Design for social responsibility and sustainability

Summary of the project

The client

Palmtech is a Startup with an environmental and social impact that recovers degraded areas in highly vulnerable areas of the Amazon region. To achieve this, they integrate ancestral knowledge with scientific knowledge to promote sustainability in the communities served.

The problem

Land degradation is one of the biggest influences in climate change and is closely connected with the social phenomenon of climate refugees. It’s estimated that the world loses 24 billion ton of fertile land due to soil degradation, causing billions of dollars in crop losses and increased costs with chemical fertilizers.

Degradation also impacts infrastructure, since it can cause landslides, road damages, flood among others. However, land recovery techniques are still considered either expensive or technically complicated, which ends up reducing land recovery initiatives. As a result, the companies, farmers, or public services usually change their activities to another area, continuing the cycle of destruction instead of recovering the area they initially occupied.

To tackle this, scientific research – done with the support of public universities in Brazil and with European Union funding – tested and proved the efficacy of a cheaper and sustainable model of recovery of degraded land using at its core community- based design. The challenge, then, was to escalate the recovery model, which already had scientific validation, transform it into a business model and implement it in the many areas that need support.

The design team’s objectives

To develop a business model that enables low-cost recovery of degraded land and promotes social justice based on a scientifically proven method, co-creating the solutions with the communities affected.

So my team and I subscribed a project in a public notice that was offering to fund innovative ideas in what is called “Social Technology”. In summary, our idea is to produce geotextile fabrics with natural fibers. Such fabrics are then used to recover degraded soil, providing positive social and environmental impact in an integrative manner.

We wanted to develop an innovative process that enabled this model to be escalated and find out how we could co-develop the business with the communities involved.

Skills used

Design Research; Business Design; Decolonial Design; Forest Engineering

The design team’s approach

We used a mixed approach of User-Centred Design, Business Design, Lean Startup, Decolonial Design and conventional project management methods. We focused on developing projects for public notices that focused on sustainable innovations and that did not ask for payback.

We went this way because our idea was very unique and we needed to test it. Similarly, it is not a very “glamorous” field, so sales pitch for anything of this sort was a big learning curve in itself. Because of that, we opted for a continuous content production that had the goal of creating awareness about the team.

The design process

This is a long-term project, so I will divide the process in two big stages that coincide with our projects that were accepted for funding: Incubation phase and Validation phase.

Incubation phase

I drew this diagram because my role in Palmtech is multidisciplinary. As the startup evolves, so does my role in the company’s activities. Thus, I will divide my work in PalmTech in two main roles: Research and Management.

Some important definitions:

• Social technology: In this context, it means “technology and business that are applied to generate a positive social impact”.
• Geotextile: “fabrics used in geotechnical applications, such as road and railway embankments, earth dikes, and coastal protection structures, designed to perform one or more basic functions such as filtration, drainage, separation of soil layers, reinforcement, or stabilisation. Therefore, almost every geotextile application is multi-functional.” (D. Zangani, C. Fuggini, G. Loriga, 2015).
• Traditional communities: “a network of people who are not motivated to seek profits” (Yamashige, 2017).
• Degraded land: soil or land that has lost fertility, structure, or diversity as a result of various natural and human activities. Includes erosion, loss of organic matter, effects of toxic chemicals and loss biodiversity.

Context

Traditional communities and social technology

In Brazil, many traditional communities are motivated by extractive activities of a non-wood forestry product such as babassu coconut, brazil nut, assai or vegetable fibers. In Maranhão, babassu coconut breakers, a group of rural women whose expertise is rooted in slavery rebels and native knowledge, is a well-known and recognized non-wood forestry traditional community.

Like them, there are communities that work with other materials, such as vegetable fibers, which is typical of many native people in South America. Many of today’s traditional communities learned from original people weaving techniques, with which various types of daily utensils were made, including hammocks, clothes, and baskets.

