Flourish

For the course ‘Design for Social Innovation’, a design project was set up. In collaboration with the Brabant Outcome Fund (BOF), a look was taken into how an educational aspect within the BOF could be emphasized by design. The Transformative Practices framework was used for guidance.

The choice was made to implement education into the design in the form of giving and receiving feedback. However, many barriers to provide effective/constructive feedback have been identified. Effective feedback should provide reassurance about achieved competency, guide future learning, reinforce positive actions, identify and correct areas for improvement and promote reflection. Effective feedback can be summarized by STOP (Specific, Timely, Objective and based on Observed behaviors, Plan for improvement).

As a result, FLOURISH was created, a toolkit for constructive feedback giving and receiving in the professional environment. The toolkit can be used through the following steps; firstly, everyone has to read the instructions to the toolkit. Secondly, the entrepreneur writes down some topics on the topic tiles that they would like to receive feedback on. Next, the entrepreneur does their presentation whilst the rest of the people write their feedback on post-its when listening to the presentation. The next step is for the participants to place their feedback on the fitting topic tiles. This is followed by a constructive discussion led by the entrepreneur about the received feedback. Finally, the entrepreneur writes a plan of action for each topic during the discussion which offers them a specific plan of action to work with.