Research, Interviews, Projects; a guide for “The Gaia Project”
In order to understand what consumers are missing, we need to explore the real-world with first-hand research. We need to Reflect, revise, and take our learning on the go with interviews and get to grasp on to our potential customers.
Our group focused on every individual doing research on a different topics, such as: Air Pollution in Portugal, Car Pollution in Lisbon, Affected population in Lisbon and Cascais Area, Impacts of Climate Change in Portugal. This way we were able to focus on how different sources of climate change is impacting the communities around us and the space that we live in.This has helped us to get a broad understanding of the environmental situation is Lisbon/Portugal.
In the past week we decided to divide the tasks: observation vs interviews.
Two of us will be focusing on observing portuguese peoples shopper-behaviors. The other two of us will be focusing on developing interview questions. I am one of the people who will be focusing on the interview questions, and I tried to develop unbias questions that will help me get an insight on how portuguese people view environmental issues and climate change. I want to get a deeper insight on their relationship to the environment, and their priorities through out the day. Whether they care about seeing improvements in their daily lives, or whether they go on about their day unbothered.
We will continue our research with interviews: we are going to start going around the city doing interviews with locals, try to understand what type of transportation citizens of Lisbon prefer. Interview students and the staff from Nova about their preferred way of transportation and if and how they view the impacts of climate change at campus. We thought of 10 interview questions that can be useful for our project to get a better insight of the shopping behavior of the Portuguese.
- When was the first time you heard about climate change? And from who did you hear about it? What information shocked you the most?
2. To what extent do you feel impacted by climate change?
3. Do you feel like you impact (are responsible for part of) climate change? Explain your answer.
4. After learning about climate change, have you adapted any of your behaviors?
5. When going shopping (grocery, fruits, or clothes) do you take your own bags with you? Or do purchase bags at the store?
6. What is your preferred way of transportation?
7. Do you separate your trash? Plastic vs. Biodegradable?
8. If not; would you be willing to separate your trash if you would get a small fine from the government when not separating it?
9. If yes; do you think a small fine would be a good idea for the government to implement, when trash has not been separated.
10. Lisbon has been elected the greenest European capital in 2020, how do you feel about that?
We have also thought about asking about their opinion and thoughts on circular economy, yet we believe that some partcipants might be overwhelmed with this question. We need to keep in consideration that, a lot of the times an interview can come with bias as people tend to answer questions in a way that portrays them the best, and puts the individual in a ‘good light’. To avoid bias as much as possible, we will include observations, to see the shopping behavior with our own eyes, instead of relying on the responses from the interviewees. This will help us to dig deeper in the drivers that affect the approach to a greener environment of each invidual.
I believe our project is on a stable, yet exciting, route and will develop into a project that will appeal to many people.
