Understanding the waste context in Mexico for “What Design Can Do”

For some time, delaO design studio has been working with What Design Can Do to organize events and workshops around the annual challenges called every year. Each challenge invites designers to get creative to tackle some environmental and social issues. 

What Design Can Do is a Dutch foundation that organizes annual conferences in Amsterdam, Mexico City and Sao Paulo to share different visions from designers and creatives from all over the world. 

This year, for the second time, we had the opportunity to be part of the research team and help them to understand the Mexican waste context to identify the main problems in the city and some opportunities where design can bring a solution.

As a starting point for our research, we picked out the main stakeholders of the Mexican waste management system and looked into how it works to map some of the activities involved. Then, we deep down into the leading waste management issues to understand their limitations and effects in communities and ecosystems.

To bring different local perspectives into this research, we carried out interviews with some experts from various design and non-design fields, who gave us a broad perspective from each waste production stage and shared some hard data about their topic of expertise. World Wildlife Fund, researcher Dr. Alethia Vázquez (Universidad Autónoma de México), Issac Correa (Walmart Sustainability Manager), and product designer Moisés Hernández participated in the interviews and shared with us different points of view around Mexican waste context, from research to industry and design.

Then, to create discussion among those interviewed and some others who could add more insights to the conversation, we organized the Local Jam, an online event due to the Covid-19. During the Jam, participants discussed different waste management topics and production and helped us complete our mapping of local opportunities, problems, and stakeholders. These conversations helped us enrich the research and create a network of experts from different fields and similar concerns.

Through this project, we had the opportunity to understand the complexity of the Mexican waste context to identify those grey areas where design can bring solutions and fill gaps, and share this information with other designers who are willing to become part of the change. It also gave us more experience to bring off deep-dive interviews and jams as a tool to enhance our research processes.

You can find the full report on What Design Can Do website and you can also submit your projects for the No Waste Challenge by April 1st.