Last Friday, ITP Resident Researcher and RapidFTR spiritual advisor John Dimatos spoke at PSFK, a "good ideas" conference for designers and creative thinkers. His talk was part of the day's Changemaking segment, and he devoted a good part of his talk to introducing RapidFTR and explaining how a few of the choices we've made could serve as inspiration for the designers in the audience.

The Political Expediency of an API

John spent some time describing our decision to focus initially on the back end of the system.  Our strategy has been to build something that's flexible enough to work with multiple mobile clients, and to make sure  the information we collect can be easily extracted and incorporated into the databases and formats in use by UNICEF and other NGOs working in the field.  John called this "the political expediency of an API," because our goal is to build something that helps child protection professionals do their jobs, not to second guess the systems they have in place.

Design Through Lack of Hubris

I like this phrase so much I made John credit me in his talk. He used it to illustrate another founding principle of the RapidFTR team: We want to make something that's useful and adoptable. RapidFTR began as a student project for a design class in a program that is all about creativity and imagination. Student designers have lots of freedom because their projects can be thought experiments that don't actually need to get made. There's no shame in that--plenty of important architecture competitions are won by designs that push the field forward but are impossible to realize--but making big statements or solving huge problems has never been our goal. We've focused instead on something far less splashy: streamlining and speeding up a process that's already in place; taking something that works and making it work better. We call it "faster paper" because RapidFTR is not about ending war or making sure no child is ever left unaccompanied. All we want to do is cut the time it takes to get a child the care she needs and the safety she deserves from months to weeks and weeks to days. It's an achievable goal, and an important one.

John brought a lot of insight into our project as well as his own, Water Canary.  It was a great talk, and I'm particularly fond of his final slide:

You can follow John on Twitter: @dimatosj