Such traditional expertise is a type of social technology. In this sense, it weaves simultaneously objects and social network. This created a very unique way of relating to the surrounding natural environment. In other words, community work is based mostly on cooperation and integration with the landscape.

Geotextiles and sustainability

As defined previously, geotextiles are fabrics used in geotechnical applications, including recovery of degraded areas. In Brazil, gullies are a big problem, and have many causes, although most of them are created by land and soil misuse.

Gullies are the worst case scenario in terms of soil degradation. They do not stop growing naturally. In fact, they do opposite and keep growing bigger and bigger, forming large craters of infertile soil and unstable land.

This causes landslides, which can destroy infrastructure (like the road in the picture) and make growing crops and livestock completely impossible. To get to this level of degradation, however, there is a long erosion process before.

In other words, degradation process can be contained before turning into this nightmarish sight that are gullets. This is often done by applying geotechnical techniques, such as geotextiles.

However, most of these are made of non-sustainable materials and usually are produced in some linear manufacturing process. So, even though these synthetic geotextiles solve the immediate problem of erosion — thus interrupting the degradation process — they create another, because they are not biodegradable.

In contrast, our product integrates sustainability, community work and valuation of non-wood forest goods and services.

Design Framework

This was my first UX Design project, so I was very conservative in my approach. I used the Double Diamond framework to design the initial concept of the business as a Service. I divided the phases of the service development in Immersion, Definition, Ideation and Prototyping.

Incubation phase: Immersion

We used Desk Research, Survey and Interviews to gain better identify our users and the problems they face when trying to deploy current solutions for recovering degraded soil. By the end of the process, we created two User Boards (Personas).

The Desk Research process consisted of gathering information we had from our backgrounds as scientists and technicians in the field of degraded land. To view it properly, we used Google Drive and a CSD Matrix in Miro to cluster the information in groups (what we were sure, what we assumed and doubts).

The Matrix was validated through the Survey and Interviews and updated with new information. This process also worked well as an icebreaker, since, because of Covid pandemic, the team was unable to meet in person for the sessions.

Regarding the Survey, though, the results were questionable because I did not have enough respondents in the time frame I had available for this part of the research. In other projects, I have avoided surveys and preferred interviews most of the time.

In this sense, the Interviews were much more insightful. They helped us to identify some of our potential users pain points that could become business opportunities and validate or invalidate our assumptions about the topic. We chose a structured questionnaire framework, which was applied by all the team members to different potential users.

I compiled the results in an Excel Spreadsheet and analysed qualitatively. To do so, I looked for keywords and patterns of speech that appeared repeatedly across the answers. I highlighted it in bold red and later discussed it with the team.

These new information led to the reorganization of the CSD Matrix, which confirmed a lot of what we knew, but brought a lot of doubts too.

Based on this, we were able to develop two User Boards (Personas) that we could identify from this preliminary research.

At the end of this, we started the next phase of Analysis and Definition, where we developed our Point of View/Problem Statement.

Incubation phase: Definition

We created User Boards (Personas), Job Stories, and a Lean Canvas to help us make decisions and prioritize some of the Business Opportunities we identified in the previous step. To finalize, a Point of View (Problem Statement) was also developed.

Initially, we created four different User Boards for our product and services, but we realized we would probably not have resources to follow-up with all of them. So we chose two that seemed to be the main ones for that moment and prioritized developing their Job Stories.

For those two personas, we wrote a what they do, who they are, some demographic characteristics, some motivations that we deemed important for our business, what are the pains they faced when trying to deal with the recovery of degraded land topic and some of their wishes.

We then created two Job Stories to map possible pain points in the future User Journey and to empathize even more with the user context. This helped us understand how to position our brand in the future and also what aspects of our solution we should prioritize to create a better experience for our user.

As a result, the Job Stories helped us later to brainstorm possible features that our product and service should or could potentially contain.

With all this understanding of our user context, mission, and pain points, we were able to map better our Value Proposition and summarize it in the first version of our Lean Canvas, which we created to better visualize how our solution interacts with the user’s pain points, map our current resources and start thinking about future steps, regarding strategic planning for growth.

