Challenge:

My basic idea is to replace the plastic cover and all packaging materials made  of plastic with a film which is made of sea weed. They are sometimes edible  (Depends on the ingredients), eco-friendly, biodegradable and used for  packaging, replacing plastic packaging with seaweed or known as brown algae  as a component. This helps the environment by reducing plastic pollution and  also is helpful in improving the livelihood of the seaweed farmers who depends  on the seaweed for their livelihood.

Selection:

The tool which I used for my innovation was the tool of Mind Mapping to  identify and find the possible solutions to the problem. My customers are  basically the hyper local markets who are working to apply the innovations  which reduce the plastic wastage. Mind mapping tells us about how the ideas  are attached to the main idea and to each other. Mind maps are used to  generate and classify ideas by looking for the insights to provide the main  design criteria. We do this by displaying the information and will ask people to  observe them in ways that allow them to get rid of the problem. Mind mapping  basically considered as a team sport. If played carefully the entire team will  succeed. This work on the latest trends. Now a days a lot of people are trying  to innovate something which helps in the reduction of plastic wastage.

Application

The front-runner in the world of biodegradable packaging is seaweed. It's  naturally high in fibre and vitamins. As they are biodegradable, they will  decompose within 6 weeks without causing any harm to the environment.

Despite using the plastic packaging, we can use these films made from the  seaweed.

First thing we does is we were a team of 5 members. We used to divide our  work and plan accordingly depending on our capabilities. We have gone to our  nearby hyper local markets and got the information about the number of  plastic covers used by them per day. by seeing them we are shocked by the

result. Then we started working on the components which can help in solving  the problem of this plastic pollution.

What if we replace the plastic covers by the seaweed packaging which is at our  desired price and even with the offering of all other things which a plastic carry  bag does. We started worked on it. Started to follow the principles of design  thinking and getting new ideas in an innovative way in order to get our desired  product onto the market.

We reached some of the hyper local markets and spoke about this type of  packaging by explaining them about the product their feedback is lot more  helpful. They said if it was available in the market, they would be the one who  uses the seaweed packaging as the alternative for the plastic packages.

Insight & Approach

The main thing I wanted to convey is that the thing which we came through  this exercise is that their suggestions were a lot helpful for understanding their  response about the issue we are trying to solve, the most crucial aspect is the  shared thoughts and their queries that are raised while we are trying to solve  the problem. And in some cases, based on the questions they raised we were  able to modify the product in order to face the challenge of such a huge  monster of plastic pollution.

Since I learned one of the most important aspect of the design thinking is the  shared insights and learning, next time I would like to take the help of the mind  mapping activity for the upcoming design thinking activities. Then later on I  would go for all other tools depending on the situation.

