Designing Environmental Solutions
Course Content
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Lesson 1: Designing for Humans
How do I understand the needs of those involved with my challenge, in order to design solutions they’ll love?
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Lesson 2: Generating New Ideas
How do I come up with innovative ideas for environmental solutions?
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Lesson 3: Prototyping and Iteration
How do I prototype, test, and iterate an environmental solution?
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Introduction
How do I come up with innovative ideas for environmental solutions?
While innovation is a buzzword these days, it ultimately boils down to a process that anyone can master. This lesson introduces tools, techniques, and approaches for applying innovation to environmental problems. Through hands-on activities, you will learn how to harness design thinking tools to push the envelope and explore the extraordinary. Using a mindset of curiosity, open-mindedness, and willingness to ‘think big’ can drastically improve your environmental work.
By completing this lesson, you will learn and practice ideation tools to develop innovative environmental solutions:
- Apply a number of ideation techniques to stretch your team’s ideas past the ordinary, to come up with breakthrough innovations.
- Practice managing team dynamics, applying best practices for leading divergent and convergent sessions, to foster a creative environment.
- Generate a vast array of ideas and be intentional in your selection of which to move forward with.
Pre-Reading
Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life will frame our discussion of where great ideas, and breakthrough thinking, come from.
Introduction to ideation:
- What is Ideation? shares some common methods to generate new ideas.
- Brainstorming (IDEO U) and the embedded videos will introduce the basic mindsets of ideation, and the rules for running a great brainstorm session.
- In this lesson, we invite you to make your ideas visual by sketching them. While it may seem intimidating, visual thinking is something anyone — regardless of drawing skill — can do. If you’re not comfortable sketching, explore 5 Tips to Make Ideation Sketching Approachable to All and From Stick Man to Star Man – a sketching guide for Design Thinking.
These two resources offer an introduction to biomimicry, a design approach that looks to the natural world for inspiration and innovation: