Digital Transformation Design
Dutch Spark: First sprint
Designing Across Cultures at Digital Society School
Our Team:
We are a group of multidisciplinary professionals selected by Jeroen Groeneveld to work on a cross-cultural project req uired in its core to bridge the communication gap, build trust and reliability through data.
- Kelsey Trites: is an experienced Field Researcher, with a background in Nutritional Sciences as well as Organization and Management.
- Mercy Cheptoo Chumo: has a background in Agriculture, Sustainability and Management.
- Shreya Gupta: has a background in Computer Science Engineering and Digital Game and User Experience Design.
- Prasam Pal: has a background in Mechanical Engineering along with Industrial & Product Design.
Coach: Anneke van Woerden with #spark_legends
Brief:
As we got a bit of a complicated brief (Consolidation & Clarification of the data between stakeholders in the Carbon Impact Value Chain, to oversimplify it). But as we sat down and gave it a few more reruns in our head we understood that
we were a bit overwhelmed at how little we knew & how much we needed to gauge to even come to a semblance of a brief. It was hard to fight the instinct to research the hell out of this utter chaos.
Bam! Enter Gaspard & Mariana!
Critical Prototyping:
‘To unlearn’ is a tenet that was given to us long ago. But here at DSS we were asked to double down on that. Forget. Forget everything you know. Come to work with an empty mind. Not knowing anything & being confused where to start, is a good thing. Loosing control of decision making is perfect. Because control is an illusion anyway. Life doesn’t work like that. Life works on improv, resourcefulness & creativity. Old habits die hard.
They asked us to forget what we don't know & start brainstorming out loud with materials around us. It was a discursive process the value of which became abundantly clear to us by the end of the day. We did about 3 short sprints of ideation where we had to generate around 10 ideas/3mins. Next we were required to discuss & judge another groups ideas while yet another group judged our scribbles and single worded stickies.
Maker’s Sprint
There were 3 selected ideas of which 2 were requested by the other group which percolated to look something like a food festival expo, where all the stakeholders can come together and start a dialogue about the impact through numerous installations, all while enjoying the cuisine of the host country. We started off by making a small cardboard shoebox where we would show the flow of such a hypothetical cooking expo.
While marinating the idea, we pondered on how it would start a conversation and while letting it sit, we were led by Gaspard & Mariana to crystallize it down to a ‘Conversational Artifact’ for the stakeholders we were imagining in our expo. We translated our innocence about the project into a Persona Questions Game where we were expecting our guests to adopt the personas of different stakeholders in the carbon market and ask each other questions in lieu of tokens.
Workshop Improv
The game was originally a maze with crucial unavoidable buzzers which forces the player to confront persona questions to reach the center which was another surprise. However, the storm, made us brainstorm it into the virtual world, surprisingly which ended up being way more conversational without the maze.
Gaming with Stakeholders
This game turned out to be a true manifestation of our innocence on the topic. Our guide, Anneke as well the Stakeholders were visibly amused at trying out personas & getting to know each other’s roles in the Dutch Spark Network. (Names of people who played the game Esther Boudewijns) They had Kelsey as a co-player, while Shreya conducted the game. Although being a little hesitant to choose a persona that didn’t match their real-life profile, some stakeholders actually got out of their comfort zones & chose a random one.
Throughout the game they were adding to each other’s answers, helping, correcting & consolidating what they know. We were also surprised at how curious they were to know their counterpart organization’s position & intent at certain questions. Tokens were exchanged along with pomp & applause.
Maker’s Sprint Retro
This turned out to be quite cool,(Props to the word play on Retro as in ‘Recent Past’ & Retro as in ‘Retrospect’) as we learned reflecting on our recent stage stint, irrespective of whether it was a win or a loss, had crazy value. We learnt that this was a value chain in which impact was the real commodity. We had to dive deeper as Esther Boudewijns our partner from Dutch Spark decided to answer our questions.
Partner Meeting with Esther
Esther did not mince words & dived straight into how the system works. Apart from have been praised by many for her work as the Coordinator for Dutch Spark, she was also pursuing a PhD on the very subject of clean cooking solutions. She opened our eyes regarding why the reliability was questioned in the first place- Stacking. Fuel Stacking was a real scenario where down the energy ladder and in complex cases we see low-income families resort to many fuels (whatever’s available to them) for their multiple needs. The thing is with the current methodology, the impact of such cases can be questioned as the sample measurement is often polluted by the negative impact of stacking. (If they can measure Emissions then why can’t they measure the absence of it?)
But we were sure it was not as simple as that. Esther also told us about a pilot project, ‘Climate Ledger Initiative’ that a multi-stakeholder initiative(jointly operated by INFRAS & Gold Standard Foundation) was undertaking where they were planning to use Blockchain to store and relay real-time data to relay Emission Impact.
