Needfinding Process

Our needfinding process is comprised of standard interviews conducted with an array of demographics. In order to obtain a wider spread of qualitative data, our group decided to interview different categories of ‘needers’ based on how knowledgeable they might be in the field of renewable energies. The three distinct category of needers include typical UCSD students, UCSD students involved in sustainability organizations, and professionals in the biofuel industry. The interviews weren’t structured around explicit questions, but guided around the theme of alternative renewable energies in order to elicit creative feedback. These were some of the memorable responses that echoed the sentiments of the interviewees:

“I wouldn’t make my own biofuels because I don’t have the time for it” “That [making my own energy] seems kind of ambitious” “I know about it [algae biofuels] because I learned it in class...but how many people actually know that there’s that option?

We had a lot of qualitative data to work with from the standard interviews so we adopted the affinity diagram to help us sort through the data (see figure 1 in the appendix), as it allows us to group interview responses and extrapolate similarities. The affinity diagram revealed that knowledge of biofuels and algae biofuels wasn’t all that extensive among students and even when they’re aware of its existence, they know nothing more than that. Of the 23 interviewees, 8 knew about algae biofuels and all of them expressed interest in learning more about the active role they can partake.

The standard interviews we conducted with professionals went a bit differently as the purpose of the interviews was just to gather information on the state of algae biofuels in the ‘real world’. The researcher from the National Renewable Energies Laboratory and the public relations officer of US Navy’s Great Green Fleet came from different aspects of the industry side of algae biofuels and discussed different matters. However, we were still able to discern similarities within the qualitative data. Both of these interviewees identified lack of supply as the major hindrance when it comes to implementing biofuels and hypothesized the lack of a large scale proof of concept to be the main reason.

For the scope of this class though, we decided to narrow our target audience to college students and in particular, UCSD students. Through our needfinding process we uncovered a lack of knowledge in the feasibility of generating algae biofuels via a photobioreactor. This lack of understanding of this relatively simple project seems like a huge oversight. Thus, our design opportunity is to tackle this gap in knowledge we have identified and bring about a behavioral change in hopes of being able to alleviate the sustainability issue further down the line.