Sustainable Transportation: Innovations and Solutions for a Greener Future Assignment

Assignment Task

Context

The transition to sustainable public transport is a critical component in the global effort to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. The Green Future Fund 1 (GFF) is dedicated to fostering innovations that align with these goals, focusing on startups that can make significant contributions to green power and carbon reduction, particularly in the public transport sector.

You are interning with a startup, ElectraRide. 2 The founders of ElectraRide are passionate about transforming India’s public transport system through electric vehicles (EVs) and related services, enhancing the commuter experience while advancing towards net zero carbon emissions. They have engaged you, along with other interns, to undertake a design thinking project to better understand the problems and markets they wish to address. As funding is limited, they are keen to identify a specific definition and design brief to attract funding from GFF. As a start-up organisation, they are not yet significantly committed to any particular technology or business model, and their focus is rather on improving outcomes for the environment and for transport users.

Objective

Your primary objective is to create a design brief that encapsulates the relevant problem you consider that ElectraRide should focus on solving first. This brief will form the foundation for developing solutions that meet the GFF's investment criteria, emphasizing sustainability and alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At this stage, your focus is solely on identifying and understanding the problem through design thinking and ethnographic research without delving into potential solutions.

Your Task

Identify/Define Your Initial Focus

Clearly, it’s not possible to solve this problem for the whole of India in one go. You will need to identify a State / City that you want to focus on initially. If you are not based in India, you will still need to focus on India as a potential customer for your end solution, but you may find yourself interviewing and conducting research wherever it is you are based with a view to considering the ways in which your learnings may assist an Indian organisation.

Design Thinking Research

Engage in a comprehensive research process using design thinking methodologies as you work through the material on the learning platform. This involves identifying and empathizing with stakeholders (commuters, public transport authorities, environmental experts, etc.), defining the problem areas, and gathering insights that highlight the challenges in India's public transport sector related to sustainability and user experience.

Annotated Portfolio Creation

As you work through the platform content and complete the exercises on it, you will document your research journey and create an annotated portfolio. This portfolio will provide evidence that you’ve completed the exercises conducted on the platform, provide you with artefacts (interviews, surveys, observational studies, thought experiments), and the annotations will allow you to share the insights derived from these efforts. Each annotation should reflect on how the artifact contributes to your understanding of the problem and its relevance to the GFF's investment focus, ultimately telling the story of how you’ve started with a really ‘big’ wicked problem and refined down into a problem definition and supporting design brief that focuses on a specific, focused, user-centric element of the problem. The final artefact will be the final version of your design brief which will set out clearly what features/benefits a solution will need to incorporate in order for a solution to be valuable (and, accordingly, why GFF should invest in the next steps towards the development of a solution).

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