NewYouthHack: Using Design Thinking to Reimagine Settlement Services for New Canadians

In 2018–2019 we applied Design Thinking (DT) to reimagining settlement services for refugee and immigrant youth in Canada. DT continues to gain followers as a practical approach to incorporating human factors into the design process. One insight motivating DT is that design is a series of experiments in which we learn about our users. Iterative prototyping and user feedback are paramount. But we also wanted to expose them to career pathways related to software design and development. In this paper we report on (1) the NewYouthHack process, (2) the resulting app and central role played by social interactions, and (3) the framework we developed to support this work.