Journey to the centre of the landfill!
This is the journey of 5 people exploring this great world and ending up in the centre of a landfill only to find a used syringe….
It was just a year back when my team and I took up the challenge to design a service for the management of medical waste. Since then it has been a year of a lot of discussions, debates, confusion and contemplations. All of this to finally arrive at our solution.
This is not just about building an idea on a piece of paper into a viable, feasible and sustainable service, but it’s about the learning, doubting, unlearning and growing.
It all started with an idea and the willingness to do something for an impact. As designers, we were told that we are problem solvers, so we head out on a mental voyage to find problems around us. It was the time when covid-19 was on an increasing surge, and the five of us would get together online to discuss the problems we are experiencing or could face in the near future. The shrinking economy, degraded mental and physical well-being, loss of livelihoods, jobs and most importantly lives. In the pile of these big problems we found something which was not being addressed, “The problem of increased medical waste”. Increased usage of medical products like masks, PPE kits, syringes, etc. led to a 7% increase in the production of Bio-Medical waste. And we were determined to do something about it.
SSDC 2021
This is where the Student Service Design Challenge sounded like a great opportunity. It was not just an ordinary design competition, but our call to design for impact. The competition was crafted to provide ample time to follow design thinking and come up with viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions. It provided us with mentors who guided us throughout the competition. We received constant feedback which often nudged us to go beyond and over our capabilities.
We started to consolidate all our thoughts and ideas about the problem of increasing medical waste and submitted our proposal. A few days later our proposal was accepted and we started with the real work.
The covid cases started decreasing here (in India) and we got a chance to finally step out and get a perspective of the ground reality. We started our expedition to explore the loopholes in the current management system of medical waste. We did ethnography research, observed them working, and investigated all the different touch-points in the current system.
We then started analysing, collating and mapping all of our research, only to end upon not one but many problems. We were overwhelmed by all the discoveries we made, by all the problems that we saw as opportunities. We were all over the space trying to figure out how to do the right thing. So we stopped and paused and took a moment to get a deep breath and take a step forward. Right or wrong doesn’t matter, a step forward is always a win. So we did it.
We now boiled down our findings and defined the problem that we would want to solve. “The problem of unethical treatment and management of syringes after administration.” The next few days were a series of convergence and divergence until we had our service in place. But it didn’t end there.
Though our service was feasible, it was not viable. We were too concentrated on solving a problem, we did not take the business aspect into consideration. The final submission had to be done in three weeks and we were thinking of scrapping our solution and starting fresh.
Contemplation, disbelief, confusion, scepticism, we had it all.
It was once again the time to take a deep breath and move forward, so we did. We worked our brains out. Day and night, thinking about all the aspects that we missed earlier. And soon with our determination and hard work we arrived at a solution that we were confident about. We had no idea if we would win or not and it wasn’t a concern either. But we were satisfied with what we did, we couldn’t have done better. It was the final day of submission and we hit send, the rest is all history.
The result was declared at Barcelona Design week and we ended up winning the competition.
For a deep into our concept, watch this video below.👇
As a prize, we were awarded a Design-In-Residence Program at Philips, which drove the next few weeks for us.
Design-In-Residence at Philips Experience Design
For the next 10 weeks, we were offered exceptional mentorship by some great experts from Philips. Over the course of this program, we attended masterclasses, with topics like Circular design, Designing with Purpose, UI/UX, Data design, Brand and Communication, Product Design, Service Design, Strategic Design, Systemic Design & Storytelling, Design Research and Trends.
We met with over 18 professionals and received invaluable insights and learnings. The masterclasses were extremely engaging as they helped us to expand our skillset and learn from their experiences. As it’s said, there’s always room for improvement. We learnt from the experts at Philips, which broadened our horizons on improving our service. The learnings helped us to explore some new directions for our service. It also enabled us to re-evaluate our service in order to improve it in ways we could've never thought through.
We had many milestones along this journey. We hit one such major milestone when we got the golden opportunity to present our solution at Dutch Design Week. It was such an honour for us to be able to showcase our concept to the audience at the largest annual design event in Northern Europe. It was indeed a dream come true.
One of the many advantages that we had was getting to talk about our concept and experience with a lot of people. We had one such exciting chance of explaining our concept to Freek Jansen who interviewed us about our journey to date and our future aspirations.
Check out the article here.
We also got the chance to takeover @LifeatPhilips the official Instagram handle thanks to Anna Caterina Salatto. During the takeover, we talked about our concept, our journey and a little about ourselves. It was a great opportunity to engage with a wider audience on a social platform.
Lastly we hit the most important milestone of completing our Design in Residence Graduation from Philips. We had the opportunity to talk about this great expedition of ours and how do we plan on continuing it.
Before winding up I would like to acknowledge a few people who played a major role in making this a success. Our challenge coaches Apurva Dabhade and Frank Kolkman who always provided us with constant mentorship and guidance. They were always there to help us direct us to the right path and get us back on track. Another person who was always there to help us out was Circular Economy Strategic Design Lead at Philips Elena Pupazan. She has always believed in us and our potential to learn and grow.
As I conclude I would like to mention our team. We always had our own roles to play, but at the end we all stood together as one. The complete journey definitely taught us a lot, but one of the most important lessons was teamwork and maintaining the harmony and balance between ourselves. These words are mine but this journey is about Team RADAR. None of this would’ve been ever possible without these five brains. (Akash K Seth, Akshita Mishra, Arnav Gupta and Raghav Byala)
Team RADAR signing off! (P.S we still debate about who decided on the name RADAR and still don’t know :)
