Refu-Job

• Type: Service Design project,


• Date: Spring 2016,


• Collaboration: Red Cross - Center Avnstrup

Background

These years, Europe including Denmark is facing an enormous influx of refugees coming into the countries. These people are seeking a new and safe haven. The political debate in the European countries about how to deal with all these people are peaking, and the immigration systems in the european countries are not capable of dealing with the large amount of refugees.

In the process of getting asylum, the asylum seeker is going through the same processes in every institution within the system because of closed data systems and no corporation or knowledge sharing between actors.

We therefore decided to work around the following problem statement:
How can a service system empower refugees to be able to impact the integration system of refugee allocation focusing on early-into-job strategies?

Process

Empathizing with people

During a talk with a person about his experience fleeing to Denmark, he told about how difficult it was to arrive in Denmark without the possibility to get a job. Even though he had finished two years of law school before fleeing, the only place he was able to get a job was as an assistant in a canteen. At the same time, he was thrown around in the asylum system without any self-determination of his future location. This made us feel the need for improving the possibilities for refugees to have an impact on where in the country they are being placed, and help the process of getting a job in the danish labor marked.

Analyzing the current system

Since this project was designed for the asylum and integration system, it was relevant for us to provide an overview of the Danish asylum process.
The asylum process can be separated into three phases.
This project was dealing with the two first phases of the asylum process, where the refugee comes to Denmark, gets asylum, moves to the allocated municipality and gets involved in integrative initiatives in that municipality.

The service system unifies stakeholders as the Danish Immigration Service, asylum centres, municipalities, asylum seekers and refugees creating transparency, and knowledge can be shared to avoid ineffective, unconstructive and repeating processes pacifying and neglecting asylum seekers, who are the whole reason of the existence of the political integration system.

Co-creating and Co-designing the service

Multiple sessions have been executed to get a better understanding of the system we are designing into, and to involve the different actors in the development of the service.

The sessions included:

- A 'desktop walkthrough' with a worker from a Red Cross asylum center, which helped us form our understanding of the early competence screening of the refugees.
- A co-creation session with a consultant from KL (Local Government Denmark) with the focus of improving the touchpoint along the journey for the refugees and the municipalities.
- A session with a former refugee with the purpose of understanding the emotions he had during his asylum seeking journey.

Visualizing how the service works

Prototype and test

Three different prototypes were made in order to test our if the right findings had been implemented into the system in a way that suited the interest of the users.

The first prototype was designed for the refugees to fill out their own 'competence profile'.
The second prototype was designed for the asylum center workers. This prototype had some administrative rights to approve refugee profiles and to give recommendations.
The third prototype was for the municipality to search for refugees matching jobs in the given municipality.
The three prototypes were made as wireframes and tested on the users.