Designing Environmental Solutions
Introduction
How do I conduct research to empathize with the needs of those impacted by a challenge, in order to design solutions they’ll love?
We’ve seen time and time again that adoption and uptake of a solution can be a critical barrier to success; but what happens if we flip this challenge into an opportunity to design alongside those that are most impacted by the problems we’re trying to tackle? In this lesson, you’ll start by understanding the human side of the challenge you’re working on, and build empathy for the people that are involved in the issue, or distill insights from your lived experience. At this stage, we learn by seeking out different perspectives (and empathizing with people that might be very different from us); adopting a beginner’s mindset; and getting curious about behaviors, mindsets, and patterns of our users. Based on the insights gleaned from interviewing and observing stakeholders and potential users, you’ll focus your challenge in order to set you up for success in the ideation phase.
By completing this lesson, you will better understand your users so that you can design a solution grounded in their needs:
- Start with a beginner’s mindset and build empathy for those involved in your challenge.
- Understand the importance of embedding your design process within the systems and communities you’re trying to help.
- Conduct interviews to understand a problem through the eyes of multiple stakeholders. Build the skills needed to go beyond surface-level interviews, so that you can truly empathize with those that you’re designing for.
- Extract actionable and unique insights from your interviews that will guide next steps, and practice communicating those to others.
- Pull your research together into a brief that frames your design challenge in a way that is specific enough to be actionable, yet broad enough to generate creative solutions.
Pre-Reading
We’ll start with the question: what does breakthrough innovation in conservation look like, and how do we get there?
- From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Urbanization and the Future of Biodiversity Conservation reframes the conversation about conservation; after decades of ‘managing declines’, it’s time for conservation to lead a ‘breakthrough’ movement of recovery.
- When conservation goes viral: The diffusion of innovative biodiversity conservation policies and practices How do conservation solutions gain traction? Learn about the diffusion of innovation theory in relation to the conservation field.
These readings will introduce the mindsets we’ll employ in this module, and the questions that we should be asking as we get started.
- Are You Solving the Right Problems? Highlights the importance of thoughtfully framing the problems we’re trying to solve before jumping into solution design.
- The Ten Types of Innovation framework invites us to consider the different ways in which we might innovate; it serves as a helpful reminder that not all innovation involves building a flashy product (and in fact, many of the best innovations don’t).
- What is Human-Centered Design? Introduces the process of working with your end users to create breakthrough solutions, and Design Thinking 101 shares the steps of the process we’ll follow over the next few lessons. (Note: in this module we’ll use the terms “Human-Centered Design” and “Design Thinking” interchangeably. There are subtle differences, but the core mindset is similar.)
Cautionary Tales: Designers and conservationists have often failed to assess the bias in their process, or consider the real needs of the users or beneficiaries of their work. If design research fails to be inclusive, the process is run on incomplete knowledge — making it impossible to design programs, services, or products that work for everyone.
- Are your findings ‘WEIRD’? and The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes invite us to scrutinize who we are designing for, interviewing, and testing with. When we default to testing our ideas with the most convenient users, the consequences are dangerous.
- The White-Savior Industrial Complex reminds us of a pitfall that projects, no matter how well-intentioned, can easily fall into. When working with communities that are different from us, it’s essential to involve them in our process early and consistently, to make sure we’re working with them in a way that empowers them.