Orienting the Design Team

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!

For the City of Vancouver Solutions Lab, the Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL) is the first lab experience where we have had a dedicated team of designers thinking, co-creating and prototyping alongside lab participants. In a few previous labs, including the Grocery Retail Solutions Lab, designers came into the process for a few rapid prototyping sessions with core lab participants. In CFIL, the design team would be a part of the lab journey the entire time, and hold the systemic question more strongly throughout the process. This prompted the question of: What do designers need to know before beginning? What does it mean to be a designer in this particular complex challenge space? How might we cultivate the conditions for a diverse team of designers to do their very best work?

Prior to our first Kick-off Session with the business participants in late April 2022, we spent 4 weeks orienting the design team to this work. Orientation included three stages, discussed next.

Pre-work

Leading up to our first orientation session, the design team reviewed a series of materials and spent time tending to the more administrative backbone of the project — such as reviewing the Mutual Confidentiality Non-Disclosure Agreement and our Research Ethics Board Application guiding the applied research part of this project.

Figuring out how to begin: Friday sessions

The Friday sessions were our time to connect and begin to understand what it is like to work with one another. As we mapped out what these sessions would look like, there were a few discussions about how this orientation should begin. Do we start with process, or content?

For me, transformative innovation work starts with the individual. Who is this person who steps into a complex challenge to deeply understand it and transform it? Naming and articulating one’s positionality and how they situate themselves in the system, who they are accountable to and where they have agency is a significant step in figuring out the starting point of readiness for this work, how one’s thinking can stretch in this process, who else needs to be involved because their perspective or worldview is not yet contributing to the challenge, and so forth. From some of our project collaborators’ perspective, understanding the context and the challenge space that we were all stepping into was an important place to begin. In the end we found an arc to the orientation that would dance with this entanglement of the individual and the systemic, the context of the challenge and the frameworks needed for being able to walk in it.

In many ways, it was as much an orientation for the convening team as it was for the design team as we learned more about each other’s “why” and “how” in this challenge space.

Over the course of three weeks, we covered the following topics:

Week 1

Learn

• CoV/VEC 101: Why this work matters to City of Vancouver and Vancouver Economic Commission
• Overview of SLab frameworks; Transformative Social Innovation 101, Complexity, Understanding Systems, Positionality

Work

• What are you excited to learn? What are you able to offer/contribute?

Week 2:

Learn

• Participatory Action Research: Principles and Methods

Work

• Iterating the Design brief

Week 3:

Learn

• Circular Economy of Food

Work

• Systems Mapping

In the Studio

Our fourth week of orientation took place in the studio, finally getting to connect with one another in person after months and months of virtual meetings to get this project set up. We began by establishing some studio agreements, guided by the question What makes for a good studio experience? The input included agreements on how we collaborate with one another both in-person and online; meeting collaborators where they are at in language, tone and priorities; having clear but evolvable roles; celebrating small victories and sharing positive affirmations, and so forth.

We got as far as we could before beginning to co-design with our business collaborators shortly after! As with anything, it was impossible to be 100% ready, and the real learning was only just about to begin.

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.