Sustainable Project Network — Our Call to Adventure
Our paths crossed in the Digital Transformation Intensive Program at Digital Society School, where our journey as Digital Transformation Design trainees from the Systems for Sharing track of the Spring 2021 semester began. From that point on, as a team, we started off our adventure through an exploratory sprint dedicated to Making.
Meet the team
Adela is confident that her personal and professional positionalities cohere with the research inquiries. Her ethnic background as an Indonesian, and her tertiary education in Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands, inform her social construction surrounding the topic of communication and sustainability. Developing communication strategies and managing different stakeholders within the context of organisations and business was already part of her set of skills for this challenge! Adela came prepared for this complex research problem equipped with critical and wide-angle perspectives.
Havel, born and raised in Gabon but with a taste of Ukraine, is a recent Masters graduate in Software Engineering with a strong passion for web development. Havel’s mission is to contribute to this project by bringing his technology knowledge and skills to the table to help Hva and Uva stakeholders have a good system for resource sharing on sustainability.
Matilde comes from Portugal and joined this team with one intention: to make sure she is a positive agent of change in the world. By engaging with this challenge, she believes greater value will be created. Namely by helping sustainability efforts become more visible and engaging, in order to connect people around a thriving sustainability community. To pursue this mission, she is equipped with a Bachelor in Communication Sciences, which will help her to contribute to an effective communication strategy.
Yannick is not only a Business Innovation student but has also a keen passion for digital media and sustainable resource management. For him, it is a pleasure to be cooperating with HvA & UvA on the ultimate goal of managing the complexity of their communication system to establish a thriving sustainability community. Yannick is embracing this challenge as a creative and strategic thinker helping an organisation define complex problems clearly, facilitating, and contributing to, a creative ideation process and finally laying out the strategy for implementing these, its superpower.
Together, we embraced this adventure as the fierce Cleanup Managers, guided by our mentor Stephan Ackermans and partnering up with the Waste Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) with the following mission on our hands: To understand and improve the system of doing sustainability projects the HvA & UvA are now operating under.
The Challenge
Therefore, the challenge we had just embraced revealed to be two-folded: To create a system, platform or product that (1) helps students and staff discover, keep track of and exchange information on the current and past sustainability projects and (2) communicate to the student body at large what is happening at the university on the sustainability front.
The Call to Adventure — A Conversational tool
Our first experience as a team began with an exploration that would bring the makers in us to the surface. The aim of this experimental sprint was not only for us to get to understand our dynamic as a group, but also to get a taste of developing a design artefact that would provide clues in understanding the problem, as part of the research.
The project revolves around the lack of a unified communication system and, consequently, collaboration in terms of the sustainability efforts, involving a diverse set of stakeholders within the universities. Looking at this problem, our main concern was to make sure the conversational object would generate insights into the current situation. Namely in what regards the communication on the sustainability front, within the university and from each of the stakeholders’ perspectives. This way, we could understand how it can be improved.
And so, we were ready to connect them!
We Connect board game
“Our digital and interactive board game will spark a conversation around the lack of interaction between stakeholders and lead the path for innovation.”
Our first encounter with our ally on HvA & UvA Waste Management department, the project’s partner, was the ideal situation to apply our first digital and interactive prototype. Through this experience, we were able to identify some of the disruptions happening in the communication between sustainability-related departments and stakeholders.
Follow our Journey
- Check our project’s web page
- Keep an eye on our breakthroughs on Medium
