AESOP4Food Methods and tools

Nominal Group Technique

The Nominal Group Technique was employed as a structured method for generating ideas and making decisions within group settings, ensuring all participants' voices were heard and considered. The Nominal Group Technique was employed as a structured method for generating ideas and making decisions within group settings, ensuring all participants' voices were heard and considered. It is an efficient and easy method for collaborative work within your team of learners, with a project team, with a community to make sure all voices can be heard. One can use it for defining challenges, collaborative goal setting, selecting a preferred alternative, or deciding on actions.

It is a structured method for group brainstorming encouraging contributions from everyone, which facilitates quick agreement on the relative importance of issues, problems, or solutions.

Team members begin by writing down their ideas, and then selecting which idea they feel is best. Everyone presents their favourite idea(s); the suggestions are then discussed and prioritised by the entire group using a point system. The ratings of individual group members are combined into the final weighted priorities of the group. You can find a presentation on the method, steps and possible uses here.

Design Thinking

Originally it was developed as a process to understand customers' or beneficiaries' wishes, needs, and visions. AESOP4Food adapted the method for sustainable food planning and applied it in the seminar and explicitly in the intensive workshop in Montpellier. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to create innovative solutions. It is a human-centred interdisciplinary approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people (desirability), the feasibility of the technology, and the requirements (viability) for business success. AESOP4Food adapted the method for sustainable food planning.

Step 1. Empathise and Explore

In this step you start to understand the problems, needs and desires of actors, stakeholders, users to address best the challenges. By understanding the qualities, challenges, opportunities of the local landscape you will come up with good ideas. For this you can use the following questions: Who are the actors? What are their problems, needs and desires? What does the local landscape look like? What are the needs and opportunities of this landscape? Methods to be used are Interviewing / photo voicing / tiny demonstration office; using the empathy maps of the design thinking method, creating personas; performing landscape walks, make overviews by using the transect method, map the landscape mapping with photos, sketches, and notes.

Step 2. Defining Challenges and Goals

Here you make a synthesis of the observations about actors, stakeholders and the landscape. The team can collaboratively define the main challenges you need to address and the opportunities you can build on. It can help to visualize these on a map of the area or in a scheme of the food system. Methods to be used are Nominal Group Technique for collecting challenges, brainstorming for generating ideas, Power mapping for your main idea / challenge, Nominal Group Technique for collecting goals and setting priorities. You can use the ‘how might we?’ questions: How might the agriparc serve best the needs of those who are more vulnerable? How might farmers benefit from the park for a fair income? How might the landscape look like when agroecology is applied?

Step 3. Ideate: Vision and Scenario

The vision builds upon the defined goals and selected scenario. It describes the way the food system and how the landscape may look like in the long term. It can be a written statement, where the main concepts are preferably illustrated with icons, images, and sketches. Scenarios can be explored using the quadrant method see section 3.4 and the lecture Michiel Dehaene: April 25 and May 16, 2024).

Step 4. Prototyping

A prototype is the early physical representation of your idea that allows people to test and explore your idea’s spatial, functional and social feasibility You use the prototype to prove the value of your idea, get feedback, catch potential failures, learn from failures, integrate lessons into design and it helps to evolve ideas quickly.

Important aspects of a prototype. Slide presentation Jeroen de Vries at the IP in Montpellier, 2024.

Prototypes may have various forms: mind maps, games, AR/VR experience, Performative prototypes (role play), storyboards, comic books, modifiable digital models (street mix or Minecraft), drawings (section drawings, floor plan), or analogue models.

Step 5. Testing and concluding

The prototypes are tested by actors, users, stakeholders who give feedback. You can understand better the actors. The prototypes should not be a draft design, but a concept for a focused interaction with users. Do not reduce your “testing” work to asking whether or not people like your solution. Instead, continue to ask “Why?”, and focus on what you can learn about the person and the problem as well as your potential solutions. When you cannot interact with the local community, you may use personas who do a role play while testing. The prototype could also be a game where participants can explore if the proposal fulfills their needs, answers to their desires. If it is a 1:1 model, or a scale model participants may also experience how it works.

Conclusions

During the AESOP4Food project we used the phases of Design Thinking for the different phase of the course. During the IPs we used parts of the approach and in the third IP we made a skip where we clearly explained all steps to the participants.

AESOP4Food adapted the method for sustainable food planning. You can view the presentation of the steps of this method here.

Collaborative Goal Setting

Participants engaged in collaborative goal setting to define objectives and desired outcomes, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment to achieving shared goals.

In the online sessions, we used Mural.co for this, and onsite it can easily be done using flipover sheets, and stickers. Important is that:

• Each group member writes down individual his/her goals
• Only places one goal on a sticker
• Collect the goals while the participants explain these
• Similar goals can be grouped by a moderator
• Goals can be reformulated into common goals with the approval of the group.

Power mapping

Objective: To create a visual representation of the relationships and influences among different stakeholders in a food system, focusing on their positions relative to a collaborative goal.

Community and Landscape Analysis

• Identify your community by analyzing the environmental, social, and political context.
• Use methods like autobiographical narration, theater, and play to gather genuine insights.
• Map traditional social groups, individuals, local and external stakeholders to understand the broader community dynamics.

Creating the Power Map

• Start with a central collaborative goal.
• Position stakeholders based on their influence and relationship to this goal.
• Use digital tools like Padlet and Miro for interactive and evolving maps.

Powermap on a food challenge developed under guidance of Deni Ruggeri

Democratic Participation Analysis

• Ensure the community becomes self-aware through the participatory process.
• Involve all affected parties to gather a comprehensive understanding of needs and desires.

Benefits for Students:

• Enhances understanding of complex stakeholder dynamics.
• Develops skills in data collection, analysis, and collaborative planning.
• Encourages active participation and engagement with real-world challenges.

Food system mapping

Food mapping is a crucial methodology in understanding and analysing food systems within various contexts.

• To map and evaluate local food systems.
• To identify stakeholders, power structures, and the dynamics of food production, distribution, and consumption.
• To facilitate targeted interventions and policy development.

Presentations on different types of food system mapping can be found in Phase II Analysing the local food system. Marian Simón Rojo of UPM introduces the relevance of mapping for starting transformative actions and presents an overview of the types of mapping. Katrin Bohn, of Bohn&Viljoen Architects & the School of Architecture & Design of the University of Brighton, presents several projects and how mapping played a role in them.

Food System Mapping Methodology

• Define Scope and Objectives: Clearly outline geographic and thematic focus. Ensures targeted and relevant mapping efforts.
• Stakeholder Identification: Use power mapping to identify key players. Engages all relevant stakeholders and ensures comprehensive understanding of the food system.
• Data Collection: Collect quantitative and qualitative data.
• Mapping the Food System: Create visual maps of food system elements. Visualises complex relationships and flows within the food system.
• SWOT Analysis: Conduct a collaborative SWOT analysis. Identifies strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, facilitating strategic planning.
• Analysis and Interpretation: Analyse data to identify trends and issues.
• Developing Interventions: Co-design solutions with stakeholders. Ensures practical and accepted solutions through stakeholder involvement.
• Reporting and Dissemination: Share findings and strategies.
• Monitoring and Evaluation: Establish metrics for ongoing evaluation. Ensures continuous improvement and adaptation of interventions.

In AESOP4Food, this methodology was applied for the Living Lab assignment to map Bucharest District 6's foodscape, involving detailed mapping and stakeholder workshops to identify challenges.