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Najia Ashar Conducted “Design Your Safety” Workshop of Journalists at IBA Karachi

September 11, 20152

Najia Ashar Conducted “Design Your Safety” Workshop of Journalists at IBA Karachi

JSK Fellow at Stanford University form Pakistan and Senior broadcast journalist, Najia Ashar held a workshop for journalists’ security at the Centre for Excellence in Journalism-IBA. The workshop was based on the innovative design thinking methods, and it aimed to assist journalists evaluate, brainstorm, and plan methods to deal with the challenges of security and safety journalists in the field face.

This past august, this one-day workshop organised a gathering of working journalists to converse and work on applied solutions for their safety. So far Najia Ashar has conducted two such workshops in Karachi one at Karachi Press Club and other at CEJ-IBA. The Design Your Safety is a collaborating and lively workshop for journalists.

Design thinking has recently become a very popular method among journalists who are concerned about enhancing creativity and engagement with their audiences. Stanford University’s d.school proposes a five-step course to start design thinking that can be used in the field as well as newsrooms. These steps are empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

Founded at the celebrated Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, “design-thinking” first describes the problem and then outfits the solutions through interactive and innovative collaboration between accomplices. The goal of this exercise is to generate a more vibrant and collaborative training sessions to support journalists in swiftly identifying, understanding, and retaining safety and security tips.

One of the participants of Design Your Safety Workshop, Ali Riaz said about his experience:

“I am really thankful to Najia Ashar and Ashar Ali for providing an opportunity to take part in today’s highly interactive workshop at IBA. They simply stimulated and played a catalytic role in utilizing creative thought process after a long time. I admit that I have rarely attended such a good learning oriented workshop based on back to back brainstorming and activities. I wish them both a very best of luck for future training programs.”

While talking to MediaSpring PK, Najia Ashar said that it more of such workshops will be taking place in the future in other cities too and soon she will be conducting a workshop in Lahore.