Design Researcher

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is among the world’s leading humanitarian relief and development organizations. For 80 years, the IRC has been at the forefront of every major humanitarian initiative to assist people uprooted by war, persecution, or civil conflict. IRC staff go to the toughest places, implement both immediate response and long lasting programs, and conduct the type of applied research and advocacy the aid community needs to continually push itself to find better solutions for people. In all its country programs and in the US, IRC teams partner with local governments, community organizations and private sector companies to achieve measurable improvements in people’s economic well-being, safety, health and education.

The IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab designs, tests, and scales life-changing, cost-effective solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. By applying the IRC’s deep technical expertise and field experience with a range of skills from the behavioral sciences, human-centered design, rigorous research, and multi-disciplinary problem-solving in humanitarian contexts, we work to develop breakthrough solutions that combine creativity and rigor, openness and expertise, and a desire to think afresh with the experience of a large-scale implementing organization.

The Design Researcher will work on a new health project within the Airbel Impact Lab and supported by the Health Technical Unit called Dela. In partnership with Medic Mobile and Think-it, an engineering collective, we’re looking to build and test a digital tool to enhance supervision and support for CHWs. Dela is a video based remote supervision tool that helps supervisor Community Health Workers (CHWs) remotely supervise field CHWs. Due to COVID-19, supportive supervision will be more essential now than ever to ensure adherence to protocols and guidelines, especially as supervisors may not be able to travel out to CHWs to conduct supervision visits because they may be overwhelmed by cases at their health facilities.

In the next phases of work, the teams in Liberia will work with designers and engineers to build, test and collect qualitative and quantitative data on the functionality and feasibility of Dela. The design researcher will be responsible for designing a research plan, conducting the research and synthesizing the feedback.

Major Responsibilities

The Design Research Consultant will lead in-depth qualitative interviews with CHWs and supervisors and community members enrolled in the program, build insights, provide recommendations and report out findings. Specifically, their responsibilities will include:

• Develop all research plans in concert with team
• Conducting up to 60, 45-minute interviews with CHWs, supervisors and other stakeholders during the prototyping and build phase of the program
• Generate ethical review assets needed for evaluation
• Create research protocols
• Collecting and analyzing data analytics on the usage of the prototypes and build. 
• Research existing supportive supervision solutions including workarounds
• Research data and connectivity environments and data transfer solutions
• Transcribe notes in agreed upon format and upload into shared drive
• Build insights from interviews and synthesize user research based
• Draft metrics and measures for evaluating our progress and success
• Build insights from design activities and share for review and input from the team
• Summarize Dela design decisions, learnings and plans in a prototyping deck.
• Write final design research report summarizing findings after the build phase
• Assist the Project Lead with embedding outputs into final program and research reports

Deliverables

• “Prototype” research plan
• “Build” research plan
• “Prototype” learning report including synthesis of qualitative research findings
• “Build” learning report including recommendations
• Learning assets including protocols, paper prototypes and supportive activities
• Desk research report on existing solutions in country, data connectivity environments and current workarounds