Knee High Design Challenge: prototyping and testing

We are now over half way through the second stage of the Knee High Design Challenge, and our 11 teams are busy prototyping and improving elements of their service, designing business models and challenging themselves to measure their impact.

Ingrid Melvær, Knee High Research Associate, has been helping each team build bespoke research plans to capture the impact of their ideas on children under five and their families.

Here’s what some of the teams are up to…

Kids Connect

Hannah White, Tracey Gilbert and Ben White

The Kids Connect team have been busy building paper prototypes of their app for parents, as well setting up different trials to test how families might use it.

The Crafty Explorers

Mission:Explore, Lambeth City Farmers & Geography Collective
The Craft Explorers team have create an incredible pop-up shop in Nunhead where families are asked to make crafty creatures and take them on missions in local parks. The team has built exit surveys into the experience of visiting the shop in Nunhead, they aim to see whether repeat visitors have an increased level of confidence to go out to play and explore as a family.

An hour at #CraftyExplorers. https://t.co/bspUD447BH

— Crafty Explorers (@CraftyExplorers) February 8, 2014

The Good Enough Mum’s Club 

Emily Beecher in association with Spin Arts
The Good Enough Mum's Club have put together a musical aimed at getting mothers with postnatal depression out of their homes and in contact with mothers who have similar experiences. In addition to capturing people’s attitudes about the show, they are setting up an experiment to test how effective two different wellbeing interventions are as follow-up exercises to their musical.

Find out when they’re performing next through their Eventbrite page.

Pop up Parks

Tom Doust, Intelligent Space

Meanwhile the Pop up Parks team hopes to tests whether children are more likely to play in parks after engaging with the pop-up parks. By giving 50 families who visited the pop-up park a pack of seeds with the instruction of planting them in the local park and send a picture, they can compare the rate of returned photos to 50 families who received the seeds without having visited the park.

Hi @DCchallenges lot's of activity here today @GabrielsWharf We are recruiting knee high park makers! pic.twitter.com/lOCTPKL7ki

— Pop Up Parks (@PopUpParks) February 20, 2014

Building a social business model

Last week we brought all the teams together again, and asked the Young Foundation Accelerator team to introduce their Social Business Model Canvas. To get the teams in the right mindset they started the workshop by asking the teams to use the canvas to map out the business model for cow.

Creative cow concepts for social good from #kneehighproject @DCchallenges! #socbmgen pic.twitter.com/521Fj6XUDC

— The YFAccelerator (@YFAccelerator) February 26, 2014

Following the workshop all the teams are starting to build a much more rigorous idea of their business models, and how they can make their work sustainable. 

Lots more coming up, there’s only 4 weeks left until each team pitches again to the selection panel to secure funding for the next stage of the Design Challenge. Follow the activity of all our teams at #KneeHighProject on twitter.