Final Reflections on Creative Methods
Written by Georgia Henkle
Since starting this project, I’ve really been able to witness the power of using certain creative methods together to help solve a problem.
Prior to my involvement in The Knotweed Lab, I had used some of these creative methods in my own workflow in the art, design, and animation fields, specifically journey and empathy mapping. These really help to get into the mindset of different demographics within the general public, and figure out exactly who your target audience is when crafting a message.
They can also really help you understand the motives, thought processes, and experiences behind different types of people—ultimately aiding in crafting a message or resource that can be well received not only by your target audience, but also helping in making your message more accessible to other demographics who may come across it.
By solely relying on journey and empathy mapping in my work in years prior, however, I found it very difficult to narrow down a specific and effective message that was fully relevant to all aspects of the situation.
Implementing other creative methods
Certain methods that we utilized through the first part of this project, such as insight clustering, the idea prioritization matrix, and the knowledge mobilization matrix, are incredibly helpful in narrowing down and understanding your main goals.
By getting into the super specific details about the reasoning behind the current underlying issues, you can pinpoint what the biggest roadblock to effective change is.
Insight clustering is great for this—you just make observations about certain aspects of the challenge you are trying to break through, think about why each specific challenge may be happening, and then group your insights to figure out what the bigger underlying issue is.
When we did this for The Knotweed Lab, we found that one of the biggest reasons the knotweed issue is so hard to fix might be due to a lack of awareness. We found that we want to focus on bringing the issue of knotweed to light and share information about our research so that more awareness can lead to more acknowledgement that things need to change, which can lead to more funding so that advancements and progress can be made.
The knowledge mobilization matrix was useful in taking information from journey mapping, empathy mapping, and insight clustering and putting it to use to break down exactly how to target each audience. Analyzing each demographic and using our knowledge of them to craft a message and an appropriate delivery method for each group makes finding an effective course of action much easier.
Finally, the idea prioritization matrix takes things one step further by rating the feasibility and benefit of each idea for the demographic to help prioritize the strongest ideas and weed out the weaker ones.
Conclusion
This project, and especially these particular creative methods, have changed how I think about communicating a message to an audience. Instead of trying to come up with ideas and hoping my messaging and methods will be effective, I now have tools for a methodical approach I can use to determine some of the best ways I can reach my target demographic and narrow down the exact kind of framing I should use.
I have not yet had the opportunity to use these methods in my work outside of what we’ve done for this project, but based on my experience with how well they streamlined the process that I normally have a hard time getting through, I will absolutely be using them in the future.