With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, VisionSpring had the opportunity to partner with the design firm IDEO to develop a model for integrating eye care for children into our existing work in India. Anitha Gopalan, Sales Innovations Manager for VisionSpring India, reflects on the experience.

When our team was called to design an approach for our Vision Entrepreneurs to screen and sell eyeglasses for children, a completely new model for rural India and for VisionSpring, we knew we would need to take an innovative approach in order to listen to the market and ensure we design a program that really works. We reached out to IDEO, pioneers of Human Centered Design, and were lucky enough to have Jocelyn Wyatt and Sandy Speicher conduct workshops and training sessions centered on this challenge.

IDEO provided us us valuable insight on the processes behind ideation and prototyping. With their help, we conducted field research and identified key barriers to the challenge of empowering our Vision Entrepreneurs to screen children for eye conditions. Some of the results of our research were unexpected; for example, we learned early on that kids are afraid to reveal their imperfections. Through the design process, we came up with innovative ways to help kids overcome their fear and embarrassment, such as having children practice screening other children and putting up pictures of movie stars who wear glasses on the walls. We found that these tools helped children feel empowered in the screening process, as well as helped to destigmatize eye problems.

We also learned that children can be a major lever in providing eye care to families. This is a lesson that had already been learned in relation to other health care issues; for example, parents we interviewed explained that many of them learned to boil water from their children, who learned about the benefits of this in school. Thanks to the success of campaigns such as these, many parents now look to their children for guidance on basic health and hygiene issues. We believe that if we can educate children about eye care and empower them to get their own eyes screened, we may well be able to access their parents as well. These insights proved to us that, while we still have a ways to go in designing our model, we are well on our way to establishing a new model for effectively serving children in need while strengthening our overall sales.

Thanks to our work with Jocelyn and Sandy, as well as our past work with Acumen Fund Fellow and IDEO employee John Tucker, we have come a long way with our innovations processes. In the last year, we have tested and successfully launched a line of photochromic glasses. We also designed a flip chart for our Vision Entrepreneurs to standardize our communication and win credibility in C-Towns (mid-size rural cities in India). We are excited about our ability to continue replicating the Human Centered Design process to create and bring to scale new approaches to providing eye care in the developing world.

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