First Impressions

Last week’s visit to the Learning Community Charter School was without a doubt the highlight of the semester for me so far. I quickly realised that the group I had picked was made up of three highly energetic, enthusiastic boys full of ideas (literally full of ideas!).

When I asked them questions like “what do you want to fix in the world?”, the boys initially seemed unsure, hesitating to give an answer but then one of them said “the ocean”. What was interesting was that the other two boys both responded to this in agreement, nearly shouting “yes, the ocean!”.

When I asked them to try to be more specific about the problem and prompted them with the follow up question, “what about the ocean?”, they all pointed to the problem of waste.

We then followed this with “So, how will you start to tackle this issue? Where will you start?” This made their responses much more specific and one of the boys suggested that we should stop dumping waste into the ocean in the first place. I thought that this was a forward-thinking answer suggesting a more long-term solution to the problem than a quick fix up. Therefore, the focus of our exercises became “How to prevent more waste from entering the ocean?”

Iterations

For every iteration of this general idea, what was almost amusing to me is the fact that the boys each took turn leading the team. If one of the boys presented an idea genuinely as a solution and with enthusiasm, the other two always tended to support that with a “Yea, and we can add/do/make…”. But of course, oftentimes ideas that were presented only to emphasise a funny point yielded more jokes from the team. The boys obviously were good friends and most of the times behaved as one unit. In such a unit, it was easy to see an idea take shape, morph and evolve as the boys easily followed each other’s newer additions.

So, given this as a premise, I felt that the group only needed very few gentle nudges to arrive at the final idea that they presented: an incentivised method of reducing waste that goes into the ocean. Melting the plastic that would otherwise go into the ocean to make other things with was the first idea that the team came up with. When prompted with the question, “What should we make with the plastic?”, ‘a boat’ was the answer.

Embrace Technology?

An app was another one of the first ideas. The purpose of the app was to keep track of how much plastic a person was recycling and receive points for each piece. When asked what the points would be for, one of the twins answered, “When you collect a certain number of points, you win something”. Immediately after he said this, he seemed unsure about what that reward would be and trailed off. Previously he has mentioned about giving away the boat made out of recycled plastic, but this time it seemed that he did not want to just give it away to the person with the most points. From here onwards, the other two boys took over and the conversation started to change direction. But it was obvious that our boy who wanted to reward the person with the most points was still fixated on his idea, but just not sure how to express his idea in its entirety. The team also seemed to be well aware about fraud and how digital accounts are vulnerable to hacking. Their way of thinking revealed that they wanted to prevent any such things that may impact their product negatively by eliminating the possibility of such issues arising from the very beginning. I am not sure if they knew it, but they were designing an entire system – casually, while making lots of side jokes.

Systems Thinking

Eventually our system became one that operates in the same way to lotteries. The recycled boat is not simply given away but is given away as the ultimate prize to a lottery-style competition. For every certain number of plastic pieces that get recycled, the recycler receives a point that can be confirmed in their app. This means each recyclable plastic product will have a code on it that will be scanned at the ‘recycle bin’. For our presentation, we paper-prototyped the boat, the bin and the app.

The experience of interacting with these kids revealed to me that children are natural idea generators, and their interactions are the most fruitful when they make a team effort. Feeding off from one another, children make a unit and it appears that they are more effective if they are with their friends as friendly competition keeps the team moving forward!

Lastly, our team struggled a little bit to follow the actual structure of the class and the given instructions for each design exercise. The boys seemed more fixated on their current ideas and less willing to adapt their idea to the given design prompts. But I think that from the midst of the ensuing chaos, some partial follow through with their original ideas and some partial adaption to the exercise questions, our team came up with a very interesting idea.