Innova&ve Design: Stormwater Management in Anne Arundel County
Alexander Wahl [email protected]
Science Discovery and the Universe Bioengineering
CPSP249E And PALS Preliminary Site Visit
Further Work Iden&fying a Need
Choosing a Stakeholder
Acknowledgments to Nicole Mogul, Mira Azarm, The Academy for Innova&on and Entrepreneurship, Rob Fish, and Eileen Donahue
CPSP249E is a scholarship in prac&ce class that through the PALS (partnership in ac&ve learning in sustainability) program looked to teach the innova&ve design process in rela&on to storm water management in Anne Arundel County and the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The class was a semester long class that focused on reflexive engineering, incorpora&ng concepts such as building empathy for your user and incorpora&ng your design environment into your prototype. The class began with us receiving background informa&on on storm water management. The class also incorporated various site visits which allowed us to iden&fy stakeholders and build empathy for them so that we could discover what their need was and then begin brainstorming Ideas for Prototypes.
To help us learn first hand more about storm water management our class went on a site visit to Anne Arundel Community College. At the college we were able to see an ongoing creek restora&on and bio-‐reten&on pond project. Rob Fish who gave us the tour was also extremely helpful in answering any ques&ons we had on storm water management. Following the tour of the storm water management project we went to a nearby shopping mall to interview poten&al stakeholders and begin to collect informa&on and build empathy towards our poten&al users.
The Point of View and How Might We statement created following our interviews allowed us to narrow down our user and begin to iden&fy some common themes among our interviewees. Through these themes we were able to iden&fy some of the key needs of our users. We were able to narrow it down to 3 major needs. Home gardeners needed their lawns to look aesthe&cally pleasing, but needed them to be environmentally friendly. The final need, was that they needed more free &me to spend tending to their lawns and gardens so the first two needs could be met. Most of the &me home gardeners could not sa&sfy all 3 needs on their own either giving in too either looks or the environment because of a lack of &me. This problem led us to brainstorm to come up with an idea that would allow gardeners to sa&sfy all 3 needs
Now that we have iden&fied a prototype we need to go back out to our users and begin to collect feedback on our prototype. This feedback then needs to be taken into account and then reincorporated into a new reformed prototype. This process will con&nue un&l the prototype sa&sfies all cri&ques by our users. At that point we can being to test the prototype by pitching the idea to the ci&zens of Anne Arundel county and collec&ng their feedback. Finally we will be able to pitch and present the idea to stakeholders to see if it is an idea they could see making a difference and if our prototype is something they would like to implement in Anne Arundel County.
Our stakeholder we ended up ul&mately designing for was the home gardener/ home depot shopper. A_er our ini&al site visit and research, we first had the idea to contact the water and sewer works of Anne Arundel County to be our stakeholder. When communica&ons fell through we were forced to reevaluate our stakeholder. It was then that we chose to dig deeper into the needs of the home Gardner and their impact of the Chesapeake bay watershed. In order to gather more informa&on we conducted a second round of interviews at The Home Depot in College park and then used the data collected during the interview to create Point of View and How Might we statement to help us narrow down our specific user and their needs.
Prototype Idea
We ini&ally came up with 3 ideas on ways we could aaempt to implement to relieve the need we iden&fies for our stakeholder. The three ides were a compost rewards program at Home Depot, a community gardening chores club, and a na&ve plant program through Home Depot. Ul&mately we ended up choosing the na&ve plant prototype. This solu&on ul&mately met the most needs out of any of the three ideas. Na&ve plants for one require less maintenance and thus our users would not need to spend as much &me taking care of their lawn. Na&ve plants also help to keep pollinators healthy thus increasing the health and overall aesthe&c of lawns. Finally na&ve species serve as natural filters helping to filter nutrients out of storm water before it can reach our waterways. The prototype is in the form of an idea, and the idea is that Home Depot partners with local nurseries to have weekly of biweekly special deals on in season na&ve species.
