CycleFarm

In May 2020, I participated in InnoDays - a 48 hour innovation hackathon that follows design thinking principles to explore new ideas and solutions to critical challenges. While the event was supposed to be based in Vienna, Austria, it was held fully virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This particular InnoDays event was focused on circular economies and plastic waste solutions. It was held in collaboration with Plasticpreneur, a European social enterprise that builds and sells plastic recycling machines.

Duration: 48 hours

Role: Sole UX Designer, Team Leader

Methods: User personas, Research, Interviews, Prototyping

Tools: Adobe XD, Sprintbase

InnoDays and Plasticpreneur presented each team with a challenge prompt:

How might we design useful products and viable business models from used plastic resources?

Unlike a traditional hackathon, the nature of this challenge and the collaboration with Plasticpreneur required a physical product that could be made out of plastic, not just a digital one.

Although there were so many potential solutions, our team decided to focus on food storage solutions.

We aimed to tackle three problems:

1. Smallholder farmers in South Africa are often unable to earn enough money to support their families because they don’t have the means to carry their fruits and vegetables to the local market. Additionally, a lot of produce is not effectively protected and stored, resulting in food waste.

2. In the cities, unemployment levels are high and many individuals that leave the rural farmland to find work in the city struggle with securing a job.

3. With this increase in urbanisation, plastic waste is an ongoing problem. Over 1.2 million tonnes of recyclable plastic is dumped into landfills in South Africa every year.

We want to connect our vegetable farmer with our unemployed city dweller, while still solving our plastic waste problem.

We spent most of the first day pitching our ideas to each other and brainstorming new solutions. We had a few extreme idea switches before finally choosing one that we all believed in strongly. We began to build an outline of a potential business model and product solution. 

We proposed to create CycleFarm - an initiative to hire unemployed city dwellers to collect plastic and use the Plasticpreneur machines to create storage crates that farmers could use to protect and carry their vegetables.

We made a user persona that would be able to bridge the gap between the farmlands and the city, and created a value proposition that we could refer back to throughout the challenge. We were encouraged by our mentors to think big, and to embrace changes to our original ideas.

This was our only full day that we had to get a lot of work done. After a morning mentoring session, we identified 20 of our riskiest assumptions for our ideas for CycleFarm and conducted impromptu interviews with industry professionals to check our hypotheses. 

Next, we created rapid prototypes of our business model and our physical product. We reached out to agricultural researchers, plastic experts and sustainable entrepreneurs from around the world who helped us to gain a clearer picture of our possibilities and constraints and gave us valuable insights. With this input, we came up with some blueprints for a storage crate made up of separate parts that could be assembled together.

At this point, we decided to step up our business model - instead of just giving farmers storage crates, we also wanted to empower farmers to sell more produce and increase their income security by building a supply chain and functional logistics system. Think big, right? 

We decided to also include a digital platform that could be used to connect our various users in one place. As the only designer on the team, I got to work on designing an app that could:

a) be used by plastic collectors to record and track their plastic collections, and

b) also connect farmers to larger consumer markets. 

Given the time constraints (we only had a few hours before our daily submissions were due at this point) the screens were basic but effective. They allowed users to record the weight and type of plastic had been collected, and showed how much they would get paid. The app also let farmers choose the vegetables they were able to sell, set the quantity, and receive confirmation about the exact time and date that a truck would drive past to take their vegetables to the city.

Since the end of the hackathon, I’ve had time to work on the interfaces a bit more, but the original ideas and features remain unchanged.

Our last day was about finalising our business model and prototypes. We tested our business model and product prototypes with some external users to see if it was understandable and if there were any points that we could improve on. After some reiterating and refining, we reached out to a few more mentors and experts for input before we prepared for our final presentation.

We had two minutes to pitch our business model and present our solutions to experts and investors (click here if you’d like to watch it!) followed by a three minute Q and A session where stakeholders could better understand our idea.

After an intense 48 hours, we had completed our challenge from idea to prototype. It was a great opportunity implement the design thinking approach, practice problem solving, open our minds to possibilities, and network with students and mentors from around the world. I’m very grateful for the experience.

If our team were to decide to pursue our idea in the future, we would have to perform extensive research and more in-depth interviews in order to better understand the users and the landscape. We would need to build relations with the users, pursue possible outsourcing and collaboration possibilities with similar, existing startups, and conduct multiple rounds of testing before implementation.

Challenges

Aside from the most obvious challenge - creating a viable business model and product in just 48 hours - there were a few bumps along the road. Our first challenge as a team was deciding on how best to communicate and collaborate with each other, given that this was a fully virtual event and we had never met each other before our 48 hours started. We decided on using Zoom to talk through our thoughts and ideas as if we were face to face, and we made use of Google Suite and Slack for most of our content collaboration.

We spent too much time deciding on ideas in the beginning - as a team leader I decided that while it was important to take charge, it was equally important to let each team member to pitch their own ideas and solutions. In an attempt to allow each member to make their case on the first day, we lost a lot of time that could have been used to refine our idea for our mentor meeting at the end of the day.

Lastly, one of our team members dropped out half way through the event. This increased our workload and we ended up having to share her tasks amongst us in order to complete on time.

What can be improved?

I think that next time I would implement a strict schedule that we could all follow together. This would help to keep us on track and focused on the task at hand. Additionally, I would have liked to conduct more interviews to verify our assumptions, and speak to even more mentors to gain more insights about how we could improve our solution.

Would I do this again?

Absolutely! This was a valuable experience that allowed me to practice my UX skills, network with knowledgable individuals from around the world, and push myself to think outside of the box.

Thank you so much to InnoDays and Plasticpreneur for facilitating this event!