School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
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- All Subjects: Sustainable development
- All Subjects: Economic
- All Subjects: Green events,
Live music events are growing in terms of popularity and attendance every year. Along with the traditionally produced festival comes social, environmental and economic impacts. Some event and festival management teams focus on “greening” their event, which involves operating sustainably. Many of them seek recognition in the form of certifications to highlight and market these efforts. There is a disconnect between event and festival management teams and certifications, however. Many management teams do not know which certifications exist, or which to choose based on their sustainability values. To solve this dilemma, I am creating a decision-making tool termed “FestEval” that compares Wiek’s sustainability criteria inspired by Gibson’s principles to six green certifications. Certifications are ranked using percentages and pie charts to display how well each certification aligns with the principles. My client Kilowatt Events is piloting FestEval and providing me with feedback. The tool provides event and festival management teams with a method for choosing a certification that promotes their sustainable event and fits their values. It is designed to advance the future of festivals and events in a sustainable direction. The project identifies gaps in green certifications and suggest strategies for their improvement. It draws connections to Matt Burmeister’s Sustainable Sound Guide, designed to help management teams shift from operating at the current standard to operating sustainably.
Effective sustainability communication is essential to the successful creation, implementation and maintenance of effective sustainability solutions. As journalists are often the intermediary between sustainability scientists or practitioners and the general public, they have a responsibility to learn how to tell these stories in a way that motivates audiences to design and support more substantive solutions. My project is an experiment in this kind of sustainability storytelling.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo I saw firsthand the harm that ineffective storytelling can do. There the dominant narrative of sustainable development – as something Northern citizens do in the South – has had a dampening effect on grassroots development efforts. In an effort to combat this narrative, I created a short-form documentary that follows the stories of one exemplary Togolese changemaker who successfully developed his own solutions to sustainability challenges in his community. The film was published online in both English and French; shared with staff, Volunteers and local counterparts of Peace Corps Togo; and modified into a shorter video profile for distribution via WhatsApp, the primary social media platform in Togo.
Focus groups organized to evaluate audience responses to the film indicated that it effectively elicits feelings of hope and inspiration in viewers, as well as an increased motivation to address problems in viewers’ local communities. Participants also noted that its emphasis on local-led solutions counteracted Western development myths. This early feedback supports a growing body of evidence that solutions journalism more effectively spurs behavior change than its problem-centric counterpart. It also suggests that shifting the focus of development narratives from foreign to local leaders can also shift audience’s perceived agency.
COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into how much paper waste there was within the State of Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) Business and Professions Division (BPD). DOL BPD is a state agency division that licenses over forty plus professional and business licenses to the residents of Washington state. Due to the pandemic, the project transformed into how the three pillars of sustainability impacts remote work within BPD. BPD is in this new and unique paradigm where the deliverable that was brought forth as this project completed are, “The 9 Benefits of Sustainability through Remote Work” (Appendix D) where this specifically showed DOL why remote work is sustainable and how it should be implemented even further throughout the agency. This list was put together with the benefits that best fit DOL BPD.