Mapping a Wicked Problem: Room Temperatures

Team: Shruti Aditya Chowdhury, @crystal.lin (Crystal Lin), DL (Dixon Lo), Catherine Shen, Maxine Zhou

We started the mapping exercise with the pain point of finding and maintaining optimal room temperature. Now that it’s winter in Pittsburgh, this was a problem that all of us faced. As we discussed the issue of room temperatures, we started to connect more issues into this issue, creating a map of the wicked problem of energy and heating.

Wicked mapping exercise on “Energy Influences”

Leverage Points (Intervention Areas)

From the exercise, some of the areas that came out as particularly interesting to us from which potential leverage points and possible interventions could be found were:

1Education and awareness (tied to the political landscape and media)

Education and new avenues of information can be done at the level of however, to get people to actively act on this awareness, it must be connected with another aspect of their lives they find in compromise.

2Lifestyle (but connected to feelings of social status)

Changing entire lifestyles takes a collective shift in ideals of social status (example: being “healthy” has become a new sign of social status, likewise, being energy-efficient and optimal has the potential for being the new sign of “social status”). These create a trickle-down effect from the very top. Others, however may see it more as a luxury than something to help save money. Lowering energy-efficient solutions and alternatives through technology/policy may play a significant role.

3Ecological destruction and income (because want to connect things that are far apart…)

Feeling the direct impact of ecological destruction on income will be a point which will directly impact the lifestyle people live, which in turn becomes a change for the demand. This is actually as aspect of #1 above and could be used to strengthen the feedback loop about which Donella Meadows talks.

Process

One of the key parts of this exercise was the collaborative experience of defining the problem. Because we all had different notions of the problem space — as well as concepts of the map — it felt a bit daunting. To get everyone just thinking, we started out individually brainstorming factors, areas, issues, ideas that came to mind when thinking of the problem of heating and energy.

Shruti Aditya Chowdhury at the whiteboard

Individual Brainstorming

Each person placed their thoughts on the board, organized in a manner that made sense to them.After reviewing each person’s ideas, we started re-organizing them based on an overall organizing principle.

Team at whiteboard considering patterns

Re-organizing Concepts

From there, the group began consolidating the issues, stakeholders, concepts, and considerations, re-organizing based on an initial visual diagram that looked at the designed world, environment, and social considerations.

Re-arranging

Re-arranged

Finding Relationships

Once we came up with a map of concepts, factors, issues, and ideas, we began to link them through relationships, looking at how the concepts were related to one another. This then became the basis for digitization.

Starting to look at relationships

Early version of digital map

Reflections

Some reflections from the team members on the process.

• Inherently difficult BECAUSE everything is connected and have to be clear and decide what and/or how you are going to map the lateral and the vertical and what these dimensions are. Issues, concepts, stakeholders and causes, effects. Also don’t forget correlation!

An attempt at tracing problem BACKWARDS through possible causes

• Deciding when to stop
• Analyzing our map to find natural groupings and then re-organizing the placement of the nodes
• Making the map self evident
• Sometimes we disagreed with how a node was phrased or the things it connected to
• The map quickly moved to larger level issues (perhaps not enough time spent on the individual or community level). This made it harder to identify leverage points where designers could possibly intervene.
• Initial starting off point was disposal of nuclear waste — Went down to 30 foot view from there and then zoomed out again.

Feedback

• Messiness of mapping // issue of categories (Ahmed)
• Would have been interesting to include aspects of RENTAL vs. OWNERSHIP and OWNERSHIP as PRESENCE and ACTIVITY and possibly even SEASONAL ASPECT (Cameron)