Bodh

Context

Women are grossly under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields globally. In Europe, the percentage of women who graduate in STEM is around 35%, the gap widening at every higher grade, with only 11% representation at the highest grade, according to a 2015 study by the European Commission’s She Figures.

Identifying two of the major problems to be the lack of motivation in science and its perceived disconnect from everyday life of high school children, the goal of the project became to enable them to become more aware of the pervasiveness of science and technology in their daily life. Awareness is the first step to making informed decisions about career choices. 

What is Bodh?

Bodh attempts to tackle this issue by opening the door to science through artefacts that students are interested in. It also attempts to drive a systemic change by establishing a connection between students and the scientific community, while also bringing female role models to the forefront.

Bodh is a service designed for high school students that brings awareness about how science is involved in everyday life through bite-sized educational content. By enabling students to view everyday objects from the lenses of different scientific disciplines, it broadens their perspective on scientific application and piques their curiosity. The service works on a crowdsourcing model that connects students with a global professional and citizen science community. 

How does it work?

The service model

Students capture images of artefacts they are interested in and upload them to the repository. The scientific community creates content for that artefact.

Bodh employs a science communicator and a video team. It collaborates with universities and research institutes to create premium content. This content is accessible to schools when they subscribe to Bodh.

Citizen scientists are invited to self-produce the videos, contribute to the content repository, and potentially partner with Bodh via a merit system. This content is freely available for all. 

The use case

Bodh is introduced to students in their classroom through a video sent to their emails by their teacher. Students are instructed to download the app.

The teacher would tie it into their curriculum, as an inspirational activity before she kick-starts a new science topic. The teacher would send students to look around for any object they like. Students then use the Bodh app to learn something new about their favourite artefact from the lens of a scientific discipline. They then share their learnings in the classroom.

Bodh would be used by the teacher to facilitate discussion about the breadth of the application of the scientific discipline. This provides students with a big picture view of where the subject matter fits in the real world and helps answer the big ‘why’. It helps in setting the context, relating it to things they are familiar with and thereby providing the motivation to learn more.

The application

Scan

The student grabs an image of the object she is curious about. Using machine learning, the application would identify the object. The student then picks one of the many subject lenses to view the object. In this case, let’s say Physics.

Watch

She would then see a list of videos for the Physics lens. The videos illustrate a concept as applied to that object. She would also see related objects. If her school is a subscriber, she would see premium content first created by the scientific community, followed by highly rated ones. She would then watch the videos and maybe engage directly with the researchers, post questions and get feedback. And at any given point of time, she can switch to view the same artefact from a different subject lens.

Discover

While the student sees trending objects, she’d also see a list of recommended objects based on her history. So both boys and girls would be learning the same scientific concepts, but through artifacts that appeal to them. While the service itself is gender-neutral, the way it activates girls is through this feature. In addition, Bodh also recommends science clubs to join, where she can find more artifact inspiration from people who are interested in similar topics.

Scalability

Content quality is maintained by ensuring that the piece comes from researchers themselves, and is produced by Bodh. Bodh would also need a variety of content in large volumes to be successful. Content would also flow in from the citizen scientists and amateurs. This user group can be incentivised by offering them points on certain criteria – for e.g., creating content for trending artefacts and being rated by the user community. Once they’ve reached a merit threshold set by Bodh, they are eligible to partner with Bodh.

How will Bodh go from zero content to a point where there is enough content for it to be successful?

• Day 0: Gather surveys from schools to generate content topics. Build partnerships with universities to get a team of researchers on board.
• Day 1: Product roll-out in schools for a trial period, while also collaborating with researchers to create content.
• Day 100: At the end of trial phase, Bodh will have a larger data for artefact preferences than the content.
• Day 300: Official roll-out once all the content has been created.
• Day 1000: Sustainable balance between artefacts data and content.

Design process

User research

Bodh was created with more than 100 hours of people-centred research and co-creation sessions with teenage students and women experts in science and technological fields. I spoke to women professors from Copenhagen University, women experts in technology, high school and PhD students.

