Retos

A digital platform to manage and sustain local innovation

2018 - Present
MIT Media Lab | Diversa
Colombia, Guatemala
#PD #UX/UI design
︎ In progress

Motivation

An increasing number of programs in the areas of engineering and design within all academia, industry, and non-for profit sectors, face the issue of continuity. This is an important issue since many of these programs are increasingly trying to avoid one-shot initiatives leading to short-term outcomes. These organizations are faced with the tension of wanting to collaborate with communities on the ground while lacking the resources to sustain long-standing relationships.

Communities, on the other hand, are looking for alternatives to maintain appropriate documentation and records for the collaborative initiatives they are involved in. This allows them to share the process and results with others, systematically capture their experiences collaborating with various stakeholders when applying for grants or other resources, and benefit from a larger repository of rural, local innovation initiatives across a larger geography.

With the Retos platform, we solve for the long-standing problem of continuity in community-based initiatives in design and engineering.

What we are doing

Along with our network of rural partners, we designed Retos (Spanish for challenges), a digital platform to document, access, and share key information on local innovation initiatives.

By using the platform, teams comprised of a wide range of stakeholders (e.g. students, mentors, professors, community members), can add key information at various stages of the design process as they go. Each stage maps to a design milestone and allows team members to include videos, technical drawings, field reports, pictures and other assets. Initiatives collate all information on each challenge: team members and organizations involved, design decisions and assets created, who worked on each challenge, and lessons learned among others. Simultaneously, the platform builds a repository of all challenges these various stakeholders have worked on, so that other users and collectives can benefit from it. At the end of each cycle, local communities with support of their team members, state possible paths moving forward with each initiative. These transition points allow upcoming teams to connect with all relevant information associated with each challenge and use stated paths as a starting point for collaboration with local communities.

The Retos digital platform is the digital companion of the Retos service, a model to help universities, non-for-profits, and industry, to connect with rural communities on local innovation projects.

Contributions

UX design, interaction design

Collaborators

Diversa communities network, MIT Solve, MIT Media Lab, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad Sergio Arboleda, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, MIT Libraries, Colorado School of Mines.