School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Communication
- All Subjects: Wicked Problems
The project, Energy Insecurity and Public Health: Going Further through Cross-Sector Collaboration, aims to improve the health of communities by promoting projects that are community-engaged, action-oriented, and equity-focused (Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, 2020). Eventually, the final deliverable of this project will be an energy insecurity toolkit that can be leveraged by stakeholders to make a change in their local communities. To achieve this deliverable, a stakeholder workgroup was created to assess all aspects of energy insecurity in Maricopa County. To avoid typical pitfalls of stakeholder workgroups, the Learning and Action Alliance (LAA) Framework was chosen to be applied to the workgroup. The LAA Framework leverages social learning and promotes knowledge sharing between stakeholders (O’Donnell et al, 2018). The framework is implemented in five phases and can be customized to fit any wicked problem. The accompanying guidebook, "Applying the Learning and Action Alliance Framework: Energy Insecurity in Maricopa County’, was created to simplify the framework’s implementation phases and provide ‘real-world’ examples of how the framework was implemented into the energy insecurity stakeholder workgroup. The guidebook will be used by the Maricopa County Department of Public Health to facilitate other sustainability workgroups. Thus far, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health has approved the guidebook and is looking forward to integrating the guidebook into workgroup standard practices.
The photographs focused on aspects of life and behaviors that have contributed to happiness in local communities. A website was created and a gallery event was mounted for public review and discussion. Gallery attendees and website visitors were asked to complete a survey to assess (1) gained knowledge of sustainability solutions, and (2) how effective a tool photography is as a means of sustainability solutions communication.
This visual medium allowed people think about how to incorporate sustainable community solutions into their own lives and may have changed people’s interest in, and thoughts about, overall sustainability and sustainable solutions. The survey results demonstrated that photographs can successfully communicate sustainability ideas. Specifically, viewers gained an increased awareness of how community and urban gardening can increase happiness, well-being, and sense of community. This visual approach can continue to be used to more successfully communicate additional sustainability solutions ideas and methods to the public.
This report describes the process by which I created a concise but comprehensive online source of information about best practices in sustainability for urban planners. The goal of the project was to provide accessible information that would help planners in ways that help them comprehend and implement sustainable solutions to common planning problems that are found throughout the United States. To create the website, I researched methods for communicating clearly to planners, took a graduate course in communicating about sustainability, and drew on information that I had compiled on sustainable solutions for transportation, economy, water, green space, and governance.