Case Study: Wicked Problems — Food Sustainability

My first project at Ironhack Bootcamp was about trying to solve a “wicked problem”. We decided to go for the topic of food sustainability and worked in a group of 5 people. I will further on describe all the steps we took during this project.

Some basic information:

• Team members: Sam Durrani, Emily Schlüter, Tadeus Fopp, Mehmet Öz, Janine Wieting
• Project duration: 8 Days
• 10-minute presentation of the project with slides

But first of all: What is a ‘Wicked Problem’?

Wicked problems are”… a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.” — Horst Rittel

We got to chose between four topics and decided to go with Food Sustainability. In more detail, the problem was explain as the following:

In the last few decades, people have become more aware of the importance of good nutrition. But organic food is not accessible to everyone, and is often only available to people who can afford it.

Supermarket chains and big food corporations benefit more from the rise of the organic food market than the local producers. Instead of fixing the problem, they are harming the environment with unsustainable models. How Might We help people access local seasonal produce, while also fostering fair and honest relationships between producers and customers?

To tackle this problem, we got introduced to the process of design thinking. There are 5 phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

Each phase has a different focus and tools/methods, to reach the desired goal. Throughout the project we went through each phase and learned why and how to use the methods.

Phase 1: Empathize

In this phase, we want to develop an understanding of customers’ or users’ unmet or unarticulated needs. The goal is to understand who we’re designing for. We can do this by talking to potential users using interview techniques, observing them using ethnographic techniques, or taking their role for a period of time.

For this project we did some secondary research and looked for statistics, general information about the local food producers and markets and consumers behavior and attitude towards sustainable food.

In a second step, we did interviews (with consumers, producers and suppliers) as primary research. For the interviews we discussed the most important questions to ask and wrote two guidelines — one for the consumer interview and one for the supplier/producer interview.

Here is an overview of the consumer interview guideline:

INTRO
Age, place of living
Where do you usually go grocery shopping?
What do you think are some factors that make food organic?
Do you buy organic food?
If so, where do you buy it?
If so, how often? (have you bought it in the last two weeks?) > What influences that amount?
What are some important factors when buying organic food?
Have you heard about any other alternatives to buy organic?
Are there other options for you? Which ones? Why?
Have you faced any obstacles when buying organic food? If so, which are they?
What would help you, to get better access to organic food?
Think about yourself 5 years from now: how do you buy organic food?
Is there anything important about this topic, which we have not talked about?

Phase 2: Define

After gathering and generating a lot of information, it was time to synthesize our findings and define a problem statement from that empathy work, focusing on the user’s viewpoint.

In order to do so, we fused our findings of secondary and primary research and put in on a wall with post-its. It give a nice overview and starting point to use a method called ‘Affinity Diagram’. The goal of this diagram is to organize perspectives and points of view into groups. Therefore, each person — one after the other — takes a post-it from the collection and glues it to another wall. The next person takes a post it as well and either adds it to an existing group or creates a new group. Every decision per person should take not longer than about 10 seconds, to make it flowing process with being as effective as possible. The result looked like this:

After we formed the groups, we gave a header to each group and got a pretty nice overview of the insights. Then it was time to find design opportunities. What does that mean?

It means to organize the data in such a way where you can find repeating patterns, important themes, and pain points that can turn into design opportunities. To choose one of the design opportunities, we used the method ‘Dot Voting’. Each group member got 3 dots, to vote on the (in their point of view) most important or interesting theme or pain point.

In a next step we created the User Persona to set a common understanding of the final user and consensus & commitment to the design direction.

Next step: User journey map:

“A customer journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points.”

Nielsen Norman Group

In our User Journey Map, we figured out 7 stages, which our user is going through (the last one in this picture is more of a joke — but made us all laugh in the group)

After creating the User Journey Map, we took a closer look at the needs of our user (design opportunities) and decided, which is the most important one to work on.

In a last step of the define phase, we came up with a problem statement:

A young, busy professional Berliner (with an irregular schedule) needs a way to find a reliable & nearby source for organic produce, because she wants to enjoy buying tasty and healthy food.

Phase 3: Ideate

For me personally, this was the most fun part of the project. In the ideation process, we used brainstorming techniques to generate a lot of ideas to solve the problem — the goal was to come up with as many ideas as possible to encourage innovation, because the first ideas are often too generic and not very innovative. You would say ‘when you can’t think about more ideas, thats when the really good ones evolve’.

First we went for the ‘Crazy 8s’ which means, each person has 8 minutes to draw 8 ideas. After that we did a session of ‘Round Robin’. We review and discussed our ideas. Our brains were activated in a creative and effective way to go on to the next step of ‘Hand Sketching’.

For me this was the point, where we worked as a group super well together. Each of us first sketched their idea on a paper in 7 minutes and we discussed the ideas after that. In a second round, we could — in 7 minutes again — either work further on our own idea or add elements of another persons idea or even take over another idea and improve that one. I turned out to work on another persons idea, which I found super interesting and fun. We discussed again and did another round of ‘Dot Voting’ to decide, with which idea to continue our journey.

Phase 4: Prototype

It was time, to put our ideas into something more detailed and practical. In the phase of prototyping, you illustrate your idea in a way you can test it with people to see if it works. But before we created the prototype, we designed the ‘User Flow’ to know exactly, how the user navigates through the App. After that we put all details in Lo-fi-Wireframes — which was our Prototype — in order to then test it in a last step.

Here you can see, how that looked like:

Phase 5: Test

What happens now?

You put your concept solutions in front of people to see what works and what doesn’t so that you can use the feedback to refine it.

We asked two people to use our Lo-fi-Wireframe to uncover problems. We did this by having three people with different tasks (one was performing the computer/app, one was interviewing our tester while using the prototype and one wrote down all the insights we gathering during the test).

This part was really “eye-opening”, because it showed all the flaws of our prototype, that we would not have figured out by ourselves, because we were too biased to do so.

After all of this, we created a few slides for our presentation and summed up the whole process and presented in front of our class members.

Thank you very much for reading. Hope you enjoyed it and feel free to leave a comment :)