According to Dana Meadows (1992), to reach systems change, the most important element is to have the power to transcend paradigms.
This is hard to do with anyone, let alone MBA students.
This week, Adam Lusby, adjunct lecturer at the Exeter MBA and Delfina Zagarzazú, 2016 Alumni, piloted a 2 day workshop coined Generation Space, where 43 students worked on the mission:
“Scope and define the internal characteristics of a spaceship that can evolve to host 1000 people for 1000 years for generational interstellar space travel”
By setting the context in a galaxy, students were allowed to enter a new paradigm without considering it, allowing re-design to happen at many different levels of a system including food, water, manufacturing and health to meet the needs of life in space.
Using Design Thinking to guide the process, the exploratory phase of it allowed students to push the boundaries of creativity whilst in ideation staying aware of the need to build a circular economy strategy for the underlying importance of closed loop design to keep resources in use through the voyage.
What is your strategy to ensure the continuous uptime performance of all your resources? In other words, how do you propose to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value during the voyage?
Further inspiration for circular design was enabled by Chris Grantham and Arianne Orillac who lead Circular Economy at IDEO in London who guided the spaceships to consider reiteration of product design onboard using circular economy strategy cards.
After prototypes and definition of spaceship purpose, teams were judged by an all women panel to put their circular innovations forward.
- Hege Saebjornsen, Country Sustainability Manager, IKEA UK & IE
- Lynn Maxwell, Sustainability Developer, IKEA UK & IE
- Emilie Sandberg, Creative Leader, IKEA UK & IE
- Arianne Orillac, Circular Business Designer, IDEO London
This project is part of the Corporate Challenge 2018 in collaboration with IKEA and IDEO.
Blog written by Delfina Zagarzazu