Designer | Mother | Educator | Engineer | Conservationist | Diver
Why do we urgently need
Conservation issues are complex and multi-layered, in many cases small grassroots organizations that are the closest to the problem do not have the tools to design a plan of action that could lead to the desired conservation outcomes - with the available resources - and within a reasonable time frame.
Our goal is to curate and adapt
Design Thinking Tools
in order to support
conservation teams, providing:
Structure
to establish a comprehensive project plan, set goals and evaluate progress collaboratively.
Agility
to quickly prototype and test ideas, learn from mistakes and iterate the process, evolving and adapting to different contexts.
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Innovation
to address environmental challenges in a creative, non-linear way, taking into consideration multiple stakeholder points of view: human and nonhuman.
Outreach
to develop empathic, powerful, highly visual communication tools that facilitate interdisciplinary work and increase public acceptance and engagement.
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To Explore the potential of design Thinking Tools for conservation goals and then adapt, modify and test them collaboratively with different stakeholders against real conservation challenges.
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To empower grassroots conservation around the globe by providing Design Thinking tools and methodologies.
Our goals:
Background
The notion of design as a "way of thinking" can be traced back to 1969 where the value of the methodology for wider audiences was identified (Simon, 1969; McKim, 1973; Lawson, 1980; Cross, 1982; Delft University of Technology; 1991). But Design Thinking gained popularity and media attention when Stanford teacher David M. Kelley, commercialized the process through his Company IDEO. Since then, several toolkits have been developed for anyone to lead teams in collaborative solution-finding for different sectors like education, sociology, technology and services among others.
Design Thinking has not yet been adopted in the conservation field, although initial efforts have been made through sporadic projects, these have not rendered outcomes in relation to the development of new, specific tools (Bakker et al, 2010; Chasson, 2015; Corbera, 2018).
Design for Conservation has elaborated on existing work and will explore, adapt and create new tools in order to make them accessible to a broader (non necessarily academic) multidisciplinary conservation community.