Mapping our Guts out
We finally got to the place we wanted to start from. Ye olde itch.We could finally google and compare notes, opinions & questions to start on a tentative map trying to understand it a bit further. We also understood the flow of information through the network of partners to their vendors to their users.
Translate Session with Carlo De Gaetano
The meeting with Carlo was eye-opening. For starters, he understood the complexity of the project. He appreciated our initial step of gamifying conversation between different stakeholders. He said that is one of the best ways of approaching such a complex network is ‘taking baby steps’, which he elaborated as the process of observing different players in action to complete the picture. His instinctive insight before the realization of the product/prototype (which in our case looked like interactive data) was a Mother Map.
He maintained that we stay mindful of what data is relevant and what is not. It’s impossible to know everything and it’s never-ending. So for us editing out extra data per step can be a good way to stay ahead of getting overwhelmed. He also told us our data is complex, so we need to learn to avoid writing everything in sentences & distil it down to themes & phrases.
Off the top of his head, he also showed us how he would approach mapping such data: by going about establishing overlaps between entities; he would begin mapping opinions/positions/actions & then map stakeholders who have it around it rather than vice versa (Close to how we are doing it). The Boolean type overlaps created from such data can also come in handy to communicate with stakeholders the common ground between themselves and also the differences as well as priorities (The core of the project). This can also act as trap to chase the points of mistrust within the system.
He also suggested going to the stakeholders and showing them our mapped or gamified assumptions & make them react to it. Let them map out what they think they do. (What we are missing Vs What they are missing) Overlapping many such maps will help us complete the picture and consolidate conflicting data.
He said once we complete the collection of relevant data. We can proceed with learning the art of mapping it. (in the upcoming spring)
Lego Chairs with Stakeholders
The idea of starting a dialogue between stakeholders with their idea of reliability was struck by Carlo. We kept thinking about how we would benefit from our stakeholders talking about reliability if they had to practice reliability in form of co-creation. We had to devise a cocreation activity where they serve as trust and reliability exercise more than the creation itself. We came up with a metaphor for data, ‘a Chair’(A chair is also a Universal Entity that everyone can relate to as well & has extreme diversity in design & perception) & if the chair is the impact, its description can be the data. And in that case, the description of the ‘Chair-iest’ chair will come across the accuracy of the description (data reliability) as well as ‘what attributes should be considered’ as the parameters of chair-ness (data quality)
After a dry run, we were observing that people always chose to use adjectives to describe their chair (which made us wonder about the real impact data out there), not to mention always get stuck on the attributes decision (like four legs, backrest or comfort) So, after 3 dry runs and a few iterations later, the game went as follows: (Observation & tracking in a controlled environment)
- We divide up some Legos amongst 3–4 players with blinders around their creative spaces and ask them to make a chair in 2 minutes.
- Once built, they are allowed to use a pen and paper to describe their chair in any way possible for their fellow players and stick it in front of their blinders.
- Then they are given another 5 minutes time to pitch their chairs with nothing but the stuck description and eventually have to agree on the ‘Chair-iest’ chair.
- Once selected, the chair is revealed. Apart from recording their instinctive reactions, they are asked to comment on their selected data & resultant chair.
After that, we dive into a Q&A group discussion with the players where they comment how they feel about the reliability of the description, their feelings about the choices they made as a group and how they could’ve done it differently. As our players were our stakeholders, they took no time latching on the metaphor. The discussions smoothly segwayed out of the simulation and into the real world of Carbon Credits. Esther pointed out that even though the game wasn’t so low stakes, they were missing a sense of competition as in real life, as in the real market everyone would be trying to sell their own data overcoming to consensus (something Dutch Spark doesn’t strive for) leaving a lot for us to reflect on.
Our Conclusions
Dutch Spark is a Community of practice, formed of different parties from Cookstove Producers to Public Institutions. Our goal for the first sprint was to focus on researching about Dutch Spark and its involvement in the carbon credit ecosystem. Next, we looked at each entity in Dutch Spark in isolation and focused on how the impact information is coming to them and to whom they are transferring this information. From this exercise, we found that, Data currently gets checked/audited by many different parties, making movement slow.”
Lastly, we tried to visualize the impact data transfer from a cookstove user (Impact Generator) to the Carbon Credit Buyer (Impact Buyer). We found different paths of Data transfer and verified that, “Impact Data transfer/sharing is very project-specific and might not involve all the Dutch Spark parties together.”
Each project is unique and has different ways to generate and sell carbon credits. The only part that remains constant in the ecosystem is the information transfer between the Impact Generators, Cookstove/Pellets
Producers and Project Developers.
