Cadence, Marley, Nora (not pictured)
The Sustainable Confidence Team started their journey by working with JUMP to design a space for Illumibrate—an event that focuses on sustainable art and bringing the community together. Unfortunately, Illumibrate was canceled and the team was forced to pivot. The design team knew they wanted to continue with the topic of sustainability and art, but they weren’t sure how they might connect this with an end-user. An empathy interview with the Ada County Landfill brought the urgency and importance of keeping waste out of the landfill to the team's attention. They considered how many materials entering the landfill could still be used for creative purposes, and this inspired an empathy interview with the director of the ReUse Market. After looking into reusing materials artistically and having interviews with Chique Lixo and Pam McKnight (local artists), the team learned that creative confidence in students plummets as they grow older. That broke their hearts. Because of this, they began to look at students as potential end-users. This discovery ultimately led them to their current HMW Statement: “How Might We galvanize middle schoolers’ creative confidence through the reuse of materials?” From this, the team decided they wanted to see first-hand how middle schoolers' creativity was affected by different materials. The Sustainable Confidence Team designed an interactive art experiment with a 6th grade class at Lowell Elementary to determine how working with reused materials affects their confidence. They observed that a majority of students felt less pressure and more free to experiment while using the cardboard when compared to the paper. The team is using feedback from that experiment to iterate on several ideas that involve working with organizations like the ReUse Market to help grow creative confidence through reusing materials in the classroom and the community.
