Reflection on using Visualization for Design Thinking

Challenge  The Household Waste Management system in the town needs a redesigning. The challenge has multiple  dimensions. The current garbage collection and disposal system has lost their credibility among the town’s  residents as they do not maintain timings for collecting the garbage from homes, impose new rules every  time on the residents, give varying and numerous instructions to residents on how to segregate the wastes  and hand over that to them etc. Also, the residents do not dispose the garbage with the town’s Waste  Management authorities, rather throw the garbage in random areas in the town. The garbage collected  by the authorities are just dumped to make heaps of garbage in an area bit far from the town. Hence, no  productive use or recycling is done on the wastes collected. In the whole case, we are talking about just  domestic wastes – industrial, commercial, and agricultural wastes are not included in the study. The  focused objective of the study is to manage end-to-end household waste management in a better manner  to draw more compliance and reduce as well as recycle the wastes.

Here we have a challenge with the town authorities to bring well framed regulations for the garbage  collectors to adhere to a definite process, and the residents to follow a thoughtfully designed garbage  disposal mechanism.

Selection  Since there are multiple dimensions to this issue, it is important to collect information from all parties  involved and present it in a creative, powerful yet simple way to draw consensus and create synergy. This  mismanagement issue has been going on for so long, and hence I am clear that the solution to this needs  a creative thinking. It needs to be brought out by laying down the available data and finding out the hidden  insights from it. Also, there could be patterns in the incidents happening since things are tightly coupled  in cause and effect manner.

To address all these needs, Visualization seemed to be the apt tool. It will help in visualizing data to  unearth the hidden details, finding patterns for addressing bad practices and presenting the information  to wider audience with varying backgrounds to draw consensus and easily communicate the new process  suggestions without confusion.

Application  To begin with I tried to read the details from the Municipality’s official sources (like its websites) on the  current Household Waste Management process. It gave a picture of all the people involved in the process,  like field workers doing the collection, their supervisors, truck drivers, residents, etc. Following that, I did  an informal discussion with a few members from each persona to know: their role in the process, their  challenges, their motivations etc. I also made visits to know how the premises and circumstances are at  the local garbage collection point near my home and how it looks at the final destination – the dump yard,  which is the next destination from the local point. Then I put it in Draw.io tool to draw a flow diagram of  the entire process, with timeline involved. This formed the Visual #1.

Also, from the details collected and from my personal experience, I jotted down the possible types of  waste items and grouped them into categories by its lifecycle. For example, in case of vegetable and fruit  wastes- it will start decaying in about 3 days and when left to decompose, it can form reusable Compost  in a period of say 3 months. I did this grouping for all other types of waste items noted and draw their life  cycle as well. The diagrams also mentioned special steps to do when we want to recycle or process the  wastes. Though these had several diagrams each for one type of waste category, for the sake for  categorization, I called this Visual #2.

From a process point of view, I noted down the flow diagram for activities performed by each persona in  a separate diagram. Though Visual #1 represented the holistic view, this will tell in specific and in deeper  detail the flows associated with each persona in a different diagram. This is Visual #3.

Insights  The power of data strikes you when you lay it out in the right form. And visualization done rightly, does  exactly that. I was able to see how segregating the wastes in the right manner will help to process them  more effectively and efficiently. Over 50% of the household wastes were organic. So, segregating it  properly, followed with right decomposition measures can return at least half of the wastes into the value  chain. It also means, reducing the needs in future by taking a supply from your past. This recommended  segregation and decomposition measures need some changes in the current process – those could be laid  out by conducting more discussions with all the involved persona to define new set of process.

The other and more serious problem was with the compliance of the current process. From the informal  discussions done, it looks like the timing and methods of collection followed by the current garbage  collection authorities is more random and hence difficult for the residents to follow. As for the authorities  they are a bit lethargic about timings and doesn’t feel the ownership of work as their location for duty  keeps shifting. Also, very less recognition is present for the work done by these field workers. So, by  comparing their individual flow diagrams with each other’s routine (Visual #3) and with the holistic picture  (Visual #1) got insights about how the problem could be alleviated by shifting the timings by a few minutes  and establishing a concrete process. This new flow diagram was generated as Visual #4 and can be used  to draw buy-ins from both parties in an open discussion.

Approach

The whole study was more self-driven to resolve a social problem. The approach followed included  collecting data, visiting places, processing the collected data for envisioning a better process to solve the  current non-compliance and create more options for recycling wastes. This helped to gain on the low- hanging fruits – like opportunity to recycle the organic wastes and steps to segregate waste materials.  This approach also enabled me to form recommendations about possible new process in terms of timing  to improve compliance. What could follow to build on the solution is to do Learning Launch in small groups  by discussing with the parties involved (or their representatives) to gather results from the  recommendations. These results could be used to reinforce the need for changes and roll-out a new  process with better buy-in from the parties involved.

