Cooks River Litter Prevention Strategy
Educating and motivating the community to stop littering and drive long term change for the Cooks River.
C L I E N T
The River Canoe Club of NSW & Civille.
T E A M
Nobuto Nishizawa, Vanessa Bu, Ivy Liang.
M E T H O D
Business analysis, competitive analysis, secondary research, surveys, affinity mapping and data synthesis, sketching and strategic planning.
D U R A T I O N
3-week sprint (Jan 2022 - Feb 2022).
M Y R O L E
UX Designer.
T O O L S
Pen & paper, Figma, Miro, Notion.
Summary
1. Where we started
In 2006, the Cooks River was reported as the most polluted waterway in Australia.
River Canoe Club has been heavily involved in cleaning up the river and have been granted funding from the EPA.
They want help in understanding where to start, get the community involved and create a long-lasting change.
2. Conducting research
Through 40 survey responses, we found that:
People felt their neighbourhood had little litter and weren’t aware of their community engaging in litter prevention.
People weren’t participating actively in litter prevention but showed concern for the environment, wildlife and hygiene.
The majority of successful campaigns around the world used community pride and emotional messaging to engage people.
3. Education framework
Our research clearly showed that people in the community were unaware of the damages litter was causing to the river.
For this reason, we recognised educating the people was the first step in litter prevention.
We identified 3 key components that come from education. Awareness, motivation and trigger, all of which will help drive and encourage long term change.
4. Running a successful campaign
Once people were educated on the litter issue at the Cooks River, it would be crucial to run a campaign to encourage them to make a positive change. We looked at 20 campaigns around the world that used various tactics like emotional engagement, local pride, local closeness and making it easy to do something.
The question remained, what is the perfect campaign for the Cooks River?
5. Scrum for litter
During this project, I was reading a book called “Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland, and learning about how the scrum framework is used in Dutch classrooms to help students self-learn.
This gave me an idea to use scrum to test small scale initiatives in hotspot suburbs and measure the results, this will allow them to see what works for our community and only commit when they have evidence that it will work.
6. Steps for Cooks River
First, they would need to list all initiative ideas. Then prioritise that list on a quadrant chat with 2 metrics.
They would then plan a sprint in a litter hotspot area and run the sprint.
Once the campaign had some time to run its course, measure the success. By repeating this process across multiple campaigns, they’re able to see what works best for the Cooks River and its community.
Reflection
Understanding the client’s brief and getting them to align on their individual needs was quite hard and time-consuming.
But getting this step right was crucial, or we would have been solving the wrong problem.
At the start it felt like we were getting all the wrong answers, so we had to question our questions.
Since they weren’t able to articulate what they needed, we helped them define it by getting them to tell us what they didn’t need.
Being open-minded with the team and creating a collaborative space where everyone can voice their thoughts, led to a solution that we could all be proud of.
