Designer&Thinker&Innovator

Heading into our final week, our group had our prototype of Cleanin’ the New ready to go. Through the use of our desktop research and audience research, we were able to refine our product to the best it could be. Our social media sites were able to convey a sense of community for our event, which is what we strived for as a goal. Most interestingly, we used a Minecraft video to properly demonstrate how our event would work. I believe this was an innovative way to demonstrate Cleanin’ the New Check out our Minecraft video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smWEP8pY_HQ&t=1s Combining all our idea’s together, i believe we were able to come up with an event that was incredibly innovative.  Reflecting on the course as a whole, i had a really positive experience. Cleanin’ the New started off as just a small idea but now i whole heartedly believe it is something that we could properly pursue if we chose to, this was also backed up by our interviewees who agreed.  Thank you for reading and co-creating, for the Cleanin’ the New team!

1 week away from our presentation, we needed to get our PR plan in order. With our social media sites already established, we sought to make a plan to effectively communicate our messages to the audience. We now had a Youtube channel and website to better represent our event. To properly prepare for our PR plan, we needed research the market and similar literature. This is an example of ‘Secondary Research’, which is defined as “when you use existing data like books, articles, or the internet to validate or support existing research” (Espisto, 2017). We outlined the following goals for our PR plan

2 weeks out from our major presentation, we knew we had 3 main issues with Cleanin’ the New that needed to be addressed. They were:

Changed Goal: Changing our goal to aim towards “changing mindsets” was something we needed to advertise and tell our audience. This was aimed at helping with the events sustainability. If the audience buy into the idea, they will not be inclined to cause more mess than they clean

Length of walk: This addresses exactly where our walk starts and ends and where our event will actually be held. This gives our participants a clear idea of what is happening and where.

Rubbish mitigation and partnership with council: This would be key into addressing our problem of the event’s sustainability. The Newcastle Council would offer us with a effective way to dispose of rubbish. Addressing these issues would see us step further to our finished prototype.

As we moved forward to delivering a working prototype for our final presentation, the idea of developing User Journey’s became a necessity. Developing a User Journey would effectively illustrate how we intend to reach our audience, engage them, and what they would expect attending Cleanin’ the New. Our User Journey’s were able to be effectively highlighted by utilising feedback from our survey’s and our first presentation. Using visual representations, we would follow the journey of our persona, Jordan.

Moving forward to our final presentation due in week 13, we found it necessary to outline the Issues with Cleanin’ the New, address them and find solutions. The problem of the events own sustainability was still lingering, as raised in our surveys and feedback. “Goods and services are only sustainable if they are as dematerialised as possible and allow for continued use or re-use, or recycling with minimal material loss.” (Liedtka, 2018). We needed to make our event sustainable.

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Week 9 saw us step closer to our final product. We wanted to refine our goal so we could better deliver our plan. We spent much of our time trying to overcome the problems of event planning, and we still had the lingering problem of how we were going to keep the event rubbish free. What if instead of focusing on throwing the best ‘Event to clean up all events’, we looked to change mindsets. Instead of focusing our event on being clean up initiative and festival, we would look to educate and inspire our participants to do the same, to reduce their eco-footprint. 

This change of mind-set is what really propelled our group’s ideation into the prototype phase. This idea came from a brainstorming session with our group, it is good to to encourage wild ideas, as the best solutions come from them (Seyverson, 2021). This week was a major milestone in our design process

Moving into the 2nd phase of our project, we now looked to move Cleanin’ The New to a prototype stage. Our full scale event made it difficult to fully realise as a prototype, so we had to get creative in how we could deliver our final product.  This week we looked to interview industry professionals to gain a better understanding how the logistics and validity of running an event like Cleanin’ the New. Conversing with industry professionals would be beneficial for us, “Collaboration is critical to building new solutions to our most urgent challenges”  (The Circular Economy of Food CoLab: Designing the Future of Food, Together, 2021) Our first interview was with Rowan Stevenson, who was the Student Events & Engagement team leader for Newcastle University. We spoke to him about our plans for Cleanin’ the New, and he said that this type of project is something the university would be 100% behind. 

