As I started to write the final blog post for CALS 501 Leading Climate Action in Society, I looked back on my initial blog post at the start of the course and the program itself. The post centered around the concept of design thinking and all of the nuances we were learning about; however, after a year of the design thinking challenge, I think it is safe to say that the only way to really understand design thinking is to experience it. Our team went through many iterations, ideas, and concepts before arriving at the prototype that we presented last week. Each course provided us with a fresh perspective and new learnings to consider and incorporate into the design thinking challenge.
Starting the program, climate anxiety was an area of interest for me, partially because I was transitioning from working in mental health and I wanted to bridge the gap with my previous experience, and partially because I had experienced some level of climate anxiety myself. At the beginning of the design thinking challenge, addressing climate anxiety was low on the list of elements to incorporate into our idea. By the end of the challenge, we had created a prototype for an app called “Resilience” that addresses climate grief and anxiety for parents and youth by transforming anxiety into action through daily challenges.
The theory of change that we used to inform our thinking allowed me to view climate anxiety and grief in a whole new way. By engaging parents first as role models, we can mobilize youth to take climate action (Elsen & Ord, 2021). Inter-generational climate action can be taken once psychological, emotional, and social barriers have been addressed. (Ojala, 2012). The daily challenges provided by the app utilize therapeutic coping skills, decolonizing knowledge, place attachment, and collective action to foster psychological resilience, both on an individual level and community level.
Prior to this, I had never thought of decolonizing knowledge, place attachment, or inter-generational climate action as ways of coping with climate anxiety. Exploring the research that is being done in these areas provided hope for the future of collectively managing feelings of climate anxiety. There are many examples of how the various courses that we took throughout our first year informed our thinking for the design thinking challenge. One example that I will speak to specifically is the concept of place attachment. Place attachment is an emotional bond between a person and a place and is shown to have benefits for human health and pro-environmental behaviours (Junot et al., 2018). This is a concept that we learned and experienced in CALS 502 Communication for Climate Action. One of our assignments was to have a sit spot that we visited weekly to experience place attachment. This is just one example of a concept that we learned and experienced the power of, which resulted in our team including it in the prototype.
This first year and the design thinking challenge have allowed for major learning and growth. Connecting with my design thinking team and the whole cohort has been a fulfilling experience and I’m looking forward to continuing to connect and push the agenda on climate action with this group.
References
Elsen, F. & Ord, J., 2021). The Role of Adults in “Youth Led” Climate Groups: Enabling Empowerment. Frontiers in Political Science. DOI:10.3389/fpos.2021.641154
Junot, A., Paquet, Y., & Fenouillet, F. (2018). Place attachment influence on human well-being and general pro-environmental behaviors. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 2(2), 49–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.18
Ojala, M. (2012). How do children cope with global climate change? coping strategies, engagement, and well-being. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 32(3), 225–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.02.004