This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 1A dealing with Metsähallitus and the Ministry of the environment’s brief on Sustainable nature recreation. The group includes Radhika Motani from the Creative Sustainability program, Ulrika Ura from the International Design Business Management program, Zita Tedjokusumo from the Creative Sustainability program, and Marleena Halonen from the Creative Sustainability program
Written by: Ulrika Ura
Climate change is taking its toll on biodiversity everywhere but something lurking in the shadows of public media is the visitors’ contribution to biodiversity loss in national parks. Ideologies of systems thinking helped us to understand this spider legged topic further and eventually even led us to our problem area. Many questions yet unanswered at the time of the last blogpost found their answer during this design sprint to be soon replaced with more nuanced problems. To turn the famous ‘tip of the iceberg’ metaphor into a more suitable one for the brief, the team really started to see beyond trees’ buds and slowly into the root cause. For example, COVID-19 and the rising number of visitors turned out to be only accelerating factors compared to the issues within communication.
Activities during the time included a field trip to Nuuksio national park, stakeholder interviews, generating insights, affinity mapping and systems mapping – all aiming to understand the relation of the stakeholders and their activities affecting biodiversity. Team was successful in keeping the visitor perspective onboard while having a rather heavy focus on our silent stakeholder. However, it is safe to say the complexity of Finnish recreational areas and the infrastructure intertwined have shown their true colors.
In this second blog post, one can find out more about our journey so far navigating through ‘Systemic analysis’ and what can already be seen on the horizon for this project.
INTO THE WILDS WE GO
Figure 1: Interviews in Nuuksio National Park
Soon after the last blogpost the team felt it was more than necessary to become a visitor themselves to enrich our data gathered from desk research and upcoming stakeholder interviews. Time was well spent in collaboration with Team 1B in Nuuksio National Park not only experiencing the multiple challenges visitors face but also doing visitor interviews and keeping our teams focus our main priority: how can we secure biodiversity?
Big takeaways from the trip included:
- The lack of physical signs and feedback touchpoints or alternatively the digital-heavy approach of Metsähallitus became very apparent → individual research over collective understanding
- Nature connectedness is a value on top of many other, because its direct impact to respect → even above reasonable number of visitors
- Newfound interest to external operators/activity firms’ presence, effects, and control over the area
- Framing our research and analysis area to Nuuksio national park
“You (visitor) have to find a lot of information on your own.”
Mari Valtonen, Haltia employee
MAPPING OUT THE MYSTERIES –
At first, it felt natural for the team to start mapping out the infrastructure of Finnish National Parks, which turned out to be quite an extensive mission for all of Supergroup 1. Stakeholders and the connections in between easily became a huge mess, and something needed to be done. When understanding the dimensions of this arena and how fuzzy the systems maps ended up being, we divided into more taskforces which worked much better. However, we really struggled with narrowing down.
Figure 2: Affinity mapping
Affinity mapping as a tool also helped us a lot in moving forward. After doing the first round in class, we also did the exercise once more. The process of mapping our findings on post-its, identifying themes and generating insights resulted in real outcomes that helped us to narrow the topic down to communication flows. Still, if we look at our insights from the first round made in class, similarities can be found with insights we ended up going forward with. We were clearly moving on to the direction of communication but were not there yet.
Figure 3: Communication flows
First round insights:
- Most harm done by the visitors is unintentional because the impact is not visible to the visitors, it is long-term, and visitors don’t acknowledge the multiplied effect that it has on the biodiversity.
- Interpretation of the rules by different visitors vary in relation to the intended meaning which creates confusion and could result in more visitor harm (e.g., “leave no trace”- one might think that banana peel fits to this description).
- Mountain biking is vastly advertised at the gate of the park without mentions that it is prohibited inside the park, which result to impression that mountain biking is allowed in the park, which leads to harmful impact to the biodiversity in the park.
Correction after further research: Mountain biking is vastly advertised at the gate of the park without mentions that it is prohibited on some areas of the park, which result to impression that mountain biking is allowed everywhere in the park, which leads to harmful impact to the biodiversity in the park.
The insights we ended up with will be presented below.
FROM BARK TO THE HEARTWOOD
Figure 4: Arriving to problem area with a circular model
Metaphorically, our process could be described as a cross-section of a tree trunk; after finally getting through the tough and rugged layer of bark (beginning of the process), the important findings started to become apparent, and the problematic effects followed right after understanding that finding/cause more. When iterated further they even formed three different streams of insights that crossed in the middle leading us closer and closer to the core/heartwood (problem definition). These streams and the core are explained below in more detail:
1st challenge (insight stream): Lack of follow-up on sustainable actions for activity firms by Metsähallitus in relation to biodiversity impacts, leads to the fact that the focus of the activity firms remains at visitor experience instead of biodiversity, which then leads to ripple effect in the visitor impact.
> The agents are not communicating cohesively the relevance of the guidelines to the visitors’ impact.
2nd challenge (insight stream): Lack of physical signs in strategic touchpoints, results in visitors not being able to rely on the guidelines to act sustainably.
> The agents are not communicating cohesively the relevance of the guidelines to the visitors’ impact.
3rd challenge (insight stream): Lack of user interfaces (to give feedback), the strategic processing in the organisation and lack of encouraging peer emergence, leads to potential of visitor agencies in preserving biodiversity being missed
> The agents are not communicating cohesively the relevance of the guidelines to the visitors’ impact.
1st + 2nd + 3rd challenge (insight stream)
> Value of the guidelines is not realized by the visitors in relation to their impacts to biodiversity.
When continuing onward with the project, our mission is to investigate the ‘three insight streams’ more and find out could we improve all or at least one of them so that eventually the value of the guidelines is not is realized by the visitors in relation to their impacts to biodiversity. This however would need to happen in a way that both supports nature’s wellbeing but also results in happier visitors who are more connected to nature and hence see the value of protecting it.
Our latest interviewee Liisa Kajala said it well, when replying to one of our interview questions: What do you envision national parks in Finland to look like in 10 years? To what direction have they developed? The answer was:
“Recreational use of national parks is well guided and there are cheerful visitors who get health and wellbeing from nature, that is also healthy. We need to have healthy nature and healthy human individuals increasingly present in national parks.”
Liisa Kajala, Senior Advisor (Metsähallitus)
The DfG course runs for 14 weeks each spring – the 2022 course has now started and runs from 28 Feb to 23 May. It’s an advanced studio course in which students work in multidisciplinary teams to address project briefs commissioned by governmental ministries in Finland. The course proceeds through the spring as a series of teaching modules in which various research and design methods are applied to address the project briefs. Blog posts are written by student groups, in which they share news, experiences and insights from within the course activities and their project development. More information here about the DfG 2022 project briefs. Hold the date for the public online finale online 09:00-12:00 AM (EEST) on Monday 23 May!