A Challenge To Be Met: Design Thinking
One of the most important stages of A Challenge To Be Met project was when we started to build a base, and create a plan for our future actions. Firstly, it was important to define our purposes and their practical stage: What do we want to do? How are we going to do it?
The methodology learned by “Human Centered Design Thinking”, a field guide by IDEO, allowed us to think further, and frame better our project, thus many things became more clear for us.
Since online websites and sources have become an everyday tool of our lives, and also a basic medium for news and information, we decided to make our own “place” for us on the internet: we started to plan a blog about ethical fashion. We had in mind that through this blog we want to raise awareness about fast & ethical fashion, and promote ethical fashion choices. Afterwards we made a specific plan of our content, and so we decided that our blog would include informative articles about how ethical fashion works, as well as information for second-hand stores and Instagram e-shops that work ethically — our basic thought was to encourage people to shop ethically.
The field guide of IDEO allowed us to think further than that, so we thought of some possible difficulties that we may face. A basic problem was the pandemic, because it would not allow us to be more interactive with our audience. Also, our blog would need time to acquire an audience, and besides that, it would be difficult to overcome consumers’ biases, since fast fashion is cheap and easy to find, while ethical brands need further “research”, and many people do not like the idea of second-hand clothes. In any case, these difficulties didn’t work as stop signs, but they lead us to a better guideline for our blog.
The next step was to make a course of action. That included reading articles, scientific or educational, on fast fashion problems and solutions, watch documentaries, discuss and reflect with the team and search for alternative ways of interaction and communication.
The final step, before the launch of our blog, was to set dates for our actions, and accomplish them. And so it happened: we planned interviews with our audience, we wrote our first 3 articles regarding fast & ethical fashion, and we carefully designed our blog with good visuals and aesthetics.
Where you can find us:
Useful links:
· IDEO is a global design and innovation company | ideo.com
The rest of the team: Hara Papadatou , Ioanna Poliou
