The Safety Lab

THE SAFETY LABinnovation for women’s safety

[email protected]

placeholder imageWomen walking at night in India.

placeholder imageA woman sits in a car at night.

SAFETY IS THE BIGGEST CRISIS FACING WOMEN IN INDIA.

// WOMEN’S SAFETY IS GETTING WORSE IN INDIAIn spite of recent attention, especially since 2012, and high-level debate & policy recommendations, the problem is getting worse.

Women-centered brands should support innovation

to address this crisis

MULTI-DISCIPLINARY INNOVATION IS NEEDED TO

ADDRESS THIS CRISIS.

// THE SAFETY LABThe Safety Lab is a platform to incubate a series of innovation initiatives that address women’s safety. These initiatives will include but will not be limited to the following

SAFETY DATA CHALLENGE DIGNITY GAMES DESIGN FOR WOMEN

THE SAFETY LAB

An open innovation challenge to get ideas around how a Big Data based information platform could help police departments, government agencies, corporations, & individuals increase women’s safety.

Subsequently, this platform will be built and piloted with additional grants & impact funding.

A program that will collaborate with leading game designers globally to design a series of “serious games” that lead to boys & men treating girls & women with greater dignity and respect. A very essential component in making India safer for women.

This too, will be spun off as a separate social project.

A design-led innovation project that will seek to design women-friendly experiences (such as streets, parks, bus stops), working environments, government services, matrimonial processes), technology services that reduce violence, and other related services.

This will be a collaborative project with leading designers across the world.

SAFETY APPS UXDESIGN FOR WOMEN

project 1

// SAFETY APPS: SIGNAL OR NOISE ? Over 50 mobile apps targeting women’s safety have been released in the last 3 years by nonprofits, corporates, & even the government. No one has evaluated what the impact of these apps has been and if they are addressing the problem well.

// THE NEED FOR UX AUDITS Apps need to be designed based on specific hypotheses and theories of change. Then these hypotheses need to be validated. Currently, even the first step is missing where apps implicitly assume certain functionality to be useful.

App 1

Quick Response

Make Safer

Avoid Unsafe

Equip Women

Improve Men

Punitive F

ear

Nothing

Nothing

Infra

struc

tura

l Stra

tegy

Behavioural Strategy

App 2

‘APPY WITHOUT REASONIn this example, App 2 doesn’t even a clearly articulated theory of change . App 1 has a theory of change but there is no validation of the base hypotheses linked to behavioral and infrastructural strategies for the app to be successful.

The Safety App UX Audit project has four stages spread over a 16 week timeline.

This phase will involve crafting the research plan including observational activity, interview guides, co-creation workshops, expert discussions.

It will also include finalizing research locations, recruiting participants, and facilitators as necessary.

In this Phase, the different types of research data gathered: field notes, rich media, outputs of co-creation workshops, expert interviews, results from the UX workshops.

These data will then be clustered organically into meaningful patterns of insight.

Based on the previous phase, two types of design activity would take place

Incremental Improvements to currently existing apps and design principles for making them more effective.

A blank slate re-imagining of how information technology and communications can be used to improve women’s safety.

Low-fidelity prototypes of both of these would be created and prototyped with users in co-creation workshops.

Upon finalization, these would be shared under a Creative Commons License to the larger community.

PILOTSYNTHESIZEIMMERSEPLAN

// PROJECT APPROACH + TIMELINES

2 weeks 7 weeks 2 weeks 5 weeks

ITERATIVE DESIGN

In this Phase, the research time will employ design research methods to understand the different personas of women with respect to their safety challenges, the socio-cultural ecosystems they are part of, and their mechanisms of dealing with these challenges.

The research teams will build a nuanced picture of how these women have used the different apps or not used the safety apps and where they place such technology apps in their overall strategy of “staying safe”.

Two UX labs will be conducted in which women will interact with specific apps and give feedback.

SAFETY DATACHALLENGE

project 2

// WHAT IS BIG DATA ? Data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. However, they yield insights and prediction capabilities not possible through smaller data sets.

THE WORLD ISBURSTING WITH DATA

TIMES GROWTHIN 11 YEARS44

Every day, 175 million Tweets are sent, 2 million blog posts are written, 68.1 million posts are created on Tumblr, and 60,000 new websites are added. Every 60 seconds on Facebook sees 293,000 new status updates.

202035 ZETA BYTES

20090.8 ZETA BYTES

THE THREE V’S of

BIG DATA

VOLUME

VELOCITY VARIETY

// WHAT CAN BIG DATA DO FOR WOMEN’S SAFETY? Used effectively, Big Data methods can enable HUGE improvements in women’s safety.

SAFETY DATAANALYTICS PLATFORM

SOCIAL MEDIA STREAMS

POLICE STATION LISTING

CRIME RECORDS DATA

WEATHER PATTERNS

TRANSPORT ROUTES

THOUSANDS OF DATA SETS INNOVATIVE ANALYTICS MODELING PATHBREAKING POSSIBILITIES

DYNAMIC POLICING PATTERNS

Using insights from the Safety Data platform, Delhi police know how to change policing patterns to prevent incidents of violence against women in the anticipation of a very heavy monsoon shower 4 days away.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ASSESSMENT

Using insights from the Safety Data platform, a family is able to evalute the “dowry-ask-risk” from a certain man’s matrimonial profile.

HUMAN TRAFFICKING PRE-EMPTION

Using insights from the Safety Data platform, an NGO is able to predict the likelihood of a certain village being targeted by child traffickers based on agricultural yields and income of families.

