Design-research helps bridge the gap between citizens’ needs and societal issues or public service. It helps to develop services, communication and interventions that truly support the public. In this track, the audience is invited to interact with design-research methodology and discuss insights and the necessary conditions from the perspectives of sustainable food, low literacy, and the digital divide.
Moderator: Geke van Dijk
Sustainable food
STBY recently conducted research for the Dutch government on the public’s perception of sustainable food. While this is an urgent political and environmental topic, ‘sustainable food’ is confusing and overwhelming for many people. In this interactive session, STBY introduce the co-creative and iterative methodologies they used to explore and analyse perceptions and behaviours around food.
Speakers: Shay Raviv, Sophie Knight
Low literacy
We developed five persona types based on design-research conducted amongst Dutch low literates. Using these personas, we developed matching methods for finding and educating these types. These methods help local organizations to find low literates and determine the drivers needed to help them take the big step to educating themselves.
Speakers: Neele Kistemaker, Petra Doelen
Digital inclusion
Increasingly, people need to be digitally equipped to participate in society. How do people without professional or social networks deal with increasing digitalization? In our participative research, we involve stakeholders and target audiences to explore and analyse perception and experience. In addition, we formulate solutions and experiments to meet the challenges defined. Our research was commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam.
Speakers: Christine Dedding, Rolinka Kattouw
6. STBY for Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (RIVM), het
Ministerie van Algemene Zaken en het Ministerie
van Economische Zaken.
SUSTAINABLE & HEALTHY
FOOD
8. How do citizens and staff from the client
organisation perceive sustainable and healthy
food?
9. STBY for Rijkinstituut voor Volksgezonheid en Milieu (RIVM)
How do citizens and RIVM staff
perceive sustainable and
healthy food?
How do they perceive dietary guidelines?
10. …and how do they perceive ‘new’ proteins such as
mushrooms, legumes, seaweed and insects?
11. How do you even start to investigate
perceptions about such a complex topic?
12. Task 1:
Think of one meal
from the last 2 days.
DESIGN RESEARCH
ON THE SPOT
13. DESIGN RESEARCH
ON THE SPOT
Task 2:
Rate your meal in
terms of sustainability
on scale of 1 to 5.
Least sustainable
Most sustainable
1
2
3
4
5
14. • To experience making food choices across different situations with
the topic in mind
• To consider various viewpoints
• To encounter questions and dilemmas
• To discuss with other participants
With such a broad and complicated topic,
people need time and reflection:
25. People find it difficult to relate sustainability to food: they
think first of packaging, leftovers and energy used while
cooking rather than how it was produced
34. • Iterating questions enabled us to probe progressively deeper
enough into participants' perceptions, creating more meaningful
insights
• An iterative process gave the client team time to get used to the
design research approach
An iterative process to deepen insights
35. • The co-creation sessions allowed us to clarify impressions,
prioritise issues, and deepen our insights
• Working with the client team as participants, observers and co-
analysers allowed them to experience the complexity and accept
the findings
• Getting the results embraced in the wider organisation is still
proving to be difficult
Co-creative method to sharpen insights and
promote acceptance for change
SHAY This project was for several government ministries, who pooled their innovation budgets to fund the project. They were interested in experiencing what an iterative and co-creative project felt like, and seeing what design research was.
SHAY The challenges that the agencies were facing became our research questions.
SHAY (read out Slide: How do citizens and RIVM staff perceive sustainable and healthy food?)
SHAY (read out Slide: How do they perceive dietary guidelines?)
SHAY (read out Slide: … and how do they perceive ‘new’ proteins such as mushrooms, legumes, seaweed and insects?)
SHAY: Health and sustainability, when it comes to food, is complex. Just think about all the conflicting information and advice you hear about how to eat better for your health and the environment.
SHAY: To show you just how complex it can be, let’s try a little exercise. Pick up the paper that should be on all of your chairs. Now think of one meal you’ve had in the last two days. You have 20 seconds to do this - so be quick! Think about the ingredients it contained, if you can.
SHAY: (after 20 seconds) Okay. Now we want you to rate your meal for sustainability, on a scale of 1 to 5. Five is the highest, so very sustainable. You have 30 seconds to do this.
SOPHIE: (after 30 seconds) Okay. Would anyone like to tell me how they scored their meal, and why they gave it that rating? Explain the criteria you used for your rating.
(ask three people)
If they don’t name enough topics, mention that these are some others that came up:
plastic packaging
imported food vs. local (how far it travelled - including how someone got it, e.g. walked somewhere or got it delivered)
homemade vs. industrially produced
meat (carbon) and ethically produced meat (e.g. animal welfare)
Fairtrade, slave labor, etc
Organic - pesticides, pollution etc
Deforestation, how much water something cost to produce (meat, almonds etc)
SOPHIE: So you can see how complex it can get. With such a complicated topic, people need time and reflection. They need to spend a few weeks experiencing different situations - at home, at work, commuting, shopping, eating out, at parties, when they’re stressed, when they’re cooking for children, etcetera - to see how their perceptions and behaviour changes. They also need to come across dilemmas and consider alternative perspectives and views to develop their own opinion and view.
SHAY: So how did we ensure this?
SHAY: (read out Slide: So we decided, with the client, on an iterative and co-creative process. We’ll now explain what the value of this process and methodology was.
