Co-Design for Climate Innovations Tool

What is this tool for?
This is an award winning¹ open-source downloadable tool that was developed by the GROW Observatory project and made available as part of the WeObserve Toolkit with community-led citizen science projects in mind.

The Co-Design Tool for Climate Innovations tool is designed for facilitating and accelerating the ideation of new Citizen Observatories. The Tool is composed of a canvas and a deck of cards. The canvas includes an Empathy Timeline that allows participants to situate themselves before, during and after a critical environmental event such as a flood, fire, etc. The deck of cards include the following types of cards:

∗ Personas: representing the roles as well as concerns and motivations of typical stakeholder groups (e.g. farmers, policy makers at different geographical levels, scientists, NGOs, etc)
∗ Places: information about country examples, such as natural assets, climatic profile and main agricultural activities.
∗ Data: example of climate and environmental data that could be collected by citizens, e.g. air quality, soil moisture, etc.
∗ Scenarios: emerging climate related critical issues
∗ Sustainable Development Goals: to encourage participants to link local action with the global SDG framework.

How does this tool work?
Participants are arranged in teams with members of different stakeholder groups. Each person is encouraged to pick a persona card different from their own experience (e.g. a farmer could pick a mayor card to put themselves into somebody else’s shoes). Groups then select different cards to create a scenario and ideate a potential Citizen Observatories. At the end, teams report back their innovations to the wider group, still from their personas’ perspective (which often adds a bit of humour).

This tool has been piloted and iterated at four multi-stakeholder events in London, Brussels, Lisbon and Santiago de Chile. Designed for flexibility, the tool can also be used at the end of a data collection period in an existing project (e.g. an observatory monitoring water levels) to ideate next steps and new innovations to stop an environmental issue from happening again (e.g. floods).

^{1 Academy for Design Innovation Management (ADIM) Conference Top III Workshops Award for “Design for Climate Services: A Co-Design Approach” Workshop: https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/prizes/academy-for-design-innovation-management-adim-conference-top-iii-}