Giraffe is a charity organisation who's goal is toward hiring people with additional support needs and who may not quite be ready for the world of work and providing them with triangle and support with the hope that they work towards a point where they are. My role in the organisation was quite unique, I had first been employed as a support worker / supervisor but my role also included working on the admin / progress side of things too. The way Giraffe operated was through a pathways system. After they had been accepted into our team the service users would then be presented with a small form to fill in (with support of course) so that we could better understand there needs and individual goals. However, the more I worked with this system the more I found that it didn't really work.
The issue was, in my mind, that the format of the pathways form was not something that people with any sort of additional support needs could easily understand and because of this there level of personal engagement was suffering.
This issue, I realised, could be solved with design. So I approached my boss and asked if I could have a go at coming up with a solution.
At the time, I don't think I had quite realised just how much I had taken on but I also looking back, I wouldn't change a thing, the project ended up being about actually opening communication with the people effected and through that communication we ended up with a solution that we could all be very proud of.
