After a heavy beginning of the week in involving a lot of sense making and meetings with advisors and fellow students we all managed to organise ourselves for 2 days of intense group brainstorming. It was a fun few days with some great ideas coming out. Leading up to a break we are having in the process to do another industry project, I will be clustering and developing a rough ‘roadmap’ for how to proceed with prototyping. Looking forward to making stuff!
After yesterday’s visit to the allotments I was jumped at the opportunity to visit the Main Farm/Offices of food-box delivery service, Aarstriderne. The company has made a name for itself in Denmark through it’s effective delivery of fresh, organic, locally grown produce to the citizens of Copenhagen. From this, and two much larger farms outside of city, the business delivers to approx. 40,000 households throughout Denmark.
The numbers are impressive and business is obviously doing very well, but I was more interested in specifically what the business was doing in fostering knowledge and interest in organic, homegrown produce. To my surprise I had arrived on a day where the Head Farm had turned into a giant activity area for three local schools who had come down to learn about growing, cooking and tending to the daily duties of the farm. A fine coincidence! The aim was to encourage social learning and appreciation for nature beyond the walls of classroom. Kids were encouraged to plant, tend and take care of their own bit of farm over the course of a season and at the end the produce was cooked into a multitude of delicious smelling dishes.
Among many things I learned from this visit, I want to just touch on this one key insight. The business promotes this initiative and organises it separately from it’s core business of delivery boxes; but maybe there is an opportunity here to provide the same knowledge and inspiration (as seen with the children on the farm) through the channel of communication they already have with many people in the city of Copenhagen itself.
There are many more insights but time is short and I need to get working on my design proposal! Check in for the weeknotes tomorrow for more on my thinking so far!
Today I took a trip to the coast or Copenhagen (Amager Strand) to have a look around the allotments there. I had been tipped off about it by some friends at CIID and thought it a good opportunity to kick off some immersion and see if I could make some contacts for any future co-design/user validation.
Approaching the allotments early in the morning the place was fairly quite with not too many people around. Plots had land on which people were growing an assortment of vegetables and ornamentals as well as a small shed in which they, presumably kept tools and materials for the growing season. It was visibly obvious that it was the end of the season. Some plots were withering away while others had a bit more care put in to keep them going well into the winter season (greenhouses and such).
Yet in general there was a wilderness about the place. It’s something I notice more and more in Denmark especially that gardeners appreciate the natural order by which their gardens/plots grow. Only exerting minimal control in ordering what grows next to what and where. As well, of course, making sure they don’t invade neighbour gardens! There was also a plethora of homemade constructions for greenhouses, trellises, potting etc. It seems there is a joy in both growing but also facilitating that growth but constructing their own rigs and beddings rather than buying “flat pack” as it were.
A solitary woman managed to jump out at me from her shed and say a hello upon which I started to ask her about her garden and the more formal procedures of obtaining a space in the collective. It’s been a very busy season it seams with a long waiting list for next year. And I can understand why. Almost immediately she tells me this she was showing me her rhubarb and boasting at it’s size this year. The people here are obviously proud and I’m left with the feeling, as I bid her farewell, that maybe there isn’t much that should be done here to change any of that.
Some interesting questions which I will take into my visit tomorrow with Aarstiderne.
The Industry Projects have started here at CIID. First up are CIID sponsors Velux and Novo Nordisk in which the class is split to work on either one they wish.
I’m well underway with Velux right now and therefore it may be a bit quieter around here the coming weeks before our thesis project kicks off with the research phase. For now I’ll show what I can until word is given on how much I can actually put on the Internet. Confidentiality and all that jazz.
Back down to workshop for some more light studies!
Here’s a quick update from the front.
Currently the class at CIID is engaged in brainstorming and idea generation for the Service Design course. We’ve been mainly based at the airport all of last week and this week working mainly as a group, running workshops between teams to help each other come up with potential idea directions.
From our session earlier:
“An inspirational shadowing exercise conducted with a budget traveller early in our process showed that for almost 50% of the time you are doing nothing in an airport; you are waiting. We expanded this to investigate passenger mindset and communication of information in order to better understand the reasons for and opportunities in waiting.”
We then held a brainstorm around our research questions (check them out here).
Some great ideas have come out and we’ve already started identifying a few of them that could be prototyped. Here’s my colleague on what we’re working around now:
“Some first run concepts explored providing a learning experience in the form of an airport library, a universal ticketing system incorporating wider infrastructure of Copenhagen to give passengers an opportunity to plan their journey and local network infrastructure based on communicating the right information at the right time to both passengers and staff.”
Looks like we’re leaning toward the idea of an infrastructural service/system that allows passengers to deposit leftover change from their trip on their airline account to be used with their ticket whenever they are at CPH airport in the future.
