Strategic Design: Increasing the impact of environmental conservation projects
Insights from Arohaehae/Critique #3 of my Masters of Design (MDes)
Today was my 3rd arohaehae/critique for my Masters, if you’re interested to read about how the project has evolved, you can read my first and second overviews here:
Here are my notes which approximate my arohaehae presentation:
My Masters is part-time over 2 years, which has given me time to let it evolve. My original starting point was ‘how might we improve the experience of environmental volunteers’, however over time my research showed me that whilst that was one area to improve, really my focus was on supporting conservation groups to become more impactful, and to expand the idea of what impact groups have.
This project is rooted in my experience as a volunteer, as a conservation group team leader, and setting up an office for an NGO that acts as a catalyst for volunteer-based conservation activities. In addition, my practice is rooted in participatory approaches to design.
The challenge: environmental community groups in Aotearoa make a massive contribution to environmental and social outcomes, but research has found that there’s massive gaps in our understanding about how much, where, and how effective they are. [1]
Through design research and systems mapping activities, I found that this is one of the causes of a range of other vicious cycles, including underinvestment in capacity building, underinvestment in new technologies, lack of realistic livelihood opportunities, and systemic underfunding.
The opportunity: whilst I strongly feel like nature participation through environmental volunteering is one of the most important interventions we can make to stem biodiversity loss (the original departure point of my Masters), I found that environmental groups are not in a position financially, structurally, or capacity-wise, to deal with a great influx of new volunteers.
So instead of working on bringing more volunteers into the sector, I believe we need to address the ways that conservation groups:
- Record, monitor, evaluate and communicate their impact
- Build the capacity of paid and unpaid ‘organisers’ who act as the lynchpins of community-based conservation
- Capture and share data to better understand and advocate for funding of the sector
So after identifying the relationship between impact evaluation and funding, I decided to dig in deeper, to the core patterns and activities of community groups.
I considered that if we could better understand the process, we could look for points of leverage.
To put people who largely work in the environmental sector at ease, I decided to run a session to map the flows with organic materials found in the forest (and a sharpie…). The use of organic materials really helped to recognise interconnections and flows of time and energy.
I found that almost universally there was a pattern which went something like:
Apply for grants > Receive grants > Do conservation activities > Report on activities
I developed this into a more detailed journey map, and from this was able to identify several points of leverage to improve the process. There was also a very clear pattern emerging:
Environmental conservation groups are trapped in short term funding cycles which prevents them from investing in the capability of paid and unpaid organisers, and from investing in systems which would improve efficiency and effectiveness of the group.
To help me understand the dynamic further, I decided to talk to funding coordinators to understand why things are they way they are.
I ran a video interview with a coordinator, which was semi-structured around understanding their limitations and needs.
I found that because environmental funding they had to allocate to community groups was quite limited, they were in a situation where they used the majority of the funding for on ground outcomes, and weren’t able to invest in ‘nice to haves’ like capacity building.
However the aspects they wished to focus on were quite strategic:
- Enable more groups to capture data about their activities, standardise how they receive this
- Support more groups to learn about and use monitoring and evaluation
- Have a way to compare the data from initiatives, and spot patterns to share best practice across the country
Coming back round to the community groups, I found myself wondering how we could standardise the capture and communication of data. Through my previous discussions, the concept of Photo Monitoring came up as an increasingly common approach to sharing ‘proof of work’, in addition to simple data.
I wanted to interrogate the process a little more, so opted to do an observation, interview and photographic documentation of the process to better understand how it was used.
This process really helped me understand that photography was being used to show short-term effects of a group, which was in line with the insight about short term funding cycles. It was an interesting moment of dissonance for me, as I’d always known Photo Monitoring to be established for longer term projects of 2–5 years, to show growth of revegetation, or recolonisation of river banks. To see it done as a ‘before, during, after’ series over 3–6 months, gave me some insights about the unique challenges and opportunities of this kind of documentation.
“It’s hard to show weed removal on photopoints unless it’s significant ground cover. You’re often taking green away from green.” — Jane, Community Group Coordinator
The issues around capture, storage, and presentation were clear and tangible.
I considered what it would look like to change the dynamic of reporting on activities into a largely automated experience.
Through journey mapping, writing user stories & jobs-to-be-done, working up value propositions & business modelling, and finally working on wireframes and an interactive prototype, I’ve arrived at a concept for capturing and communicating the impact of a group’s activities using photos as a primary data point, and passively collecting other data (GPS etc) thanks to the wonders of smartphones.
I’m aiming to:
- reduce the time and cost of capturing, storing and reporting for environmental groups/organisations
- build a tool for both citizen science and ‘traditional science’
- standardise data collection for funders
- enable groups to contribute data to a repository which could be used for scientific or policy purposes
Whilst I showed the development of a single concept in this arohaehae/critique, it is one in a portfolio of concepts which is the output of my Masters. This idea of a ‘portfolio of prototypes’ as a response to a complex challenge [2], is one I’ve been working with through my Masters in juxtaposition to the idea of using prototyping to arrive at a single product / service. Essentially, many small bets are a more effective approach to working on complex problems, as complex problems by definition are emergent and thus will change when new interventions are introduced.
I define my work as ‘Strategic Design’ which I refer to as a practice of identifying leverage points and developing strategies to intervene in complex problems. I have found through this MDes, that any single intervention (such as a photo monitoring app) will likely not shift the needle on the kind of challenge I identified for myself (biodiversity loss). However, creating a platform from which I could launch multiple interventions to deliver ‘value systems’ [3] seems like a better strategy.
I envision an environmental impact studio as a vehicle for that work, to better enable me to affect systems change. More about that another time.
In the way of a portfolio of prototypes mentioned earlier, I am also exploring a data gathering & visual reporting service, and an approach to low cost capacity building for the sector.
You can see more at:
What’s next?
Keep building relationships. Keep improving the concepts. Find a way to seed fund the development of the Photo Monitoring concept.
Please do keep in touch on Twitter.
References
[1] Peters, M. A., Hamilton, D., Eames, C., Innes, J., & Mason, N. W. H. (2016). The current state of community-based environmental monitoring in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 40(3), 279–288.
[2] Hassan, Z, et al (2015). The rise of the prototyping paradigm. Social Kritik 142/2015. https://payhip.com/b/leqA
[3] Huddle (2017) What We Do http://wearehuddle.com/what-we-do/
