COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Resistance in India Assignment

Assignment Task

Brief

As you progress through the modules in this course ‘ Innovation by Design ’, you will be required to undertake a range of readings, watch demonstrations of the way in which certain design thinking tools are used in practice, and attempt to apply those tools to understand and ultimately define a project definition for an industry problem. For this, you must recollect the work that you have done and identify the following based on your learnings from both of the following:

• The problem that you are investigating
• The tools and processes that you have been asked to use

As you undertake the work, record your reflections and insights. Your assessment task requires you to develop a nuanced and clear problem statement arising out of the insights gained using the process; you are also required to annotate a portfolio of evidence of the project completed to explain the benefits and uses of design thinking tools for understanding your problem and, specifically, how and why you might use these tools in your own future work lives; what you would do again and/or differently; what you have learnt about yourself; what your own learning style is; and, importantly, your own contributions to a team as a consequence of the work completed in this course. 

The global pandemic that began in 2020 has affected India more significantly than many other countries. The complexities of managing the crisis have been evident from the beginning. In addition to this, there have been growing concerns regarding the take-up of vaccines and growing hesitancies about getting vaccinated. This article from ScienceMag explores some of the complexities associated with the COVID-19 vaccine in India.

In this course, you will be asked to examine the question of COVID-19 vaccines from the perspective of Indian businesses, with a view to deeply understand the problem. In the next course, you will work with your group to propose a solution to a problem brief (that will be provided in the first week of the next course), which will build on the work that you have done at this stage, to solve this problem from a particular stakeholder’s perspective.

The Problem

Every time you are asked to work on the Industry Problem, you are being asked to apply what you have learned in this course to the following problem.

Your focus in this course and this assignment would be to uncover human needs and motivators or pain points that are already creating, or will shortly create, challenges as corporations transition into the ‘COVID Normal’.

Many complex matters need to be addressed before Indian plant, factory and office workers return to work, and it is quite likely that the future of work and the experiences of individual workers will significantly differ from those prior to the pandemic.

Since the end of April, Indian citizens over the age of 18 years have been eligible to receive the vaccine. However, the task of vaccinating India’s enormous population is a significant logistical issue that is affected by the sheer size of the country and the number of people involved. 

Your task is to focus specifically on the issue of hesitancy– understanding who is hesitant about receiving the vaccine, what their concerns are and why they have them to create a clear problem statement that will assist you and your teammates in identifying some real pain points (or issues) that will form the basis of the ‘solution’ that you will ideate in the next module. The stakeholders experiencing (or likely to experience) the problem that you have identified will create a demand for the solution that you will develop. You need to clearly define your stakeholder group and deeply empathise with the issues that they are facing or are likely to face to address the problem and be cognisant of the potential market and the opportunity for the solution that you are yet to design.

During this course, you will be introduced to a range of design thinking tools that will help you understand the people and circumstances relevant to your industry problem. This assignment requires you to use these tools to identify and understand your stakeholders using design thinking approaches to problem identification. You also need to understand and elicit insights about your chosen subjects, their circumstances, needs, desires and frustrations with a view to prepare a design brief that will be the basis for a solution design exercise (to be completed in the next course). You will submit a portfolio showing the artefacts that you have created during the problem identification stages of the design thinking process along with the annotations where you have outlined your learnings (of the subject matter of the research and your use of design thinking tools) while using these tools and reflecting on the applicability of these tools to your own work and life.

Expectations from you:

This assignment does not require you to identify a potential solution. If you move forward too quickly to a solution, you are likely to limit your opportunities to do well in this assignment. You will be assigned to a team during this course, and you will be expected to work with and communicate with your team. However, the work that you submit will be individual work that will be individually marked. You will continue to work with that group in the next course, where you will collaborate to create a solution to a design brief that will relate to this same industry problem. The work that you do, both individually and with your team, requires you to have a deep understanding of the problem in ways that you can share insights with your teammates and work with them to create an innovative solution to a problem based on a shared understanding.

To summarise, the key deliverables from you would include:

1. The filled up checklist

2. Annotated portfolio created using the artefacts that you worked on during the course

3. Reflections on the artefacts

Your submissions can be any of the following: a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document, or a combination of the two. 

A special note about annotations: Please spend some time reading the assessment criteria carefully. The purpose of annotating the portfolio is twofold:

1. To demonstrate the ways in which you use the tools that you will learn about to draw insights about the problem

2. To reflect on the use of these tools and to articulate how and when these tools may be valuable to your future work

A good way to reflect on experience is to use a framework that prompts deep and purposeful thinking about what happened. The 5Rs (modified as 4Rs below) of the reflection (Bain et al. 2002) is one such framework. The five elements of this framework are Reporting, Responding, Reasoning, Relating, and Reconstructing. When used effectively, reflection can facilitate significant personal and/or professional growth. Using the following checklist will help you ensure that you have reflected on each of the tools.

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