References to Blackboard Weekly Readings
A 1000 word essay describing the festival in regards to the importance of design thinking and including 8 references to the weekly BB readings.
Why is Design Thinking Important and Effective with Eliminating ‘Wicked Problems’?
How do we know Waste Warriors will be successful?
Design thinking is a contemporary, avant-garde process, described by many as the future of thinking. “Defining problems in obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions.” (Leidtka, 2018) To come up with new solutions and methods of dealing with ‘wicked problems’ designers must think outside the box. That is why Waste Warriors takes the non-conventional route of a festival accompanied by a mobile app to promote sustainable food consumption and waste. By starting a conversation and a social event, Waste Warriors will be successful in raising awareness and encouraging action. Helling mentions in a study that “while the terms “sustainability” and “circularity” immediately give the impression that we are doing good things, we are missing the structural changes required to really do things differently” (Helling, 2020). The festival will use design thinking to create an advanced strategy in reducing food waste, by attacking it locally and realizing that “Some food system challenges are too large for any one organization to solve alone.” (CoLab, 2021) and by understanding that “Collaboration is critical to building new solutions to our most urgent challenges and designing the future of food is a matter of utmost urgency for the world.” (CoLab, 2021).
Design thinking is the only solution to complicated and layered world issues, such as reducing the abundance of edible food wasted every year, while many communities battle starvation. Yet, “Design thinking has truly come of age. And yet we should not rush to congratulate ourselves, for we are rightly asked what it takes for such thinking to truly have significant impact.” (Brown, Katz, 2019) Questioning the unexplored is a natural process, and it raises questions of limitations and dangers and ironically the answer to those questions lay within design thinking itself, as contemporary thinking brings on contemporary issues, which are then counteracted by more contemporary thinking. Waste Warriors takes the traditional gathering and formal meetings of biased business individuals and morphs it into an informal space created to start local discussions. The slight change to an old practice reassures sceptics and provides a somewhat familiar process, however, greatly improved. “To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in.” (Leidtka, 2018) The festival brings the solution of reaching an impossible goal by tackling it bit by bit, eliminates the risk of decisions being made based on profit and any other form of bias or toxicity, as other “issues we have to confront when considering transformer models for our prototypes”(Syverson, 2021), and rewards engagement with success, thus proving the effectiveness of design thinking. “Who would have thought, when the first industrial designers hung out their shingles, when the first graphic designers laid out a printed page, when the first generation of digital designers grappled with the mysteries of the Internet, that by virtue of their unorthodox training and their frequently anti-establishment practices, they would also one day have a major role to play in addressing challenges so urgent and complex?” (Brown, Katz, 2019)
The Waste Warriors will take the form of a festival, which aims to educate children and adults on food waste in the world in a positive and encouraging manner, what the options are, the alternatives to throwing food away, and on the importance of reducing food waste. The question of “How might we create viable infrastructure and business models to ensure food grown for people doesn’t go to waste?” rises. To answer it, the festival will collaborate with local food businesses with sustainable practices to prove that food can be fair. “So by training teachers, by having kids come through, by us going into the classroom and teaching them design thinking and just using design thinking methodology to solve some of their problems we've had great luck and we're very proud of what's going on there.” (Kelley, 2012). David Kelley believes that teaching the public design thinking can have overwhelming success rate and so the festival aims to teach and allow for opinions to be heard. He also mentions the humorous irony that “You don't usually think of engineers as people, so to speak, but my experience has been that when engineers really feel that something would be important to people, would have meaning in people's lives, that's highly motivating and it makes them work really hard.” (David, 2012), further developing the idea that passion leads to action.
On the one hand, this new approach is questionable, and the success of the Waste Warriors is technically unpredictable, however, on the other hand, there are many other greatly effective organizations that employ design thinking within their beliefs. For example, “Launched in July 2015, the d.light A1 (since rebranded to A2) is bringing solar light to hundreds of millions of people living without access to electricity.” (IDEO 2021) Their programme predicted that “tens of millions of families will gain extra hours of light to work, study, and play, while simultaneously reducing the harmful health effects and slow-burn cost of kerosene lamps. Not only does the dim light of kerosene come at a persistent financial cost—as much as 25 cents per day for families who live on $1.25—but it also causes serious respiratory problems and is a significant fire risk due to gas lamp exposure.” (IDEO 2021) and in 2021 “90% of d.light customers rate their product as a good value for money and would recommend d.light to a friend” (d.light website), which indicated an unbelievable success. Following the footsteps of similar actions, Waste Warriors aims to achieve similar results. By empowering the local Newcastle community to make a change, the team behind the festival believes in the effectiveness it will have in making a dent in the waste of food produced in the world.
In conclusion, design thinking is the future of sustainability and environmental awareness, as well as change. The Waste Warriors festival will be a great success and an event to be remembered, and the encouragement of an entire community of people will bring the action needed to create a difference in this flawed world. Collaboration between the event, the people and businesses will allow for a common language and a passion big enough to create an ever-growing web of influence.
Leidtka, J. (2018), Why Design Thinking Works, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works
Brown, T., Katz, B. (2019), How Great Design Could Fix the World’s ‘Wicked Problems’, Fortune, https://fortune.com/2019/02/15/change-by-design-new-excerpt-tim-brown/
CoLab, (2021), The Circular Economy of Food CoLab: Designing the Future of Food, Together, IDEO, https://www.ideo.com/post/designing-the-future-of-food-together#:~:text=The%20Circular%20Economy%20of%20Food%20CoLab%20is%20a%20membership%2Dbased,prototype%20new%20solutions%20at%20speed.
Helling, D. (2020), The Doughnut Model for a Fairer, Greener Amsterdam, Green European Journal, https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-doughnut-model-for-a-fairer-greener-amsterdam/
IDEO, (2021), Channeling Solar Energy for Over 4M People Around the World, IDEO.org, https://www.ideo.org/project/the-only-solar-lantern-youll-ever-need
Leidtka, J. (2018), Why Design Thinking Works, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works
Solomon, A. (2012), Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley, bointboint, https://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/design-thinking-for-social-goo.html
Syverson, B. (2021), The Rules of Brainstorming Change When Artificial Intelligence Gets Involved. Here’s How., IDEO, https://www.ideo.com/blog/the-rules-of-brainstorming-change-when-ai-gets-involved-heres-how
