Apricot was born as a learning management concept for One Acre Fund’s farmers training program, through an 8-week design sprint that I led with a team of 3 designers in 2019. One Acre Fund had been previously providing training to its member farmers, but struggled to keep attendance numbers up and ensure compliance with their proprietary planting methods. We were tasked to find out why farmers weren’t attending training and imagine a way to make training more appealing and sticky.
Process
Before this project started however, the team was on the verge of burning out. We had had a tough year: the IDEO.org studio in Nairobi had just picked up steam, there were several new hires (myself included), and it took time to learn to work together and define our identity as a studio. We came into the One Acre Fund project with the desire to optimise for joy.
This meant that we had to work differently. Though it felt like taking many risks, we infused play into all our activities as a team, with our partners, and with farmers. We created research games in lieu of our typical one on one interviews. We presented our learnings through an interactive exhibition instead of a slide deck. We experimented with non-verbal research synthesis where we illustrated and painted what we had learned as a team, instead of our typically post-it writing parties.
It worked. We saw users open up in ways we hadn’t seen before during research. Our partners warmed up to our working style quickly and looked forward to having us on their campus. More importantly, I had never experienced such a symbiosis working in a team before. We had so much fun, gelled incredibly well, disagreed constructively, and built each other up.
Learnings
One of the central questions of this project was: how do people prefer to learn? This is one of those questions you unfortunately can’t ask directly and get a straight answer. Many of us never get to reflect on how we prefer to learn because, though we are exposed to many learning experiences in our lifetime, we are taught that learning only comes in the form of instruction and that the only legitimate form of learning is through schooling.
So how do you find out how people prefer to learn? First, we tried giving farmers some exposures to various kinds of learning. We took some of the modules they are taught in the One Acre Fund program and redelivered it many ways: through a series of videos, through an instructor assisted by a video, through an instructor assisted by printed materials, through demonstrations by peers. We observed how farmers reacted to and adapted these methods.
We then created a space for farmers to reflect on what they had experienced during research and reflect on learning in general. We wanted to create a platform for them to chat without feeling exposed. We thought, let’s print pictures of all kinds of learning situations and tools, lay them out on the floor, and ask them to create collages in teams of 4 about how they’d prefer to learn new farming methods and tools. We weren’t sure whether the activity would work but it did.
That session was the highlight of my career as a designer. We learned about their learning preferences but also what aspirations they had for themselves professionally. We also learned that the highest form of learning they valued was hands-on and peer driven, which alleviated the need for One Acre Fund to rely solely on instruction to deliver their content.
We developed Apricot as a concept to demonstrate how learning might evolve to be more hands-on and peer driven. We also created a set of playbooks to guide how to test Apricot and further develop the concept.