We did that also in an online meeting and through our Miro board, through workshop sessions that I designed and facilitated by me. To be effective, I planned the sessions with a time limit and goals that I always kept visible to everyone.

I also briefed the team prior to the meetings, to align expectations and be effective. I interfered minimally to not break different ideas, even though this was a convergent moment (i.e., a moment to focus and not go too crazy with new ideas).

To me, this was a very enriching experience, as I gradually transitioned from Project to Product mindset, as well as from Client to User to Human Being.

Now that we had the context of our user laid out (at least we were on a clearer path to it), we finally could create our first Point of View (PoV):

Silvestre needs to hire or partner with a recovery of degraded land service that is cheap and reliable so that he can deal with the problem of degraded area in his land. If he does not achieve this, his community could lose their homes and livelihoods.

Incubation phase: Ideation

Ideation phase is another convergent moment in the Double Diamond framework of Design Thinking. Hence, a lot of decisions were made, based on what we had already discovered about the user and our solution.

This stage proved to be a lot more hands-on than the previous ones. That is, a lot less thinking and theorizing and a lot more decision-making and deliverables. This meant I, as UX and team member, had to learn how to use new tools and be more agile in my facilitation sessions.

As a result, we had more meetings and sessions then in all the previous ones combined. We created Moodboard, Heuristic Analysis, User Journey, User Flow and Sketch Frames.

The Moodboard included a competition analysis and a Heuristic Analysis to understand what have our competitors been doing right and where could be do better. We also applied Word Association as a method to brainstorm ideas for our service.

To develop the User Journey, we first we identified pains of our user and touch points of the User Journey with our solution (I’m calling it “solution”, but it means “product and service”, since it involves more than one type of process) and came up with ideas do minimize potential friction points in the contact areas.

In this context, “contact areas” are points where the user interacts directly with our solution, i.e., landing page, contact button and navigation inside the website to find some helpful content or information that would assist the user to fill the tasks inside the website and convert to what we expected.

With this in mind, we entered multiple Brainstorming sessions again to map potential functionalities that the products and services could have. Keeping in mind the concept of Minimum Viable Product / Service, we used a prioritization technique (Must have, Should have, Could have and Will not have) to define which features we would create first.

Finally, we drafted a preliminary User Flow to visualize exactly how we expected the users to access and interact with our solution.

Incubation phase: Prototyping

In this phase, I did my best to follow the Double Diamond framework with my limited understanding of Product Design, Service Design and Decolonial Design. Back then, I still didn’t fully grasp the limitations of the Innovation models proposed by Silicon Valley big techs in solving complex problems.

So I tried and followed the conventional UI design model, even though I was already having a hard time understanding how exactly a website could recover degraded land. Either way, I mapped the interfaces I wanted to create initially and tried to create a mindset of some sort of Design System.

I also planned for some usability test and eventually I wanted to apply the SUS framework or HEART framework to the service. However, I realized later that this made absolutely no sense with what we were creating, which was much better represented by a Service Blueprint then by a digital product.

With that insight, we moved on to create our next funded project and started our Validation phase.

Validation phase

The next project we created saw a much more mature team with more realistic approaches towards the various innovation and Design tools that became common sense in the past decade. As such, I started testing the Service Design approach as a more adequate framework to identify our businesses processes.

This is still under evaluation, but it is clear that we are going to follow a service approach and focus on partnering with public services for the next years.

Validation phase: work in progress

We decided that our solution was going to be a project-based service. That meant that we would delegate the roles dynamically, according to the type of service and skill set required of us. This made sense also because of the nature of a recovery of degraded land project, which has to be done on a case by case scenario.

As a business, the startup is now focused on developing the project as it was approved by our funders. Our approach relies heavily on community-based design, emancipatory environmental education, decolonial design and indigenous expertise valuation.

For now, I am not able to share further information due to confidentiality agreements. However, it is possible to follow some of the progress in the startup’s website.