Digital Transformation Design

Dutch Spark: Third Sprint

Designing Across Cultures Track at Digital Society School

Our Team:

We are a group of multidisciplinary professionals selected by Jeroen Groeneveld to work on a cross-cultural project required at its core to bridge the communication gap and build trust and reliability through data.

• Shreya Gupta: has a background in Computer Science Engineering, Digital Game and Product Design
• Kelsey Trites: is an experienced Field Researcher with a background in Nutritional Sciences and Organization and Management.
• Mercy C. Chumo: has a background in Agriculture, Sustainability and Management.
• Prasam Pal: has a background in Mechanical Engineering along with Industrial and Product Design.

Coach: Anneke van Woerden / Program Manager: Nick Verouden

Gearing up for the Third Sprint

At the close of our second Sprint, the Design Across Cultures team at Digital Society School team presented three problem themes with five speculative scenarios to propose a picture of possible solutions to stakeholders and how the target user group might interact with them.

We did this to discuss with our stakeholders the opportunity areas identified, based on problem mapping and prioritize one as the most urgent to solve. We discussed the themes in the context of our initial Design Challenge,

“How might we demonstrate the reliability of the impact data clearly and uniformly to be useful for all stakeholders involved — especially auditors and other carbon credit buyers?”

The theme “Visualization of Qualitative and Quantitative data” had many elements that targeted Carbon Credit buyers’ problems and trust issues, which we will see later in this article, hence was chosen as the focus area.

We keep coming back to How Might We………………?

To move into the second half of our Double Diamond Design Process with gained focus, we needed to re-write our final brief into a more actionable question.

During our sprint retrospective with our coach Anneke van Woerden, we were introduced to team storming. We discussed as a team things we achieved, learned, and need to work on and our individual experiences working within the interdisciplinary team.

Such retrospectives are essential when working in an agile environment and multidisciplinary team to create an open dialogue of understanding and discuss aspects that might hinder the performance and productivity of the team. We also dived into some models of group development.

We also used our retrospective to redefine our brief into the “How might we…..?” question together. We all understood what would be essential things to find and solve for our target group, now narrowed down to Carbon Credit buyers.

After some team storming, we finalized our design question to-

“How might we build buyer confidence in Dutch Spark’s carbon reduction projects by creating a tool that visualizes the impact they are purchasing?

It also became part of our sprint Goal, which focused on mapping our target group’s persona, finding their motivations and developing an information Hierarchy to start conceptualisation and prototyping.

We used desk research and our partner’s buyer behaviour insights as the basis of the persona building. We used many mediums to collect our persona’s motivations like Youtube, Linkedin, other social media channels, the Fair Climate Fund website and other Carbon credit marketplaces.

It also gave us critical information about how the narrative around carbon credits and carbon reduction projects is currently illustrated in front of the buyers. What factors now contribute to unreliability in the minds of the buyers and speculate what might in future.

Determining the Core

Previous research activity led us to define the core elements our solution must have to fulfil our design goal. Then finally, we tried to explain it by answering three significant questions.

Where should the solution live?

What form should it take?

What features the tool should have?

Next, we brainstormed around these three questions to come closer to a definite design scheme. Then as a team, we dot voted to conclude and formulate the answer to the above three questions.

Translate Session with Maaike van Cruchten

Maaike Van Cruchten is a lecturer at the Interactive Media Design School in Amsterdam and a docent at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She has extensive experience in data visualization and prototyping. We invited her because of her focus and expertise in not just data representation but also storytelling.

When we introduced our design challenge, approach and progress, she suggested that we next collect and finalize the information we need to show to the buyers and start building concepts around the information. She said this because the information has many forms; it can be analytical, numeric, or words, and it’s a must to get a taste of the data that we are trying to visualize.

She even shared some proactive tips and examples of cultural storytelling and introduced us to ‘Scrollytelling.’

Information Mapping and Hierarchy

After our session with Maaike, we looked at the information we have and its form. Then, we started collecting all the information that tells the story of women benefitting from clean cooking, the level of impact and its effects on the buyer and environment.

We divided the information into sections to create a structure and then arranged it in a way that tells a compelling story and generates interest.

Section 1: Impact Generators Story

Section 2: Baseline Statistics

Section 3: Impact Statistics

Section 4: Certifications and Accreditations

Section 5: About Project and Partners

Once we finished, we decided to include our partners in this discussion, as we didn’t want to leave any crucial information or their expert opinions.

So we presented this information map and co-filled it with our partners.

Next Steps

Coming Sprints, we will conceptualise and design low-fidelity prototypes to test and iterate with the target group. Read about Sprint 4 here.

I hope you are enjoying this Digital Transformation ride with us; please comment if you want to share something with us or know more about us, our project and partners or Digital Society School.