Transform your city challenge

Creating sustainable design has became crucial, this is why UN have published 17 goals to improve “life” on Earth, protect the planet and its inhabitants.

What can we do to actually improve our lives, environment, protect our surroundings, protect earth at our own level?

In this article we will use on the goal # 11 Sustainable cities and communities as focal point to generate new ideas to transform our damaging cities to sustainable ones, and we’ll go through the different steps to design sutainable solutions.

While some of us are lucky enough to live in a great area, surrounded by trees, houses with enough space for each member of the family to get their own intimacy and construct themselves as individuals, get enough money to buy whatever we want, some others are living in poverty, with nothing to eat nor clean water, living in slum areas. What can we do to bring sustainability at our levels?

Step 1 — Research

To design a solution we need to start collecting information about it, make our own mind about the topic, understand what has been done, what and why it is working or not, how it helps, how it has been designed and for which purpose, how is it going to be used in the long run.

For our project, here are some data from UN to start the information collection:

• “Cities occupy just 3 per cent of the Earth’s land, but account for 60–80 per cent of energy consumption and 75 per cent of carbon emissions”,
• “Rapid urbanization is exerting pressure on fresh water supplies, sewage, the living environment, and public health”,
• “3.5 billion people lives in cities today and 5 billion people are projected to live in cities by 2030”
• “9 in 10 people living in urban areas worldwide were breathing air that did not meet the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines”

La ville durable est-elle une ville qui dure ? — Building Beyond

Step 2 — Identify the problem

With different elements that have gathered, what topic creates the most interest to us or to our community. What motivates me the most?

In order to identify a problem and create an heuristic map about this topic, the Fishbone diagram can be used to fully understand the ecosystem of elements that are impacted by this topic.

Step 3 — Define a User statement

The user statement will help you clarify the actions and the goal to accomplish (refer to the infographic below).

Step 4 — Frame your design challenge

Once the user statement is clear, you need to dig into a bit further to particularly focus on the right problem and impact you want to make.

Steps 5 & 6 — Define game mechanics and Sketch your game

Those steps are the start of the realization of your project, define how your game will be played and sketch it to think about every angle of your solution

Step 7 — Prototype your solution

Sketching would have helped you elaborate your project but the prototyping will help you to visualise with 3D tools what your solution will look like at the end.

Step 8 & 9 — Exhibit

Those last 2 steps will fully concretise your work, present to your community what is your solution and it is reflected into your game.