Designing Environmental Solutions

When we set out to find solutions to urgent environmental problems, one of the biggest opportunities to consider is how these solutions can empower stakeholders—whether those are communities, organizations, governments, or individuals.  Rather than solely focusing on technical functionality, it’s essential to design with and for the end users of a solution; this helps us to create more appropriate, equitable, and scalable solutions.  Borrowing from the processes of human-centered design and design thinking, this module introduces ideation and innovation tools to spark, design, develop, and test ideas and potential solutions for environmental problems. 

Through this module, you will practice applying innovation tools and methodologies; research and design new solution ideas; and finally focus on an idea, make it tangible, and iterate on it. 

By completing this module, you will: 

1. Lead needs-finding research to empathize with the perspectives of users or people that will be involved in a solution.
2. Conceive of and design novel environmental solutions by applying a suite of innovation processes and design thinking tools to an environmental problem.
3. Prototype and evaluate potential ideas in order to understand what it will take for solutions to succeed, and how to iterate on the design moving forward.
4. Practice the mindset of an innovator — including risk tolerance, open-mindedness, optimism, curiosity, creativity, boldness, and balancing micro- and macro-aspects of a challenge. 

The materials in this module can also be downloaded here, and guidance on how to use this toolkit is here.