Kicking off
Adjusting our lenses when working with participants
by Sheyda Rashidi, Designer
Welcome to Learning out Loud! This is where CFIL collaborators reflect on what we’ve been learning and trying in this experimental space. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you!
Finally, there we were! sitting around a table at Emily Carr University, walking the walk to get one step closer to living in a utopic city where food is not lost or wasted, access to food is nourishing, equitable, and culturally appropriate, and habitats are protected for current and future generations of all living beings. The passion and enthusiasm in the room were indescribable. Gathered here from across the globe with various skills and expertise with one goal in mind, yet we knew the true experts of the field were not in the room with us.
In the Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL), we acknowledge our inability to know all the details and the challenges food sector businesses face when dealing with food waste. Therefore, we ask for their guiding hands, and that’s when we see the magic happen! So, it is not just a simple project, it is a community coming together to work collectively and think through how we might be able to mitigate avoidable wasted food and return food to the food system. We would prototype, test and try together, and we would fail and learn from our mistakes together.
Dipping our toes into the food system
After weeks of preparation, hours of discussion and practice, the CFIL team was honoured to host a kick-off session with our lovely experts coming from food businesses big and small in and around Vancouver! Granted! It was not a proper party! Covid, you know? But we had a blast seeing eager faces joining us for the same cause.
After going through the agendas for the day, Lily, our lovely host, started the meeting by asking us why this project matters to each of us and how we could envision a circular food system. Here is a snapshot of what we discussed.
Getting below the surface of food waste
Our next step was understanding how systems thinking could help us find areas for interventions in the food system. Using the iceberg systems mapping method, our experts from businesses helped us identify the challenges regarding food waste in their enterprises. They started off with situations, events and activities that they have noticed happening in their business where food is lost or wasted. Then the iceberg map helped them to dig deeper and find the underlying reasons for those events. This exercise led to a more enriched understanding of how the food system works and how we should address the root causes of the problem to truly change the system.
Thereafter, we tried to dig deeper to find out the underlying reasons for such challenges. By mapping the feedback loops, we captured businesses’ perspectives around stuck patterns that reinforce the challenge of food waste and what parts of this highly complex challenge they are wrestling with. Then we worked together to write our creative questions. Creative questions writing helped pinpoint the main questions and the goals for each of the feedback loops. It is just as simple as filling in the blanks of the template below.
It was amazing to see how this project was immediately enriched by the business participants insights regarding the procedures and the barriers they face that in their environment resulting in wasting or losing this gift of life.
Sharing our wildest dreams
Finally, we worked together to create our unicorns and turn them into horses! A bizarre sentence, I agree! What we mean by unicorns is wishful, imaginary solutions without considering our actual world’s constraints. Hilarious ideas were developed in this process! For the next step, we tried to reshape those imaginary ideas into horses by teasing out the core essence of those unicorn ideas into implementable actions. Last but not least, we discussed our priorities when thinking about solutions to food waste problems. This allowed us to get an initial sense of what matters most to our food sector business participants when thinking about interventions to the challenge of avoidable food waste.
Was it a demanding session? For sure! Was it wonderful? Even more so! We couldn’t wait to see how we would experiment with all these ideas in the following weeks. But before we got ahead of ourselves, we needed to get into the field and visit the businesses to learn more from their individual operations. What was about to come was definitely worth waiting for!
Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CFIL participants.
