporate control. It’s important to now investigate and propagate models for securely doing this, i.e., sharing successful, evidence-based global solutions that will improve the lives of citizens the world over.

Human-Centered Design Methodology

Starting with “an understanding of psychology and technology” and putting “human needs, capabilities, and behavior first” (Norman, 2013) our design solutions will accommodate the participants and the system’s support teams in a variety of ways. Knowing that the complexity inherent in parsing through the details in successful social or environmental projects will create a significant intellectual challenge, the system’s design will include help in the form of PDF guides, videos and project managers to mitigate the cognitive and perceptual demand required to appropriately understand the material (Dalton, et al., 2011). It is also essential to adhere to the Usability Heuristics (Nielsen, 2020) that will ensure that we can develop a user-friendly foundation and framework that facilitates “good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen.”(Norman, 2013).

As we continue to learn more about the global community’s evolving needs, we’ll be able to assist communities in more meaningful ways. Making that happen will require a cadence of actionable feedback sessions that not only gather good feedback, but also provide superlative channels to act on that input and measure the results. To those ends, this design will also include social and financial impact studies as metrics for measuring progress and informing adjustments and revisions needed for improvement.