Week 2: Empathise
With our group together our next step was to begin forming our idea, our innovation. To properly ideate, one must emphasise with their audience. We thought about Newcastle as a city, what was important to it and what defined it. We quickly decided that our iconic beaches were an integral part of the city’s identity. We decided we would make an event/festival focused around cleaning our beaches, in the style of a Groovin’ the Moo music festival. Our idea formed around the idea of cleaning and maintaining our iconic beaches, which is in accordance with Goal #14 “Life Below Water’ on UN’s wicked problems list.
The basis of our idea revolved around a ‘Clean Up’ walk between beaches for people to attend, collection rubbish between Bar Beach and Nobby’s. The participation within the event would give you access to a music/cultural festival. The festival aimed at cultivating local music artists and rewarding participants. We had grand ideas, however in hindsight, i can see the many holes in our plan. Through the development stage we would address the issues of sustainability more closely, but for now we had our idea. “ So design is really a process of making impact on the world by doing this kind of creation of something new to the world and then getting it out there.” (Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley | Boing Boing, 2012), through this quote we are able to see our mind-set as a group, we wanted to get our idea and make an impact on Newcastle.
It’s funny how names sometimes stick, after basing our festival idea from Groovin’ the Moo, someone suggested Cleanin’ the New as a name for our project. It stuck
References:
Boing Boing. 2012. Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley | Boing Boing. [online] Available at: <https://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/design-thinking-for-social-goo.html> [Accessed 10 June 2021].
