Career Bridge was a design service project to help young mothers to take care of their kids. We tried to reduce job discrimination by making it easy for companies to offer longer parental leaves to both fathers and mothers. Since our main resource was university students, for research and to help mothers, we ended up designing a service where students would be able to get internships in companies to cover for parents while they got their parental leave.
Admittedly, this service runs on a couple of assumptions that might not be true, like that enough students would be willing to volunteer in this way, or that they have enough skills to actually take over parents’ jobs in meaningful way. Furthermore, it could have negative consequences, since if companies find they can hire younger people that can do the same things parents can do at a lower salary, then they might end up firing the same people we were intending to help.
However, I’m proud of this project, because it was my first service design project, and it was the first time I worked closely in a team with people from cultures very different to my own. It took a lot of effort to learn to communicate and work with them, but I think I learned a lot about teamwork and project management thanks to it. Furthermore, it was my first time using co-design and interviews as design research methods, and I was amazed by how useful these methods could be, specially co-design which was so similar to the workshops I did in Public Speaking.