Interview with Professor Kirstin Kohler - Mannheim University of Applied Sciences / inno.space
Co-innovation of students of the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences with the non-profit organization HITA e.V. in the context of Digital Health - A Win-Win Situation for the Participants
Digital innovation is often driven by technical issues. This is also reflected in the curricula of the corresponding degree programs such as computer science or communications engineering. However, developments in recent years have clearly shown that software systems can have a major impact on social change and that their design must be considered in a sociocultural context in order to assess their sustainable significance. Note, for example. the impact of social media or the recent discussions on the use of a Corona app as a prominent representative of digital innovation. Universities must therefore consider teaching concepts that sensitize students to their social responsibility and enable them to pursue technology design from a social, societal, or human-centered perspective. After all, successful digital innovation can only emerge when user-centricity and technical progress are in harmony and integrated in the cultural context.
In the User Centered Innovation course, 8 students from the master's degree program in Software Engineering at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, in cooperation with HITA e.V., demonstrated how it is possible to jointly create added value for a non-profit institution and at the same time develop the competencies described above within the framework of a course. HITA e.V. is a non-profit, non-governmental organization whose vision is to contribute to the optimization of health systems in Africa with the help of eHealth and mHealth technologies. During the project-based course, students worked over a 15-week period to develop a solution to a challenge they encountered in their daily lives at HITA. At the very beginning of the project, HITA posed the following question to the students: "How can digital innovation support the clinical management and organization of a local community clinic in Ghana?" This question was motivated by the experiences of the two HITA representatives Thomas Erkert and Daniel Gerlach, who have extensive background knowledge of the Ghanaian health care system through their volunteer work.
The university takes a user-centered innovation approach, applying creative methods, prototyping, and user interviews, for example, using the design thinking methodology. In the process, students work with so-called "assignments". These are weekly assignments that allow students to learn step-by-step methods to address the complex issue that is presented to them. The question initially causes uncertainty among students because it is much more open-ended than questions in other course formats. The resulting degrees of freedom of the solution space are unfamiliar and initially overwhelming. Under the methodological guidance of the supervising teacher, the exploration of the problem space by the students took place during the first weeks. This included exploring specifics and processes of the Ghanaian healthcare system and understanding the country's social framework. This highlighted to students the vast differences in hygiene, bed capacity, treatment methods, procedures and set-up of medical centers compared to their own healthcare system. Based on these insights, different personas were created to document the findings on the target group and their daily challenges (in this case, midwife, nurse and patient were considered). The example of the nurse is shown in the figure below.
With the target groups in mind, the students were then challenged to think up various solutions based on their extensive knowledge of digital technology and to roughly sketch them out. The work took place in small groups and initially resulted in more than 40 different ideas. From these, the students developed five ideas into so-called low-fidelity prototypes. These are preliminary stages of the product, which are created from simple materials such as paper and cardboard in a short time. Thus, the ideas are not initially translated into code, but into concept representations that serve only for communication and discussion. From the very different concept ideas, the two most promising ones were selected in dialog with the HITA representatives. In the following weeks, the students elaborated these through several iterations into clickable demonstrators on the target device. Repeated methods were used to examine the quality of the elaboration from different perspectives (e.g. user experience, feasibility, costs).
Throughout the course, the HITA experts were very engaged in dialogue with the students to answer questions about Ghana or provide feedback on concept ideas. The students were able to experience how closely the use of an application in a specific context is interwoven with its design and implementation through intensive engagement with the Ghanaian context. The highlight of the course was a guided user test with the Ghanaian hospital, in which students had the chance to walk various representatives from a clinic in Ghana through their digital solution during a one-hour video conference to explore its adoption and address concerns. This was possible mainly because the HITA representatives were able to organize the video conference on site as part of their trip to Ghana. To the pride of all involved, the feedback from potential users was extremely positive and provided complementary, valuable impulses. Finally, the official conclusion of the project was a comprehensive presentation of the overall results by the students to Thomas Erkert and Daniel Gerlach of HITA e.V. on the university campus.
From the point of view of the supervising professor, the cooperation with HITA e.V. was a great benefit for teaching. It provided students with a learning experience in which they had to reflect on the consequences of their technology choices in a social context. In this way, the students could become aware of their responsibility, but also of their creative possibilities. At the same time, they were sensitized to the realities of another culture and society, which is characterized by far more restrictions than their own reality of life.
The course took place at inno.space(https://inno-space.de), the creative and makerspace of Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, which is part of the worldwide Design Factory Global network(https://dfgn.org). There, students work exclusively on real issues in a creative learning environment according to the principle of action-based learning. In contrast to the cooperation with HITA e.V., many other inno.space projects deal with challenges faced by companies and are thus strongly influenced by economic interests. By working with a non-profit company like HITA e.V., it is possible to make sustainability and the common good more of a course focus. This is a task that universities, as institutions with social responsibility, are increasingly taking on. All in all, the project was a happy win-win situation, the likes of which rarely arise and, from the perspective of Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, will hopefully be repeated.
In an insightful interview, Professor Kirstin Kohler talks about the genesis and development of the project. Also in the conversation is Daniel Gerlach from HITA: