Emily Grows

Project Description

This project required a group of 3-4 students to find a solution to a social problem presented by the instructor. The issue was to engage youth and elders through community gardens within the Vancouver area. Each group will have to generate two Personas and will map their respective social network to try and identify how their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors get influenced. Each group will apply the understanding gained through the Personas and their social network mapping to develop co-creation tools and activities to explore different ways to achieve the project’s goal. The solution should foster engagement and creative exchange without increasing personal investment, and provide visible benefits to all the users. The ultimate goal is to change behavior: to promote knowledge exchange across generations, to foster relationships across generations, and to increase knowledge about community gardens: their benefits and management.

Design Treatment

Please see process book to see detailed process and iterations in making this project

Group Members

Clayton Wadsworth

Katrina Yu

Tina Yan

Research

Before any design related work could be done we had to do research into the issue of;
How can we engage elders and youth through community gardens to increase food resilience,
while promoting inter-generational learning and utilizing Vancouver's existing resources?

Our research first began by creating two personas to help guide the design process.

After developing the personas a mind map was created to illustrate the existing
knowledge, needs, interests, motivations, attitudes, activities and daily routines.

Mind Map illustrating the influences of the personas. (excerpt from process book) — Mind Map illustrating the influences of the personas. (excerpt from process book)

In order to get an even more comprehensive understanding of the problem. A Co-Creation event was planned. This allowed us to get vital primary information.

Our co-creation activities

, we decided on the information that we wanted to obtain from the activities and catered them to fit the factors.

These factors include:

• Level of interest in community gardening

• How to increase interest & motivation

• The barriers

• Level of interest for youth working with elders (and vice versa)

• How to increase interest

• Do they know how current food systems work?

• Current knowledge of gardening

From these points we created our 4 activities, keeping in mind that

these activities must be interactive and engaging for the participants.