A Service Designer and Communication designer,
a Systemic Thinker, and a Curious Explorer.
Circular Food Innovation Lab
Dip your toes
What is Circular Food Innovation Lab?
The Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL) was a project of the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC), Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and Vancouver-based businesses and organizations working in the food system. This project was a collaboration and co-creation with Vancouver's food businesses to find ways of intervention in Vancouver's food system that would enable a circular future. CFIL used systemic design, action research, and prototyping to experiment at possible solutions in f. It aimed to transform Vancouver's food system not only to reduce waste and enable circularity but also to shift the underlying mindsets leading to unsustainable processes in the system.
Our process, starting from March 2022 to March 2023
Our convening question
How might we work together to increase circularity in Vancouver's food system so that food is not lost or wasted; access to food is nourishing, equitable, and culturally appropriate; and habitats are protected for current and future generations of humans and more-than-humans?
My contributions
As a designer and researcher, I had several responsibilities in the course of this one-year project. They include:
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Co-developing design processes, tools, and techniques
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Conducting in-field learning, co-design, and rapid prototyping
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Co-leading generative and evaluative gatherings
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Documenting and communicating learnings and outcomes
Prototype
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Leading the Measure What Matters Prototype
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Collaborating with team members on the Co-creating Collaborative Responsibilities prototype
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Collaborating with team members on Last Call (Tracing Foodsteps experiment) Prototype
Design deliverables
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Design experiments such as design probes
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Participant documentation tools
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Survey designs
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Workshop designs and facilitation
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CFIL's Webdesign
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Visual communication support
Where change happens: the ambiguous space when Dominant systems merge into the Emergent ones
Our ‘north star’
The North Star is the larger vision that we are working towards. We envision a food system in Vancouver where:
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Food isn’t wasted -circular systems are in place so foods easily flow to their next use.
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Access to healthy, gorgeous, and delicious food is affordable, just, and culturally appropriate for all residents in Vancouver.
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Jobs support a multitude of livelihoods in a regenerative economy.
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Food is not reduced to a commodity but rather respected as an integral part of human and planetary well-being.
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Our food system is rooted in place and reflects care for local, regional and global ecosystems.
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Food is centered in family, community, and cultural lives. It grounds important moments and movements.
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Our food system moves beyond human exceptionalism and recognizes that we are part of a complex balance held between all beings.
I joined this project as a designer and researcher in the Spring of 2022. As one of the significant opportunities in my career, this project advanced my training in systemic thinking and design for social innovation through several systemic design principles, tools, and techniques. Co-creation and collaboration were the foundations of this project, and it helped me strengthen my collaboration skills and taught me various ways of effective communication by working on multiple tasks with different people with diverse perspectives and cultures.
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