Soobin Song

Soobin Song is a service designer who believes systemic changes enabling a creative approach design the future of the world as a holistic perspective. She is passionate about exploring the potential impact of service design to lead technology and social innovation across different sectors including the digital industry, fashion, healthcare and environment.

She joined the RCA Service Design programme to further cultivate her ability that can design interactive and affective experience design that provides integrated service in diverse touch points with the users. During the course, she worked on multiple topics such as the future of work for market traders, financial guidance, AI and new interaction having partners with Ernst & Young, Rainbird AI and Modal. She plans to do service design bridging industries, social community and users and induce the change of society through visual contents, products and physical space.

Finished her BA in Industrial Design at Hongik University and built up her professional experience as a User Experience and Brand Experience designer in planning, marketing and advertising fields at Cheil Worldwide, Amore Pacific and 3Developer.

MEVo is developed with the vision to reduce the maternal inequalities faced by the South Asian Women in the UK. The main goals include understanding and embedding the voice of the South Asian Mothers using a self run and iterative framework for system innovation.

MEVo aims to be adopted by Royal College of Midwives and National Maternity Voices to enable their practitioners; Midwives, Maternity Voice partnership chairs and others within the Local Maternity Systems to embed the voice of the mothers in the service improvement, development and evaluation processes leading to transformation of maternity services locally.

MEVo provides a stage based method that is actionable, seamless and guided along each step of the process by the platform, with easy to implement tools that are culturally sensitive. The MEVo platform publishes the use cases of the method to collate a library of good practices that can inspire practitioners across the country.

WHAT IS MEVo? — MEVo is a method for champions (Healthcare Professionals within the Local Maternity System) to facilitate dialogue with South Asian mothers to record, collect evidence and embed the voice of the mothers in the transformation process locally using a stage based guided set of tools supported by the MEVo platform.

THE CONTEXT — We mapped the barriers into individual capacities, interpersonal relationship, community, service delivery ecosystem and socio-political context. Understanding the cultural context of South Asian Women we defined the point of entry in the service delivery eco system with the aim to improve care by designing and delivering services that are accessible and relevant to the local context and lived realities.

STAKEHOLDER PROBLEM — Within the Local Maternity System, responsible for designing and delivering services to the population, we identified key stakeholders whose role is vital in embedding the service user needs, who we identified as champions. Let’s meet the champions and understand their barriers for embedding the voice of service users.

HOW MEVo IS USED? — MEVo’s 7 stages & Tools

BENEFITS & IMPACT OF MEVo — Through MEVo, South Asian Mothers get a safe space to express their needs and opinions and in turn get the opportunity to access services that help them prepare better for their maternal journeys. Our champion is able to understand the needs of the mothers and build a qualitative data set that can inform the plan for the department. Over time MEVo enables building capacities to deliver user centred care at a local level and informs personal practice, cultural competency and highlights the good practices.

BEHIND THE SCENES — A special thanks to Benash Nazmeen and her colleagues who have supported us through the project. We are also indebted to all the women who have supported us, from the streets of Alperton, Church Street and virtually who have poured their heart out to us and shared their emotional maternity journey for our project. Our project is an ode to women from Ethnic Minorities who go through the troubles of life and bring a newborn child to this world. From women, for women and by women. Thank you!

In collaboration with Benash Nazmeen, Cultural Liaison Midwife at Bolton we have tested MEVo and run virtual workshops with her and South Asian Mothers to understand the usability of tools for initiating dialogue, collecting evidence and analysing the data. Through the multiple sessions we were able to build and test the tools to fit within the seven stages of MEVo.

Over the next few months we wish to run the pilot at Bolton BL3 hub, set up meetings with RCM and NMV for collaboration and reach out to more champions to endorse MEVo. Simultaneously we will work on expanding the tools to cover more communities by adding relevant images, languages and scenarios. Finally, build the library of good practises, which is the most important outcome for Mevo as it highlights what’s working and also inspires more people around.

In Collaboration with:

Geetika Kejriwal

Hyunjin Jo

Soobin Song

In Collaboration with:

Social

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Royal College of Art