Impath, bullying prevention service

Impath is a service dedicated to schools that promotes playful and effective activities with the aim of preventing bullying.
It offers a range of tools to empower and educate children, parents and teachers in a playful and engaging way.

Our Process

What differentiated this project from other service design projects was precisely the process, dictated by a very broad brief: the theme of well-being.
We devided the research in three main parts: Exploring, Describing, and Explaining.

EXPLORING: Based on our assumptions we started exploring existing projects and cases related to wellbeing. We choose to work on the area of ‘Fragility’.

DESCRIBING: After immersing ourselves in the concept of fragility and further understanding who is struggling today with different kinds of abuse interviewing a Lawyer, we have come to the topic of ‘bullying‘ and explored it through literature review, case studies and more interviews with a kindergarten teacher and a child expert.

EXPLAINING: Further development brought us to work on teenagers and we started studying the inter-relationship of the various common issues that touch them trying to find the roots of these problems.

Through quantitative & qualitative research we gained great insights in order to design solutions, test them and afterwards define a business model.

From research to Concept generation

The main problems we’ve been able to identify and that needed to be solved are:

• We have noticed, in the first place, in the professors a strong lack of training as regards the issue of bullying.
• Secondly, a strong lack of empathy and information in children, who often see everything that differs from the norm as different and therefore wrong.
• Lastly we identified a huge communication gap between parents and children.

All of the information mentioned above, brought us to create a service to provide information and skills for the children, parents and teachers to prevent and stop bullying in an interactive and playful way.

We defined the concept of an educational program for schools to educate the 10-14 year-old students. The program is mainly composed of three parts:

• assessment activities,
• online interactive program,
• offline role-playing.

All these activities bring awareness and knowledge for students, teachers and parents for preventing bullying incidents.

Together with Gioia Gabellieri, a psychologist and child expert, we co-created an accurate concept of experiences by developing the details and adding activities such as Cinema therapy to our starting proposal.

Element I – Assessment

Through the online platform of ‘impath’ children start their journey by filling a questionnaire. At the end of the online evaluation, each child is assigned a card representing a character with a brief description that refers to his temperament. Every description leads in a metaphorical way to one of the key figures of the bullying circle: verbal bully, physical bully, victim, and neutral character. Through the cards it is possible in the first place to push the children to a partial personal reflection, and secondly to spark interest in the next activities.
The data collected from the assessment are also used to send a report to teachers and headmaster about the level of bullying and victimization within the school context.

Element II – Interactive fiction

The second activity proposed to children is an online game called interactive fiction. Starting from the attributed character, each student is invited to immerse themselves in an animated online story. Each story is characterized by a series of interruptions during which the user is asked how he/she wants his character to behave: in this way, each story takes different turns based on the choices the student makes during the interruptions.
Thanks to this activity, children are able to become aware of the consequences of their actions.
Moreover the activity helps the child expert to collect a series of information about the students, on their attitudes, temperament and fragility and guide him/her in facilitating the next activities.

Element III – Cinema Therapy

The third activity proposed within the Impath program is cinema therapy.
Used by many therapists, group cinema therapy helps them address different issues and translate kids’ feedbacks and reflections into useful information to trace a psychological and emotional profile about each of them.

At the end of this moment, conveyed by the help of the expert, the children proceed to co-create the scenario that will be used to carry out the fourth activity proposed in the impath program, the roleplay session.

Element IV – Scenario Building
( Steps before Role playing )

In order to be engaged, children need to be involved through all the things they do. Therefore, instead of creating a content for them to roleplay, we enabled them to co-design and play roles on their own with the guidance of the facilitator.

After watching the movie, kids describe the movie genre and central fragility in the story. They talk together and define the details of the characters, challenging situations and feelings they perceived during the cinema therapy and fill the scenario board together. As the board gets filled, the general scenario and the tasks(scripts) of the roles are written by the help of the facilitator and the class is ready to act the role-play.

Element V – Role-Playing

Students are split into two smaller classes. Some students may have the same card sorted, so they co-play the same role together (as a team of bully, victim, or bystander). They are advised by the facilitator to stick closely to their scripts when they first start playing roles with their peers. Then as students gain experience with acting role-playing, they are encouraged to be more imaginative, to develop a better understanding of their personalities, and to “give substance to their roles.”

Element VI – Reflection session And Iteration

When all students have played their roles, they will discuss and express their thoughts together to better understand how their colleagues conceive their behavior and how to react in a particular situation. After reflections kids iterate the roleplay in order to better improvise and take positions.

Testing the service system

Prototyping & testing the service stages were iteratedmany times everytime we were concentrating on each part of the system. By every iteration we defined purposes, techniques, tools, and stakeholders we needed to involve.

The most successfull tests we made were with a Middle school teacher and a child expert.

We intended to ‘Understand whether children feel too shy to participate in role-play’. We chose ‘observation of spontaneous participant actions’ as method and the ‘Bodystorming & Role-playing’ prototyping technique for role-playing to identify the problems.
For this aim, we asked Gulzhamal Bisembayeva (middle schoold teacher) to test the role-play section with her students and provide us some feedbacks of the session. Through this prototyping session we gain priceless insights and ideas that helped us to refine the details better.

We repeated a test with our child specialist Gioia. During this session, we identified our last service issues. We had a service walkthrough with her to explain her Impath journey.
We understood that specialists should operate in classrooms individually and without teachers, because the interaction between the children and the teacher could filter the discovery of certain behavioral signals.
We also understood that other activities, such as cinema therapy and online fiction, would benefit the service and build empathy along the journey.