The challenge.
How can we help sustainable businesses to improve their offer?
As part of my MA dissertation in Sustainable Design and Social Innovation (Kingston University), I wondered how to help businesses that offered children-related products to be more sustainable and collaborative. I focused on a specific borough of London to narrow the scope down and reached out to several organisations and businesses to understand what they were doing great and what could be improved.
The approach.
Working with and within the community.
I wanted to get to understand the struggle: why and how decisions were made and based on which arguments. That led me to approach people working at businesses, not-for-profit organisations and Government agencies. In addition, I wanted to understand from families what could be improved, and which were the things they really liked about a specific service or product.
I engaged with people working in organisations and businesses by using a traditional research approach: interviews. But for engaging with families, I wanted to make it far more engaging and somewhat worth their time. That’s how I came up with a series of gamified surveys, as shown in the following figures.
The results.
- A simple tool that shows alternative features of a sustainable service for children, including a detail of the pros and cons of each decision, and all based on user and business needs.
- Valuable insights were shared with Government officials to improve the quality of public services.
Please see a link to the full report.
