Today’s session was all about finding new solutions to our challenges and to look back what we have already done and where we are now.
This blog post is presented to you by Mammals: Monica, Toni, Sami, Veera and Annie!
Our challenge is to develop an ecological compensation design for our partner Helsinki City. The ecological compensation should address the increasing use of the Helsinki Archipelago region and the resulting harm to the nature. The idea of ecological compensation is to prevent the biodiversity loss in total. So when we decrease the biodiversity somewhere we have to increase it elsewhere.
During the last week we interviewed people from our target group: residents of Helsinki or potential users of the Archipelago. The results were similar, as all interviewees liked the fact that more islands are made available for the public. Almost all of the interviewees were ready to pay more for conservation purposes and they also wanted clear restrictions of valuable areas on the islands. So our ideas on solving the challenge seem legit.
We began the workshop by reformulating the problem and vision (again, but in a good way). It seemed that the term “ecological compensation” is not the best term for us to use by the information we reserved from an expert we called last week. Well, lets see what our partner is going to like about that change of plan on our next meeting on Wednesday.
To get new ideas and perspectives on the challenge we were encouraged to write by ourselves the funniest, most difficult, weirdest, boldest and the most expensive ideas for our solution. We got some crazy and awesome new ideas, e.g. sky train on the islands, alternative transportation to the island, i.e. swimming, paddleboats and parachutes. We also invented solutions so that people would not even need to visit the islands, e.g. our Monica-ranger could present the nature of the Archipelago via a vlog. (see pic)
Post-its, post-its, post-its…
Then the groups were mixed so that other groups would invent new ideas for the other groups. The mixing of the groups brought even more great ideas. Our group was joined by some members of Post Plastics, who proposed the idea of promoting environmental friendly activities, e.g. bird watching towers, kayaking, butterfly house etc. on the islands. We of coarse invented also awesome ideas for their group!
Post-its, post-its, post-its…
In the end of this session all of the ideas, new and old, were evaluated in terms of problem solving capacity and attractiveness (see pic). The best ideas will be presented to the partners on Wednesday. So, let’s keep our fingers crossed that the partners will love the solutions we have came up so far!