Boiled down to its essentials, it will seek ideas on how Big Data can be used to address women's safety. Our hypothesis is that many parts of the women’s safety problem and approaches such as Big Data lend themselves to crowdsourced innovation. The richness and quality of solutions which a well chosen set of participants can come up with, would be very difficult to replicate with a small set of predefined stakeholders.

The contest will play out in 2015 and ideas that emerge from it will be taken forward in either their original forms or by cherry-picking the best pieces of thinking that the contest unearths and creating effective technology solutions to address the women's safety crisis. 

We will be working closely with organizations in this space as well as the Government to scale solutions that come out from the SDC.

// THE SAFETY DATA CHALLENGE

AN OPEN-INNOVATION CONTEST TO IDENTIFY HOW BIG DATA CAN ADDRESS THE WOMEN’S SAFETY PROBLEM

The Safety Data Challenge has three distinct stages leading to a large scale pilot.

An open innovation contest can be very effective if designed well.

This phase will involve crafting specific problem statements, defining solution constraints, creating or curating seed knowledge materials for the participants, planning contest logistics, setting up evaluation parameters, recruiting a board of supporters, creating communication materials. 

In this phase we will launch the contest and invite participation from institutions and individuals in India and outside.

A high-profile press conference will be used for the launch. Formal media partners will ensure that project continues to receive coverage over an extended period. A strategic campaign on Facebook will be kickstarted.

There will also be well-designed offline events such as Safety Brainstorms hosted across India.

In this Phase, the ideas that emerge from the contest will be evaluated on the basis of different criteria that the core group designs.

Winners will be announced and suitable prizes given.

More importantly, the best thinking from the contest will be combined to create blueprints for Big Data solutions that can address this crisis.

An innovation retreat that gets experts from across the world will be convened to create the blueprint.

Based on the blueprints developed, we will create a proposal for a pilot project around a Big Data / Learning Management platform that will greatly improved the effectiveness of Violence Against Women efforts.

A formal partnership with a State, City, or District will be forged to implement this pilot.

Post pilot, the solution will then be leveraged nationally through sustainable business and organizational models.

PILOTBLUEPRINTSCONTEST LIVE

CONTEST DESIGN

// PROJECT APPROACH + TIMELINES

2 weeks 8 weeks 4 weeks 12 months+

Marching for safety in Delhi A women’s safety march

Women-centered brands should support innovation

to address this crisisSOME THOUGHTS

// SUB-OPTIMAL PROBLEM SOLVINGThere are high-level structural errors in the way the women’s safety problem is being addressed.

REACTIONARY APPROACH

LACK OF LEARNING LOOPS

REDUNDANT EFFORTS

Thousands of people wanting to engage with the problem without an efficient framework leads to a scenario where we have 100s of safety apps on mobile phones most of which are rarely used or even effective.

Constantly monitoring progress of initiatives is needed to assess whether the “theory of change” being used is valid or needs to be modified.

Given the organizational expertise, financing structures, & coordination problems, most women’s safety initiatives run in silos and do not sufficiently invest in data-driven measurement and data-sharing outside organizational boundaries.

A large proportion of activities to address the crisis are reactionary and not strategic.

The Government, under pressure to respond, announces large INR 50 crore programs to install alarms on public transport without really evaluating smaller pilots on whether this will even be effective.

Citizens descend in their thousands to India Gate to “demand justice” without having a nuanced understanding of the broader women’s safety problem in India.

NO SHARED THEORY OF CHANGE

A “theory of change” is a set of hypotheses that describes why a certain problem exists and what high leverage mechanisms exist to address the problem.

Very few, if any organizations in India, have a comprehensive theory of change that covers all forms of women’s safety.

// SYSTEMS THINKING IS NEEDEDSystems thinking can help address the women’s safety problem much more effectively through three levers.

The problem is at a large enough scale and has diverse enough drivers that it would benefit greatly from emerging technologies such as Big Data / Analytics if they were applied innovatively to not only respond to crises but also to predict and prevent them.

There have been laudable efforts to define and institutionalize safety audit frameworks of places and approaches such using Big Data can go a long way in making current efforts much more effective.

Similarly, millions of people are involved in efforts to address violence against women - from police personnel to grassroots NGO workers - but often they operate with incomplete information and minimal training. Mobile phone based learning platforms can possibly make their work far more effective.

Any large social change problem has three categories of solutions. Advocacy, infrastructure (or hardware), & behavior (or software).

For instance, infrastructure solutions could include how urban planning for safe public places occurs. Behavioral solutions include awareness campaigns around gender, educational programs getting women to speak up or for men to understand how their actions might be contributing to the problem.

Innovation hubs and ecosystems that bring together diverse skills & disciplines to address the safety problem are missing.

Multidisciplinary innovation is needed to ensure that problems get addressed optimally.

Presently, even though the issue of women's safety attracts almost daily attention in the news, it doesn't lead to structured and concerted problem solving. Instead, a large proportion of well meaning organizations and individuals try and "hack away" at the problem in the best way they know how. Unfortunately, this approach tends to be greatly ineffective and inefficient.

A critically missing piece seems to be a Stakeholder-Value Chain Map of the Violence Against Women problem.

Without an ecosystem level map, synergies don't get identified neither do necessary complementary actions for the success of an initiative. 

STRUCTURING THE PROBLEM

MULTIDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION

USING DATA & INFORMATION

A discussion on safety

CONTACT

NIRAT BHATNAGAR / [email protected]

THE SAFETY LABinnovation for women’s safety

[email protected]