One of the main takeaways from the desk research was the Gender Neutrality Paradox. The paradox is that as countries become more gender neutral, fewer women choose scientific streams as a career. With more freedom to make the choices they want and no financial constraints, they lean towards their own natural interests as there is no motivation to pursue science.

Below is a graph from She Figures, 2015 that investigates the level of progress made toward gender equality in Research & Innovation in Europe. Women represent only about 30-35 % at the graduate and post-grad levels in STEM, and from then on – at the academic staff level, as the grade increases, the gap widens. This phenomenon is called the Leaky Pipeline.

Insights

I tried to validate the existence of these phenomena via user research. While I did observe these patterns during my interview, I then decided to investigate the reasons for these phenomena and understand the ground reality. I spoke with many experts in the science and technology field, and also with high-school students to get a perspective on the problem. Here are some key insights from the user research.

Insight 01: The awareness of real-life applications rather than teaching standalone concepts generate more interest in the subject.

Insight 02: One concept – many applications

But this diversity of application, while being specialised in just one area, is not communicated to the students. The students on the other hand think being a researcher is confined to conducting cancer research or climate change research. They are very limited in their understanding of what science is, and what scientists do. This misconception about scientific streams is in part due to media portrayal and also due to a lack of role models.

Ida believed that she can be creative in languages and the arts. She says in maths, there is only one answer, and that’s what she doesn’t like about math. What students don’t know is how one can creatively apply that one answer in innumerable ways.

Initially, I interviewed students between the ages of 16-18 years. Talking to them, I realised that their interests were already shaped, and they were less inclined to explore science at that point. So I focused on the younger age group of 13-15 years as my target audience.

Insight 03: Seeing connections between STEM and their natural inclination increases the chances of pursuing these fields

Very few experts I spoke to came into science because it was one of their personal strength subjects. Many came in through related or unforeseen associations.

The problem statement I defined based on the research was to provide school girls with the visibility of science and technology working in the background of everyday life by integrating their existing inclinations.

HMW provide school girls with the visibility of science and technology working in the background of everyday life by integrating their existing affinities?

Ideation

I conducted a group ideation workshop to generate a variety of ideas for the problem. Some of the potential ideas involved celebrating scientists as role models, and showcasing their daily life in the lab. I also involved my users in the creation process by sharing the concepts with them and asking for their feedback.

When researching existing solutions in the market, I realised there was a lot of work done in this space already. However, I wanted to focus on not teaching mere concepts but illustrating their application in everyday life. I also wanted the solution to drive systemic change, embrace students’ natural inclinations to spark curiosity in science, and also bring the female role models to the forefront. Studying past solutions that were designed only for girls, I learnt that such products backfired quickly, ironically for the same reason. Also, science doesn’t have a gender. Therefore, I wanted the solution to be gender-neutral in order to be more effective at targeting girls.

Prototyping

Prototype 1

To prototype the service introduction, I created a newsletter and a video that illustrated what the product was about. The goal was to identify which one would be a more impactful means of introducing the service in the classroom. I requested the science teacher to send the newsletter to some of his students and the video to some others. I then spoke to the students – they gave a very honest feedback about the newsletter feeling more like an ad. They found the video to be quite educational and informative.

Prototype 2

I created a paper prototype of the application and went to the students seeking answers to these questions:

1. What is their impression of the product concept?
2. What kind of content appealed to them?

I picked a clock as an example artefact. I then created different kinds of content for each discipline – an experiment, a science fact and a story. Interestingly enough, the students were rather uninterested in what I had to say because the artefact itself didn’t interest them. So I realised that it mattered to them what object they were learning about. Further, when I asked them about what object would they rather learn about instead, they were blank. It appeared that they were thinking hard to find objects that were ‘science-y’ enough, and rather missing the point. However, the paper prototype was successful in communicating the concept idea.

Prototype 3

I had further questions that needed answering:

1. What kind of objects interested them enough to understand the science beneath it?
2. What kind of visual content did they find gripping?

This time I brought in more visuals and chose a different object – a painting. The students found it much more interesting than the clock. However, they thought it had nothing to do with science. I then showed them different applications of scientific disciplines in art – fluid dynamics to make a controlled artwork, and a computer algorithm that converts an MS Paint digital art into something very interesting. I used different types to media to get a sense of what captured their attention more. The variety of concepts demonstrated piqued their curiosity, and enabled a healthy discussion in the class.

