Designing Environmental Solutions
Lesson 3: Additional Resources
Some more resources on failure: at some point, we’ll all face failure, whether we want to or not. If we embrace it as a way to learn, we drastically increase our chances of creating a successful intervention.
- Building better teams by identifying conservation professionals willing to learn from failure
- Failure in conservation projects: Everyone experiences it, few record it
- 3 Reasons Why Failure is the Key to Success
More Tactical Tips for Prototyping
- Why You Should Talk Less and Do More
- The Why, How & When of Co-Creation During Product Development
- Our 10 favorite prototyping tools shares some tools for prototyping digital products and services
- WildLabs tech tutors: “Bite-sized, easy-to-understand” lessons that cover the basics of building different types of conservation technology. A helpful next step if you’ve got rough ideas of how an idea could work but don’t have the technical skills to know how you’d make it a reality. (Note: the actual design of a technology will be covered in depth in the next module).
- Helpful tools:
- Storyboard That is an easy-to-use Storyboard maker.
- Tips for creating an app: Keep your first mockups simple: after sketching by hand, you might move into Miro Templates, or familiar programs like Keynote or Powerpoint. Later, you might use user-friendly no-code programs like MarvelApp, Figma, Invision, Sketch, or XD.
- For a complete, advanced course on prototyping products, explore MIT Open Courseware’s Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping
Tips on the next steps in prototyping, testing and iteration:
- Testing With Humans (fill out the form to request a free educational version)
- Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximise Learning shares some tips to get genuine, constructive feedback that will help you iterate your design, and move away from the mindset of testing only to “validate” (where you won’t learn as much).
- A New Tool for Testing Your Design Concepts Ethically
Some more examples of prototyping and design thinking being used in conservation organizations:
- Incentivizing biodiversity conservation in artisanal fishing communities through territorial user rights and business model innovation
- Conservation at the Edge – Prototyping low-intervention conservation in the Patagonian wilderness An example that demonstrates a prototyping approach directly applied to conservation.
As you look to the future, these resources are helpful to develop more refined products:
- Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think offers a great framework for usability in design.
- ProductBoard’s Blog and knowledgebase offers excellent tips for managing a product, creating product roadmaps, etc.
Diffusion Theory offers a long-term lens to consider how your innovation might scale.