How Might We Design an Immersive Experience to Help a Geographically Distributed Team Share Crucial Insights and Unite Around a Shared Mission to Combat Malnutrition?
Client: International Rescue Committee
The Challenge
The International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) nutrition team, dispersed across multiple countries throughout Africa, was managing a complex, high-stakes three-year project dedicated to addressing severe acute malnutrition in young children. As they marked the critical halfway point of this challenging initiative, team members identified the need to improve cross-border knowledge sharing, team integration, and data utilization. To address this, the IRC needed to design a collaborative, immersive space where distributed country teams could align on data interpretation, share success stories, and co-create unified, high-coverage healthcare models to maximize regional impact.
The Outcome
The Dakar workshop successfully transformed a highly distributed public health initiative into a deeply unified, family-like collaborative network. Country teams co-created individual "Ideal Journey Maps," which were then collaboratively combined into a single, consensus-driven, best-in-class roadmap that served as a standardized operational blueprint for data utilization and cost-effectiveness.
By mapping out work relationships, the team established transparent communication flows and resolved long-standing administrative ambiguities. Ultimately, the collaborative sessions dismantled regional silos and equipped nutrition specialists with concrete, repeatable HCD tools to lead future program planning with empathy, cohesion, and shared strategic momentum.
The Approach
To bridge these operational and cultural divides, noodle partnered with Quicksand Design Studio to design and facilitate an immersive, multi-day workshop experience in Dakar, Senegal. Rooted deeply in human-centered design (HCD) principles, the workshop structure walked participants through a structured daily arc, moving from "Recognising Multiple Perspectives" to "Coming Together as a Team," and ultimately "Imagining New Ways of Working". We leveraged a variety of custom-designed, low-tech HCD exercises under the broad categories of Empathetic Connection and Collaborative Data Synthesis to build team camaraderie and facilitate critical information-sharing.