SHAY: Interestingly, the client wanted some of their own staff to participate, so that they could understand the process and become advocates for it within the organisation. These people had, by nature of their job, more knowledge about sustainable food, but we were interested to find out whether that meant they had different perceptions and behaviours around sustainable food.
The client team also observed the workshop sessions and were very involved in the creation of research materials, and later, the analysis.
SHAY: This is a diagram of our research process. It was iterative because we continually refined the ‘inputs’ we gave the participants. We started with a workshop, then had a month-long ethnographic study, where participants used an app to record food experiences. And then we had a final to co-analyse our findings and delve deeper. During the ethnographic phase, we sent out weekly emails asking participants to record entries about different topics. We adjusted these based on participants’ input in earlier weeks, and worked closely with the client team to write these emails and select materials they wanted the participants to read. Continually refining this enabled us to zone in on our research questions and get deeper into participants’ perceptions.
This was the first Foodlab, where we were getting to know people, finding out about their general diet, and preparing them for the ethnographic study.
Then came the month-long ethnography- these are some screenshots from the app that we used, which is called Experience Fellow. They could record a meal, rate it for health or sustainability, and write a description of the meal, the context, the reason for their rating, and other thoughts they had about the food.
The participants were mostly very committed and engaged. Some wrote huge long entries every day. Using the app also nudged them to reflect on their food choices and the food ‘environment’ around them.
After a month we had a second Foodlab. This time it was co-creative. This enabled us to go deeper into the issues that people had brought up during the month-long ethnography. We were able to clarify, confirm insights and assumptions, and provoke group discussions that teased out the dilemmas and thought processes participants had had during the month.
SOPHIE
SOPHIE Here we explored our findings together, match it up to their knowledge and expertise, and saw what was recognisable for them. There were some familiar elements, but also many surprises for them. We were able to explain the perspective of the participants to them, and the participants from the client team could also share their experiences with the rest of the team.
SOPHIE: So, what did we find? One of the major findings was that people find it difficult to relate sustainability to food. When they hear ‘sustainability’ they first think of plastic packaging, reducing food waste, and how long they cook something or how many pans they use. It was only a few people who thought immediately about how the food was produced.
SOPHIE: So, what kind of issues came up? Many! These are just some of them - you’ll recognise some from the short exercise we did earlier. There were many conflicts and dilemmas. For example, some people wanted to eat less meat and more vegetarian food, but vegetarian alternatives such as veggie burgers had a lot of salt and additives, which they saw as unhealthy, while some noted that soy also leads to deforestation.
SOPHIE: However, sustainability really isn’t a priority for most people. Health is more frequently a priority, and is the main priority for some, but the top four for most people seem to be: taste, price, time, and social context.
SOPHIE: We also found that there was a lot of confusion and angst around food and nutrition advice. People read things on Facebook, in the newspaper, on food blogs, and all this information is often contradictory and confusing.
SOPHIE: At the same time, everyone juggles various criteria and priorities: maybe they’re losing weight, or maybe they do a lot of sport, or maybe they’re cooking for children or picky eaters, or maybe they have allergies or intolerances, or whether they’re on the road, or maybe they want to celebrate something
SOPHIE: We identified three main ‘types’ when it came to sustainable food: as you can see on the graph, which maps knowledge against a person’s preparedness to change, there was one group of highly knowledgable, motivated and committed people. There were also those who were interested and engaged, but in the process of figuring things out. And there was another group who didn’t really care that much about sustainability due to other priorities in their life and eating habits.
SHAY: Despite this diversity of types, current advice from the government is really ‘one size fits all’: there is only one ‘Schijf van Vijf’ (which means ‘circle of five’), and there’s no vegetarian version, for example, or one for people who have food intolerances, different cultural habits, and so on. So people are left feeling that they have to work things out for themselves to adapt the guidelines to their own lifestyle and preferences, which can be a lot of work.
SHAY: So, we recommended that the client should try to guide people through sustainable food dilemmas, and enable them to customise the dietary guidelines to themselves.
SHAY: What did we take away from the project?
SOPHIE: Firstly, iterating on our inputs throughout the study meant that we could really drill down into people’s perception and behaviours. This meant that we got very meaningful, deep insights that we wouldn’t have been able to get if we had stuck to a plan made before the project began.
The iterative process also meant that the client had time to get used to the design research process, and learn as they went along.
SHAY: And the co-creative Foodlab with the participants allowed us to clarify the impressions we had got from the ethnography and first Foodlab. Some of the things we found corrected our assumptions, added nuance to our preliminary insights, and led to completely new insights.
Secondly, because the client team played several roles - as participants, observers and co-analysers - they were really able to experience the complexity and accept what we had found. If they had been completely outside the research process, they would not have been able to accept it so easily and quickly, particularly because some of the things we found were painful truths for them. They had previously assumed that people would change their behaviour if only they had enough information, but we found that there is a big gap between KNOWLEDGE and PERCEPTION, and perception and BEHAVIOUR.
However, getting the results embraced in the wider organisation is providing particularly difficult - people who did not take part in the study find it hard to accept the findings and see their value.
By DIGITAL DIVIDE we mean the inequality with regard to access to, use of, or impact of information and communication technologies (ICT).