Living Labs Initiative
PATH’s Living Labs Initiative accelerates the pace of health innovation to ensure that all communities have the solutions they need to live healthy lives. We do this by co-creating with users to rapidly design, test, and scale solutions to their long-standing challenges.
Our Approach
PATH’s Living Labs Initiative uses human-centered design to work with end users to co-develop solutions aimed at accelerating the pace of innovation, lowering risk, and increasing the likelihood of realizing sustainable solutions. Through PATH's world-renowned expertise in global health and longstanding relationships with governments and communities, we have built a strong reputation as a trusted partner and can help to rapidly engage with key stakeholders to help deliver lasting results.
We use a '4D' approach to human-centered design: discover, define, dream, design. We iterate at the design stage until a solution is developed that is acceptable to the end users.
Livings Labs staff interview health workers to understand their daily work and the challenges they face. Hearing their stories allows for co-designing solutions that will meet their needs. Photo: PATH
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Observation is a key part of the human-centered design process. Creative designers seek to understand the current processes and support the co-creation of solutions appropriate for the context of use. Photo: PATH/Brian Mushaukwa
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Stakeholders from all levels of the health system, including health officials, nurses, community health workers, and community members, are brought together in workshops to discuss health challenges and brainstorm solutions. Photo: PATH
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To develop a deep understanding of users, workshop participants create an empathy map that describes what the user sees, hears, says, and does in their work environment. Photo: PATH
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An approach used by the Living Labs Initiative is the creation of journey maps to look at current processes and opportunities for improvement. This journey map details the work of a frontline immunization worker.
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The Living Labs team uses Miro, an online collaboration platform, to document and analyze information gathered through workshops, interviews, and observations. This Miro board documents parts of a human-centered design sprint cycle.
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Our human-centered design and user-focused approaches support the goal of creating solutions that are tailored to the needs of users and contribute to solving complex health challenges. Photo: PATH/Brian Mushaukwa
7 of 7Our service offerings
The Living Labs Initiative offers three primary services: designing solutions, exploring concepts, and testing prototypes or potential solutions. While the overarching aim for each approach or service remains the same—bringing the voice of the end user, their context or use case scenario, and the needs and challenges into the design process—the specific objectives and outputs slightly vary.
Designing Solutions
We work with partners who have a general idea of what the health challenge is, but are trying to deeply understand the context and the users and come up with potential ideas for addressing the problem. Through participatory processes we gather insights from users, prioritize ideas to prototype and iterate until solutions are developed that meet their needs.
Examples of our work Designing Solutions:
Meet the health workers who will co-create solutions for vaccine delivery
Exploring Concepts
We use this process when there is already a firm understanding of the health problem and potential concepts to solve the problem. It lowers the risk of launching a new product or approach by providing an opportunity for rapid, initial user feedback and positioning for the concept, while simultaneously avoiding an expensive and time-consuming pilot of a concept that is not appropriate, scalable, or sustainable. We identify key stakeholders, collect feedback from end users through interviews or focus groups, and aggregate and analyze data to inform concept recommendations.
Testing Prototypes
We test health prototypes or solutions with end users across different settings to inform what is working and what can be improved. We put early-stage solutions in the hands of end users, observe or simulate use with potential end users to discover strengths and weaknesses, and strategize improvements to make products or solutions market-ready.
Examples of our work Testing Prototypes:
To optimize COVID-19 vaccine rollout, listen to health workers
Meet Members of the Living Labs Team
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Chris Obong’o
Lead Product Manager, Living Labs Kenya
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Nelson Cheruiyot
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Janet Muigai
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Wilkister Musau
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Steve Osumba
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Oyugi Allela
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Sue Wairimu
Creative Designer, Living Labs Kenya
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Faith Mbai
Program Assistant, Living Labs Kenya
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Dr. Joseph Kayaya
Lead Product Manager, Living Labs Zambia
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Casildah Lumamba
Creative Designer, Living Labs Zambia
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Brian Mushaukwa
Creative Designer, Living Labs Zambia
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John Allan Zgambo
Creative Designer, Living Labs Zambia
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Brenda Magula
Creative Designer, Living Labs Zambia
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Catherine Kagulura
Finance Officer
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Brian Taliesin
Global Director, Living Labs
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Bhavya Gowda
Deputy Director, Living Labs
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Christina Smith
Senior Project Administrator
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Kevin Kwong
Market Dynamics Associate
Partner with us
Living Labs is ready to partner with your team to connect individuals, ideas, and innovations. If you have questions or are interested in integrating Living Labs into current or future projects, please contact livinglabs@path.org.