Here is a brief snippet of our interview with Rowan https://youtu.be/kAbdWuL0UZk Our second interview was with Deputy Lord Mayor Declan Clausen. We spoke to him on the logistics of gaining a grant for our event. He also highlighted that our plans to involve Olive Tree Gardens was a good idea. Here is a snippet of that interview  https://youtu.be/DBvlcikoAp0 We were able to gain valuable industry knowledge from these 2 interviews.

Week 7 would be the week where we pitch/present our idea to the class. With all the information and more highlighted before in this blog, we used a PowerPoint to help aid our 10 minute presentation. Our presentation would touch on the 5 design principals of innovation: Ideate, Empathise, Define, Test, Prototype. Our presentation was the mid way point of our project, we felt good about what we had ideated so far. The final details of Cleanin’ The New had been bedded down, Key points:

- Walk would take place between Newcastle beach to Nobby’s beach - The event would be in Nobby’s park - The event was a clean up initiative first and foremost - We would use local music artists and business’s for our event. Our presentation was well received, once again feedback questioned how much rubbish the event would be producing. This is something we would have to work hard at in the prototyping stage to address.

Social media has become an integral part of the way the world communicates. Social media is also an essential tool in the Design and Innovation process. Our marketing campaign was focused around using traditional social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Youtube to spread awareness of Cleanin’ the New’.  Our social media posts and traditional posters would all features QR codes for people to scan and be brought to our Facebook event page, this page would have all the details about Cleanin’ the New.  

The key to Design Thinking is to be all encompassing of the environment, anmd incorporate many different ideas to form our own. “The gift of Design Thinking for education is the ability to incorporate the hands-on engagement of making something within the broader lessons that expand to all areas of curricula” -  (Thomas, 2016)

Our social media presence would give us a way to create a visual journey for our audience. As we move closer to our first presentation date, we were confident that with our ideation and creation period, we had a pretty strong idea.  

Scan our QR code to be taken to our event page

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As we moved closer to giving our first presentation on our Cleanin’ the New project in Week 7. We Sought to create persona’s to better identify our target audience for the event. We were able to design our persona’s from the demographic questions we had on our survey. After we nailed down what our project would be, our design process was multi-layered, with 5 people on the group often working independently.  “The five stages in the Design Thinking process are not always sequential — they do not have to follow any specific order, they can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively.” (Friis Dam and Sang, 2020) . This quote shows that the design process can be down in a non linear fashion.

This is an example of one of our persona’s

As we moved closer to our presentation date, Cleanin’ the New was starting to take form. Reflecting back on it now, i didn’t realise just how far we would continue our research into this, i am very glad we did. At this stage in Week 5 we were just scratching the surface of our eventual prototype. 

Further ideating for our event, we knew we needed more information for our audience.  We knew what we wanted to have at our event, but what did our audience want? The idea was to emulate the live music aspect of Groovin’ the Moo and the chilled out market vibe of the Olive Tree Gardens. Through making a survey, we would be able to further identify what aspects we wanted to include in our event.

We made a 9 question survey, aimed at gathering data on the demographics of those who replied and their thoughts and feelings towards our event.  Our survey revealed that 64% of respondents are regular beach goers, 69% responding that they are unaware of other cleanup initiatives, and only 7 of 31 respondents answering that they find our local beaches to be very clean.

Most notably,  68% of respondents did not know of any other clean up initiatives in Newcastle. 

Through our survey, we were also able to collect information on the type of event we wanted to hold. We gave the respondents a list of options to choose from

We had our plan, but how were we going to execute Cleanin’ the New? In preparation for our upcoming presentation in week 7, we begun to turn our attention to our target audience to help co-create our idea. This week, we focused on our empathy maps and surveys. We knew it was important to have as much input from our peers and audience as possible. To better illuminate our target audience to refine our product, we employed empathy maps. These were used to collect the thoughts and feelings towards Clean’ the New and gather information on what worked, and what didn’t. Empathy maps are good to gauge in your audience how they think, what they say, how they feel and what they do with the idea.

A qualitative summary of our empathy maps would suggest one thing, “wouldn’t this event make more mess than it cleans?”. This became an ongoing question and common theme during our continual development of the idea. Our empathy maps were a strong tool in focusing in on our problem. “If you start making, you quickly see what you don’t know, what you Design Thinking And Learning. Nothing beats executing in reality when it comes to pointing out the gaps in your ideas, knowledge and approach.”  (Hambeakeus, 2021). This quote identifies with how our group was identifying with gaps in our idea. References: