Practical Action wanted us to do a discovery process for the Flood Solutions Catalogue, which forms part of the wider Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, who also works the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), the International Institution for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Centre (Wharton). They also wanted Aptivate to develop a central resource with a key aim of providing information and support resources for communities affected by flooding and the organisations that support them in Peru. We aimed to run a user centred discovery process and to train Practical Action in Lima to continue this work independently.

We interviewed the main stakeholders in the project; these included community members from the river Rimac area of Peru, community leaders and national institutions that have a local presence and a large scope to react to flooding. Aptivate worked closely with Rob from Practical Action and also trained Sachin Sapkota from the Nepalese Practical Action office, who provided valuable insights into the main issues.

We made extensive use of Google+ community to contain all of the audio and visual output, as well as all the resources. This enabled a quick sharing of all the content and a very effective way to feed back to the users. We set up workshops in Lima with people from the community on the river Rimac. This gave us the opportunity to really learn about people’s lives and the issues they faced. It was a very interactive and hands on workshop, which really helped people get to know each other.