HMW Encourage Composting in Toronto? 3-Part Design Thinking Sustainability Event Series organised by OpenIDEO Chapter

Summer of 2022, the first normal summer after the pandemic, OpenIDEO Toronto Chapter embarked upon a hybrid three part series event to explore composting practices in Toronto.

The first part of the event introduced participants to UX design research methods and design thinking techniques to enable us to think of ideas
that encourage people in Toronto to compost their kitchen scraps and garden waste.

For the second part, OpenIDEO Toronto Chapter 2022 collaborated with The Stop’s Green Barn located in Wychwood Barns park in St. Clair Ave West neighbourhood to learn about the process of composting. The farmers market at the Wychwood Barns also gave us the opportunity
to interview the farm vendors and the customers on site about their composting habits and their knowledge on the same topic.

The third part of the series was a group workshop. All the participants
and organisers came together to analyse their collected research using
the clustering method to look for common observations and HMW statements to ideate.

THE PROBLEM

According to the Retail-insider article, Consumers in Canada Increasingly Embracing Sustainability as Pandemic Continues: Study, “More than half
of Canadians plan to pay more attention to the environmental impact
of what they consume but continue to rely on companies to act as leaders
in driving positive social and environmental outcomes,” as told by Lokesh Chaudhry, Consumer Co-Leader, EY Canada. The article further adds that, Canadians are also exhibiting financial caution, reserving their spending as tightly as possible, as a result of the uncertainty and economic fragility caused by the pandemic.

Past research collected from a 2019 OpenIDEO Toronto chapter event around organic waste found that composting was a major barrier due
to three major challenges:

1. Culture of convenience — people don’t want to get out of their comfort zone and change their ways of managing waste.
2. Landfills: out of sight, out of mind — people do not see or experience the process of waste ending up in landfill on a daily basis, so it is difficult for them to connect with the issue and care about composting.
3. Condo buildings look for cheapest & easiest cost — recycling and composting is less convenient and cost-effective than garbage disposal for condo buildings.

INITIAL HMW STATEMENT

How Might We (HMW) encourage composting in the city.

THE EVENT SERIES & PARTICIPANTS
- 1 virtual meeting of participants & intro to research methods
- 1 site visit
- 1 in-person research synthesis and ideation workshop

SESSION 1: RESEARCH METHODS

In the first session, we were introduced to the Design Thinking process
and to the first stage — INSPIRATION:

We also learnt about UN Sustainable Development Goals — Composting being one of the contributing factors towards Sustainable cities and communities.

Research Method:

• We were introduced to Generative Research, as a technique to follow when conducting our research. The goal of the research is to find opportunities for solutions and innovation.
• The techniques we were to use were — One on One interviews & Field Observation
• We decided to carry out our research on two user groups:

SESSION 2: SITE VISIT & TOUR
The site visit was organised at the Stop’s Green Barn located at 601
Christie Street in the St. Clair Ave West neighbourhood. It’s a unique urban agriculture hub, situated in the midst of Wychwood Barns park. It offers
a greenhouse, community gardens, a commercial kitchen, a bake oven,
a compost demonstration centre, and a year-round Farmers’ Market.

We met Samuel at the compost demonstration centre, who gave us a tour of the medium scale compost pit and explained to us all the steps that go into composting the scraps of their food waste. The resulting composted soil and the fertiliser is utilised in their community garden.

After the compost tour, all the participants gathered around our stall in the farmers market, that was taking place that day. We created a large poster posing the question, ‘How Might We Encourage Composting in the city?’ We asked the customers at the Farmer’s market, who stopped by our stall
to write their answers in the post it note. We also split into pairs and walked around the market interviewing people and the farm / non-farm vendors
of different stalls on the topic of composting.

My team interviewed an elderly couple, a middle-aged woman, a sales rep
of a local bakery and an elderly woman who lived at the condo across
from the park.

List of questions we asked people:

1. What’s your living situation like?
2. How do you manage your kitchen waste?
3. What motivates/discourages you to compost?
4. What bias/assumptions do you have regarding composting?
5. What barriers do you face when you are trying to compost?
6. Do you have access to composting?
7. What’s your perspective on sustainability?
8. Who can help you with the process of composting?

SESSION 3: RESEARCH SYNTHESIS & IDEATION WORKSHOP

The organising team and participants met at the CSI’s Climate Ventures
space on Spadina Avenue, to analyse our research and brainstorm ideas
on the basis of our findings.

We followed the CLUSTERING METHOD and used post it notes
to write down our observations in order to find out the common
themes of our research.

Some common themes that emerged were:

1. Composting techniques that people follow presently include throwing kitchen scraps in the garden and green bin.
2. People consider composting to be messy / smelly process
3. There is a lack of education and access to resources about composting
4. People feel there is lack of enough space required for composting
5. People expect help from the city in the form of the right infrastructure and policies
6. People rely on city’s green bins
7. There is a lack of positive influence and re-enforcement by their community and landlord

From these common themes we discussed what our solution
MUST, SHOULD AND COULD do:

We briefly discussed Empathy Mapping and learned to write User Need Statements, an actionable problem statement that comprised of three main points:

1. Who the particular user is
2. Their needs
3. Why that need is important to the user

Reflecting on our field research and interviews at the market, some examples of the User Need Statements we identified were:

1. Someone who lives a sustainable lifestyle and is looking for a better way to dispose off their kitchen scraps and doesn’t have faith in the city’s green bins.
2. Someone who is a baker and produces a lot of food scraps and needs environmentally friendly ways to dispose of it.
3. Someone whose hobby is gardening and finds it expensive to purchase soil and could benefit from composting as it will provide them with their own natural fertiliser and soil conditioner.
4. Someone who makes coffee at home everyday and needs better way to dispose of their used coffee grounds, as they feel guilty about throwing large amounts in landfill.

Next step was SCOPING — all of us rewrote HMW statements we felt would help us come up with better creative solutions. The final HMW we narrowed down on was:

How might we inspire & educate first time users to compost habitually?

The rationale behind choosing this statement — we all collectively felt that educating the kids early on about composting will lead to inculcating composting as a crucial habit and inspire the adults in their community
to compost as well.

Keeping this HMW statement in mind, we used the Crazy8s method
to come up with as many rapid ideas as we could under 8 minutes.
All of us shared our silly, crazy, unique ideas and some cool ideas really
stood out to all of us.

Some interesting, wild and unique ideas that we came up with:

1. A compost bin connected to a budding plant that helps it grow
2. A compost land amusement park
3. The city rewards you with points every time you compost. You can eventually use those points to buy tickets for fun city events
4. A fun digital comic book on composting for kids
5. A tamagotchi game about composting
6. A live worm feed to see how composting works

CONCLUSION

It is evident from our preliminary research that people are aware of the benefits of composting, but are not well-educated about it. They also lack proper access to resources that will help them take proper steps towards composting. Educating kids in inspiring ways early on and making it a part of their daily routine can make a huge difference and in return inspire their parents and the community to take part in composting as well.

On a personal note, I had a very positive experience as a participant in the OpenIDEO Toronto chapter event series. It helped me:

• discover and get acquainted with the challenge of organic waste and composting in Toronto.
• get out of my comfort zone and interact with strangers in an unfamiliar neighbourhood in Toronto about the common problem being faced by all of us as a community.
• get familiarised with UX design research methods like Clustering, Scoping and Ideation through Crazy 8s methods.
• experience how much fun it is to solve a problem using UX design thinking and research techniques face to face in groups, for the
  first time.