the bindi GUIDE

THE BINDI GUIDE

Our vision: The Bindi Guide aims to help NGOs and grassroots groups co-create self-sustaining programs to empower low income women. It provides them with a step-by-step process on how to design and facilitate such programs using a human-centered design and train-the-trainer approach.

Bindi programs aim to empower women by giving them access to knowledge, new skills and financial opportunities and developing their self-confidence and leadership skills. Through their participation, women will become “bindis” in their community. Bindis are women who share the knowledge and skills they acquired with other women in their community, thus becoming leaders and catalysts of change in their community.

The Bindi Guide consists of four main phases: Define and Co-Create, Train and Bootstrap, Make it Self-Sustaining, Evaluate and Refine. It was created as part of Design for America of NYU’s winning idea for the Amplify Challenge on OpenIDEO. The approach was tested through several collaborations with NGOs working with women. Read our guide and good luck in your Bindi endeavor!

who we are

Design for America of New York University (DFA NYU) is a student club using human-centered design to tackle social issues and develop innovative solutions for and with our communities. Since 2011, we have actively participated to OpenIDEO, an open innovation for social innovation. The Bindi Guide emerged from our participation to an OpenIDEO challenge on Women Safety in Spring 2014. Our Bindi team is composed of undergraduate and graduate students and a faculty at NYU.
Contact us at nyu@designforamerica.com

OUR APPROACH

Our project was developed using the Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach. HCD is also the approach at the core of the process we propose in the Bindi Guide.
Human-Centered Design is an approach to solving a problem that begins with gaining deep empathy for the customer’s needs, hopes, and aspirations for the future. It helps us understand not only people and their needs but also the broader context that shapes their daily lives.

It is a creative problem solving approach that assumes that people are the experts of their context and culture and thus the ones who can find the best solutions. This is why it always starts with a deep dive to understand people’s context and needs. This deep dive will allow you to come up with insights and help you see new opportunities and generate a lot of new ideas and innovative solutions.
Human-centered design is intrinsically optimist. Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the most challenging ones like women empowerment, are solvable. (The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, IDEO.org).
To learn more about HCD, watch this video created by IDEO.org

THE BINDI NAME

A Bindi is a decorative mark worn in the middle of the forehead by Indian women.
We chose the name bindi because it is said to protect against demons or bad luck. It is also supposed to retain energy and concentration. The name will change depending on the cultural context but what remains is the idea of protection, strength, support, and energy. For example, in the pilot in Nepal, women are not called bindis but sahayogi saathis, which mean helpful friends in Nepali.

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OUR STORY: OPENIDEO TO TOOLKIT

In March 2014 Design for America of NYU (DFA NYU) participated on OpenIDEO in the first Amplify Challenge on Women Safety.
Our original idea was a service and associated toolkit which tackled the problem of information sharing and community building by creating a new role – the community concierge, who would inform and connect women within the community. This project sought to identify and train female leaders, who in turn provide skill-training and access to resources to other women in their community.

In order to prototype our idea we contacted Women for Human Rights (WHR), an NGO based in Kathmandu, Nepal. This was the beginning of our collaborative journey with WHR. After the idea was announced as an OpenIDEO winning idea in July 2014, together with WHR we refined it and formed what we now call the Bindi. From the start, WHR engaged the women of Tripureshwar by getting their feedback on the original idea and asking them for input, adopting a co-creation approach.

First meeting organized by WHR with women of Tripureshwar, April 2014

In January 2016, a group of DFA NYU traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal to conduct design research and light prototyping with WHR. The research trip was supported by the Amplify program (a collaboration between IDEO.org and UKAID, the UK Department for International Development). This research and prototyping trip allowed us to test and validate our assumptions and further develop our idea - both the program and the associated guide.
In parallel, in February 2016, we started a pilot with a NY-based NGO, Wishwas, which works with immigrant women in Queens. Our aim with this second pilot was to see how the Bindi program could be adapted and implemented in a different community and context. This helped us refine our idea for the program and for the Bindi guide.

Thanks to these two pilots and the feedback of IDEO.org, we were able to refine our idea and focused on developing a step-by-step guide to help NGOs implement a community-centered program to empower women.

nepal PILOT

In April 2014, Women for Human Rights (WHR) accepted our invitation to collaborate on the idea our team had posted on OpenIDEO for the Amplify Women Safety Challenge.
DFA NYU idea was announced as a winning idea for funding in Summer 2014. With the funding, WHR was to pilot our idea in Tripureshwar, a slum in Kathmandu. Amplify invited DFA NYU team to travel to Nepal to work as design consultants with WHR in order to refine the idea using Human-Centered Design methods.

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queens PILOT

In February 2016, we started our second pilot; this time in Queens, New York. We collaborated with Wishwas for the Spring 2016 semester to explore whether and how Wishwas could refine its program using the Bindi approach. For our team, this was an opportunity to see how the Bindi program could be adapted and implemented in a different community and context, and to understand how to refine the Bindi guide so that it can help different organizations.

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the bindi guide

The Bindi Guide proposes a step-by-step process to help NGOs and grassroots groups designing and co-creating a community-based program for empowering women.
Our guide is open source. You can take it, try it and adapt it to your context. Feel free to contact us (nyu@designforamerica.com) if you have any questions or if you want to share your experience with the Bindi guide. We'd love to hear from you.

A DFA NYU PROJECT

Bindi is a project of Design For America of New York University.

The Bindi Guide by DFA NYU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.