Final Assignment: Track Your Trash

Design Thinking for Innovation (UVA Darden)

Before you read: Currently, I am a university student. Therefore, I have not had the chance to  implement a tool as people working in an organisation could. As a solution, I have implemented a  tool in my student career and would like to ask you to view my assignment in its context. Thank you  very much for your time and understanding.

Challenge  I am a first-year student of Media Studies from Europe. As part of a course about data projects, the  instructor required each of us to make up a project and give a project pitch about it. The project had  to function as a response to a call for proposals by a non-profit environmental communications  centre. This call stated that it would provide a grant to an investigative journalism project on  environmental crime.

The project I made up, Track Your Trash, was about issues with plastic waste from western countries  exported for recycling in developing countries: A considerable portion of it is not recycled and ends  up in incinerators or dumping grounds, causing severe environmental damage while being labelled as  recycled in the country of origin. To track down the parties involved, my project would put GPS  transmitters with a connected thermometer in export containers containing plastic waste. The  movements and temperature, which is interesting for the last few seconds before it enters an  incinerator, would be accessible for everyone through a website. This website would allow everyone,  especially locals, to add further information when the transmitter is in their area.

Selection  The goal of the pitch was to inform and convince my audience of Track Your Trash’s potential.  Imaginatively, it had to convince the non-profit organisation that my project was the most interesting  and deserved the grant. Not surprisingly, I decided to use the storytelling tool which was introduced  by Andre Martin in the second module of this course.

This tool aims to take listeners along a journey. First, it must get the audience in the right state of  mind. Like any other presentation, data, hard facts, and recommendations should be introduced, but  now, it all has to be a part of a compelling story. The attention of the audience is a key point of  storytelling. Therefore, the story must build suspense: e.g. by asking questions of which the answers  will be revealed later. Another useful method to involve the audience is by creating tensions which  can spark interesting debates around aspects of the project.

Application  When the idea for the project was finished, it was time to start preparing the pitch. The pitch was  structured according to the storytelling tool. In the introduction, I introduced the recycling problem,  partially by referring to everyone’s daily experience with throwing away plastic waste. The idea was  that they could relate to the problem and as a result, be more interested. Going on, I used data and  hard facts to indicate the severity of the issues with plastic waste exports to get a common view on  the problem in the minds of the audience. Moreover, I put question tags at the end of some  sentences to make people think for a second.

Then I told them I had a plan to get to know more about these practices and the parties involved.  Next, I started to ask questions which all revolved around one main question: How are we going to  get to the bottom of this with the help of data collection? That was when I started explaining the

strategy of the project. Although creating tensions is one of the storytelling methods, I purposefully  did not make use of it because I simply had to convince my audience that my project is the one that  deserves the grant. Disagreement would probably have lessened my chance to reach that goal.

Insight  The pitch, at least the way in which it was told, turned out to be a success. The audience seemed to  be more engaged than with all the other pitches. Moreover, my pitch was praised by the course  instructor for being engaging and he even said that I had a clear grasp of how to do these pitches.  Unfortunately, one issue he did point out was that the project would be way over budget. But luckily,  that does not have much to do with my aim to become a good storyteller.

Based on this result, I have gotten the feeling that storytelling serves its purpose very well. By  implementing this tool for my studies, I have realised the importance of creating engagement and  getting the audience in the right state of mind.

Approach  Next time I get the chance to implement the storytelling tool, I will try to focus more on the  stakeholders. In this pitch, I could have tried to indicate a connection between my project and the  non-profit organisation for which the pitch was meant. What possibilities the results of my project  would allow them for example. Furthermore, to prevent such a painful mistake again, I will focus a  bit more on the project itself, rather than the structure of the pitch next time.

Bahar

7-5-2021

