Design Workshops and Ghosts

Day 2 of our time with Laerdal was just as memorable as the first. Having convinced ourselves that we weren’t jetlagged, we tried again to wake up for the sunrise - sadly, we snoozed too many alarms and missed it once again. We walked over to Laerdal with Cansu, determined to learn as much as we could before our field immersions.

Our day began with a meeting with Signe, a midwife currently studying simulation training methods for postpartum hemorrhage (PPH). She presented research for her PhD thesis, comparing the treatment of PPH training in Norway and Tanzania. After her talk describing various approaches and the use of Mama Natalie within different cultures, we were able to better understand the importance of self efficacy in training and of training in the team you will work with.

An important takeaway: Understand the cultures we will be designing for.

We then learned about Laerdal’s design process, from identifying the challenge to manufacturing the final product, and the outputs of each step in the process. In this session, we focused on diverging and converging throughout, from identifying many needs and prototyping multiple solutions to narrowing our ideas down to the one we choose to pursue.

After learning more about Mama Natalie, we had the chance to tour the workshop and learn about rapid prototyping from Olav. We saw everything from silicone molds to large machines, allowing them to use even scrap material to create prototypes. We also saw eight of the iterations of Mama Natalie that evolved into the final product - it was very interesting to see how drastically the model changed through the process.

Important lesson from the tour: Prototype early! No matter how simple the prototype is so we can get feedback early on.

And then it came time to integrate the entire design process in a one and a half hour session with Cansu. The five of us and Tor Inge designed a product to remedy a difficult learning experience for our partners. We interviewed each other about challenging learning experiences, identified needs, designed solutions, made prototypes, and got user feedback. From Sakina’s motor bike simulation to help Ramji learn to drive in different conditions, to Teja’s program to help Tor Inge learn to play the accordion, to Kendall’s solution to help me learn to code (by making yellow spirals), we came up with a wide variety of needs and solutions - in a very short amount of time.

Lessons learned: 1. Ask open ended questions whenever possible, and 2. sketch out as many solutions as possible (Sketch, not write).

Teja explaining his app to help Tor Inge learn to play the accordion

We experienced our first (and only) dose of rainy Norwegian weather after leaving Laerdal. We set off on a short drive to Utstein Abbey, one of the oldest and best preserved monasteries in Norway. The view on the way there was gorgeous, with large fields of green flocks of sheep. We had heard about Utstein guidelines for CPR and training, and knew influential conferences were still being held in the building. We learned from our guide that abbey had once housed the King of Norway, and had then been changed to a monastery, housing monks living on a strict routine. We saw the kloster (outdoor courtyard) and church, and heard the story of Christopher Garmann.

Kloster at Utstein Abbey

Legend has it that when his wife, Cecelia, died. Garmann promised her that he would not remarry. However, 20 years later, he fell in love with a women 36 years his junior. As he was at the altar in Stavanger Cathedral ready to marry again, he collapsed, claiming he saw Cecelia’s ghost in a white dress in the cathedral. Garmann fell into a coma and died days later. It is said that the ghost of Cecelia still haunts Utstein Abbey (that explains the “wind” that mysteriously opened a door for us). And the gloomy, rainy weather definitely helped set the mood of our ghost story.

The burial site of Christopher and Cecelia Garmann

After a lengthy discussion about Cecelia and a short nap in the taxi ride back to Stavanger, we had dinner by the harbor and enjoyed a slight glimpse of the sunset. We headed back to our rooms for a night of revising our interview guides and prepping for out last day in Stavanger. 

The sunset on the walk back to the hotel (We lucked out with perfect weather for our entire trip)