World Affairs Challenge 2022

WHAT IS WAC?

WAC, or the World Affairs Challenge is a challenge between participants from 6 countries that Futures Lab participated in for year 2022. Check out more general information on their website HERE.

Our team was given an overall theme (Climate Change) and tasked with figuring out a specific issue to focus on under that umbrella topic.

During our project that spanned over 6-8 weeks, we were also given articles to read over for a quiz on the final event day held by World Denver (host of competition).

After each step of the design thinking process, my team was able to create a video submission along with an extra skit and some final plans to carry out after the project finished. Overall, our team placed 6th worldwide.

The Initial Launch

We started the project off with a virtual call from director Hope Mukai, who'd be helping us throughout the entirety of the project.

I began by taking notes on our initial needs, options, and process (+ important dates). I made sure to take note of the deliverable we absolutely needed as well as our choices of SDG's. Learn more about the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals HERE.

The Empathy Stage

For this project, our Empathy stage would be the longest stage and consist of: Research (articles, media), Interviews, Field Trips, & Meetings.

Research & Discussion

As a team, we meet every day to discuss our daily plans and how we will progress.

It was sometimes necessary for us to move rooms, so our team made do with what we had access to. Here's an image of some brainstorming work we did.

What collaborators would we contact? Who would we look to for inspiration? How would we narrow down from Biodiversity to Native and Invasive species?

Finding Our "WHY"

As a team, it was important to discuss our passions in the project. We knew this was going to be one of the longest projects we've taken on thus far, so we had to discover and refine a longterm motivation.

Articles, Articles, Articles, Oh My!

Along with our main project, we were also given articles (Around 15 total, I believe) throughout the duration of the project. These articles would hold useful information for the quiz on the final event day. To keep track of our information, we made SKETCHNOTES for each!

That's a lot of sticky notes.

We used many white boards in our room and even more sticky notes to organize things for the whole team. During our sessions of referencing other videos and researching, we wrote down our insights, things to remember, and things to avoid.

Root Cause Analysis & Personas

Above is an image of the corner of the wall that hosted all of our individually-created Personas and the Root Cause Analysis sheet we worked on as a team.

More About Personas & Root Cause Analysis

Both of these are part of the empathy stage in the design thinking process. They are used to help connect with our stakeholders (the ones who care, or are affected) in order to get a better idea of their needs, wants, and so on.

The personas are completely made up people, but they're realistic enough to where they are extremely specific. They are created with the mindset of, 'this is an individual' - We try to avoid general stereotypes. Though, there is a balance between unique enough and completely unordinary. These personas are still generally realistic and tell the stories of our stakeholders that could exist in order to connect with the entire stakeholder group more in depth.

The Gardens on Spring Creek

We also made sure to reach out to possible collaborators throughout our project. One of those being the Gardens! Check out their website HERE.

Why The Gardens?

We chose to visit the TGoSC because they hold a strong focus toward some of the themes we also focused on for this project. During our meeting with them, they highlighted the Garden's goal of inclusivity, education, and accessibility.

These are also themes we were trying to incorporate into our final solutions, all of which we are still making progress on as of April 6, 2022.

Going here was also a nice mental break, a change of scenery to keep the team engaged.

The Define Stage

In which we define our goals, what our stakeholders ultimately need, and more.

Insights & How Might We's

To synthesize and define our goals and needs about our end users, we created Insight Statements and How Might We Questions.

From Insight: Educating with reputable information in a memorable way.

To... How might we educate with reputable information in a memorable way?

The Ideate & Prototype Stage

I'm arranging these both together since we had to mainly focus on the Empathy stage - so much so that we did not have a lot of time to work on our final video. Here, we brainstorm what our final deliverable will look like, and we prototype it.

Prototyping Final Products

We knew we needed a storyboard (or multiple) to get an idea of what was going to be on screen while we spoke. From there, we identified the need for mulitple scripts. If we were going to do this with art, we needed to also have enough time to make said artwork. Since I was in charge of visuals, I even spent the last night up until 3 a.m. to finish all the drawings.

We also needed a script for the "wolf skit" section of the video, in which we educated a bit on the importance of wolves and why we wanted to help, which led into the second half of the final video where we spoke of our solutions. Originally, there was supposed to be an animation at the very beginning of the video, but I did not have time to complete it.

RPReplay_Final1646943555.MOV

The Animation

The WIP (work in progress) animation based on the storyboard with concept-development assistance from my teammate, Mazi.

Final Video Storyboard

This was the storyboard I created for the final video, which included the basics of each scene.

However, some changes were made to the video after the first viewing. In the end, over 50 drawings were made for the visuals!

After it was finished, it was sent in as a final submission. From there, we'd attend the final event day on April 2, 2022 to participate in challenges worth more points for our team and hear the announcements of the winners.

The Final Event Day - April 2, 2022

The Final Day

We all grouped together in the same room we'd spent so many weeks in for the project.

Attending a Zoom call of 150+ worldwide participants, we went in to participate in events and eventually hear the winners announced at the end.

I got to work with participants from Zimbabwe, Iraq, and Turkey on a collaborative question following a hypothetical scenario in which we had to come up with a solution for in 45 minutes.

Final Submissions

Final Video

To the left is the final submission we gave for the WAC Challenge.

We ended up in 6th place overall, and that's still a huge accomplishment in a worldwide competition!

Fun fact: An animation was supposed to be made and shown at the beginning of the video, but was not finished in time.

Wolf Skit

While this is part of the final video, I thought it also deserved its own section.

I worked on this alone (as writer, editor, artist, and narrator) with the help of my Voice Acting friend Emite, who played the wolf character.

This skit was meant to be visually entertaining while also teaching a bit about wolves. The ending leads to the very end of the video, where we talk about how we can help.

Project WAC Reflection

Project WAC was by far one of the most challenging group projects I've ever had the chance to participate in. Not to mention the massive scale of it. I had never been in a competition between 6 countries.

It was a great opportunity where we had to utilize the design thinking process in a different way. We had to start from the very, very beginning; choosing a problem to focus on. This was a lot different than a client coming to us with a clear outline of what they wanted.

Overall, this project allowed me to gain experience with the full design thinking process, while also learning what it takes to stay motivated for a long-term project. We were last minute on the video's finalization, but we still got it in on time.

I admit that it would have been easier with multiple digital artists and video editors on the team aside from myself, but I was able to stay up and finish it the night before. Planning was an interesting hurdle as well, since this was the longest project we'd ever done.

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