NewYouthHack: Using design thinking to reimagine settlement services for new canadians

Abstract

In 2018–2019 we applied Design Thinking (DT) to reimagining settlement services for refugee and immigrant youth in Canada. DT continues to gain followers as a practical approach to incorporating human factors into the design process. One insight motivating DT is that design is a series of experiments in which we learn about our users. Iterative prototyping and user feedback are paramount. But we also wanted to expose them to career pathways related to software design and development. In this paper we report on (1) the NewYouthHack process, (2) the resulting app and central role played by social interactions, and (3) the framework we developed to support this work. We launched with a two-day designathon with 12 identified problems and proposed solutions. Social interaction and community supported by software were threaded through almost all of the solutions. This presented two new challenges: securing iteratively developed network software for vulnerable users, and meaningfully engaging the youth in necessarily complex software. Previously we had developed an outreach curriculum with tool support based on a library in Elm for stand-alone graphical web apps. We taught interaction using state diagrams. In Petri App Land (PAL), we generalized this, with tokens representing users visiting places within the app. Transitions now capture user interactions. To facilitate significant changes from iteration to iteration, much of the code is (re)generated based on a PAL spec.