Some key learnings:

• The students requested for the source of this information as a means to validate and explore further.
• The video content was the most impactful of the different media types.
• All students were surprised by the connection between art and science.
• The product has potential uses as a tool to spark in-class discussions.

Experience prototype

I prototyped the experience of a video team/science communicator from Bodh going to a researcher, getting a content piece from them, producing the video and getting consent for distributing the video.

The following is the video prototype create based on the content written by a researcher:

The video for the prototype demonstration was edited using video content sourced from Receitas Nestlé and Silverson Machines.

The video was also shown to the researcher to get her consent. Later it was shown to a student for her feedback.

The following are a couple of quotes from the researchers, sharing her experience of participating in the creation process with Bodh.

Learnings from the prototypes

• The artefacts through which students study science, are more important to them as science itself. 
• Although science can be observed in any object around us, students need inspirational prompts to come up with those artefacts, due to preconditioning of their minds about what objects may be called ‘scientific’.
• The students were very surprised that even seemingly ‘non-sciencey’ objects always had something to do with science. This suggests that there is a gap in how science education is imparted to students.
• The researchers enjoyed the interaction with the video team, and were glad to be a part of something that’s going to get students excited about.
• The younger the academicians, the more time they have on their hands to get involved in such activities. Creating such videos would also be a way for creators themselves, especially undergraduates and graduates, to develop a deeper understanding, as per the Feynman learning technique.

Value proposition

• Bodh enables students to get a big picture view of why they should learn science, by giving them context and the value it adds in people’s lives.
• It enables students, irrespective of their gender, to learn science through objects that appeal to them. While the service is gender-neutral, it targets girls specifically, through the object recommendation feature. 
• Bodh drives home the idea that science is all-pervasive by enabling students to point at any artefact around them and learn the science behind it.
• Bodh also helps students develop new perspectives by showing different facets of the same artefact. Viewing a description of the same entity from the multiple lenses of physics, maths, biology and other scientific disciplines illustrates the inter-disciplinary nature of science.
• It provides researchers with a means to share their knowledge with young minds in a way they can relate to. By inviting general public to contribute to science, it promotes a scientific mindset in the society.

Future scope

After prototyping the MVP, I believe there is potential for scaling up the product and its services in many areas. To name a few:

• Introducing other types of bite-sized media content
• Museums as a potential niche user base
• Mentorship/apprenticeship models to attract young students
• Industry collaboration in creating cutting-edge education content

Jury Feedback

The project was presented to a panel of jury members at CIID, followed by an exhibition. Some feedback shared by the jury for Bodh:

Hector Ouilhet, Design Lead for Google Search, News and Assistant Products

Solid process that takes a highly relevant topic and makes it actionable with a solution that is scalable and feasible. A coherent approach that was informed by desk and user research. The process enables a very solid presentation along with a fantastic experience prototype. The concept is exceptionally strong to provide value to all the related people on it. From scientists, to the schools and to the end users. The experience prototype really went the extra mile.

Marie Wollersberger, Founder and Futures Director at Normally

Your research was mature, informed and of a high standard, and your intelligent use of prototyping allowed you to stay clear of too simplistic solutions to a complex problem space. The concept was thoughtful and very well brought to life through the prototypes. There was also sophistication in thinking about the incentive structure and business model behind your concept.

Riccardo Giraldi, Designer, Inventor, Speaker, Teacher

I was impressed by your project and the quality of your process. You jumped on a space that is both complex and delicate. You did a very good job throughout all the phases, starting with good research and insights. You thought about many aspects of the service with a remarkable level of detail. More, specifically, I LOVE the simplicity of the idea of sparking kids with curiosity of seeing the world around them through the lens of science. It’s so simple and powerful.

Ulrik Hogrebe, Creative Director and UX Designer

Your special skill is seeing the world with the eyes of a scientist and a designer. The framing of the project was clear, the research solid and the iterations good to see. I also liked that you had given thought to the incentives and overall systems maps of the experience. Nicely done!