It's Friday the 17th of July, and I'm coming to the end of my second week in Mexico City, where I've been working with recycling organisation Rennueva as part of my LIA program with MakeSense!
Having spent the first week settling in, getting to know our project and surroundings, this week was about immersing ourselves within our project, researching, and getting to grips with the basics of what our final outcome would look like.
We spent the first part of the week at our Impact Hub workspace, where we learnt about the first of the methodologies that would guide us through our project, design thinking. We learnt about the five stages of design thinking, and how progress may not be linear, but rather that we need to focus on expanding our focuses, before narrowing them back down.
We also looked at the importance of rooting our work and project in communities, by building trusting relationships and focusing on collective, rather than individual, impact.
Overall, this was incredibly beneficial to understanding the structure of our project, and added to the different ways of learning that we would be using.
We also spent time focusing on the volunteers we would be working with, preparing a group presentation where we outlined the project we were working on and the issues we were trying to solve. We focused on trying to understand our volunteers strengths and weaknesses, so we could best utilise them in a way that would compliment our own abilities. Despite the cultural and language barriers, this proved to be a fruitful experience, and I look forward to working with our local volunteers for the rest of the duration of the project.
Finally, we spent today with Hector at Rennueva, where we went over the research we had spent the past week doing, using his expertise to discuss our own findings, and move onto prototyping our project and business model now that we have the core research covered.
Overall, despite the disappointment of England losing, it's been a busy and fulfilling week, and I am grateful to MakeSense and Rennueva for the effort that is going into making this experience so valuable!