UPLINK: Crowdsourcing innovation to address the world’s most pressing challenges
Aim
Design, build & deploy a digital platform that can crowd source innovative ideas & knowledge to help reach the sustainable development goals.
Role
As a product designer at the World Economic Forum, I led the design for the MVP phase of ‘Uplink’. From understanding stakeholder needs & aspirations, user research, prototyping to overseeing the build & first phase deployment of the platform. I led a team of 5 interaction & visual designers to bring the project to life.
Outcome
In about half a year, I helped give tangible shape to a broad and ambitious undertaking for the organisation. Uplink was launched at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos in 2020 and has grown from addressing 1 to 12 challenge areas with over 10,000 active contributors.
BACKGROUND
As an international organisation, the World Economic Forum aims to bring together world leaders and experts to collaborate. However, with the pressing need to meet the sustainable development goals in the next 10 years, it was essential to expand both its reach and impact.
The idea of UpLink was created to bring together anyone and everyone with the drive to make a positive impact and to amplify their ideas through the resources in the Forum’s network. Aimed at connecting with a demographic that historically the organisation did not engage with such as teenagers, young entrepreneurs and activists; UpLink was a difficult design challenge.
USER JOURNEYS
A high level overview of how the key personas interact using the platform.
Key pages from the final design
Breaking down a problem as large as a Sustainable Development Goal in an engaging manner was a big challenge, We tackled it by creating ‘Topics’ & ‘Challenges’.
A ‘challenge’ page explains the problem & encourages users to try and address them.
Users can make a ‘contribution’ either as new knowledge or as a solution.
