Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong are two designers at the global design agency IDEO. They talk about what is Human Centered Design and how it goes with Planetary Design. IDEO uses Human Centered Design to create solutions with a positive impact and shape a global change.

Anna: We need to redefine the stories that we tell us, and if we see ourselves as part of nature,  actually everything that serves humans and humanity, so it doesn't serve consumers or paying customers, but it actually serves humans, would hopefully also serve nature.

Laura: This is The Spaceship Podcast.

Clément: This podcast is brought to you by the special master class where we support change-makers and entrepreneurs in their journey to solving big challenges our planet is facing. Here we bring the theory to life by featuring thought leaders and impact entrepreneurs from around the world.

Laura: How do we design the future? How do we try to tackle the challenges the world is consistently facing, the human challenges and the environmental ones. Now, this is what we're talking about in this week's episode with our guests Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong from the global design agency IDEO.

Clément: Anna Várnai and Shuya Gong, so first of all, we are really glad to have you in the spaceship podcast. So thanks a lot and welcome.

Anna: Hey, thanks for having us.

Shuya: Yeah. So excited to be here.

Clément: You both work at IDEO, a global design company, known for its commitment to creative, positive impact, which is why we are so excited to speak to you both. And both of you work together, Anna you're a senior design lead,  consultant and facilitator, and Shuya you are head designer at IDEO co-lab exploring how emerging tech and societal trends change systems.

Shuya: We're multi-purpose here.

Anna: Yeah, that's very true. It's usually hard to put it down, like to one title or two.

Laura: Why is it so hard to have one title when you're doing what you're doing? Or maybe even describe what you're doing. If you had to pick one title right now,

Anna: I would pick the title of design researcher and in a way I sometimes describe it that is part-time reporter, part-time storyteller or anthropologist and therapists. So I think that already might give you an answer why it's hard to like put it into one role because depending on the project and the challenge, there are different skillsets that are needed and different roles I step into.

But usually in one sentence for a living, I try to understand why people do the things they do and how we can design better products, services, or systems that actually resonate with them and help them thrive in the end

Laura: Does design in the way you're both talking about it, is this a more democratic way of thinking about the word design?

There are boundaries to it and the way you're speaking about it, it seems like it's something that's just everywhere. You can design anything. You can design the way you pour your tea into your mug. Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit on that?

Anna: There are two ways how I think about it, and there's one way when I see the word of "to design",  I think that is an innate human capability that every one of us is designing if we're changing the state of something. So in a way it's understanding what's the current state and changing it to a different state. And then through the history of design as a practice, it professionalized. It was industrial revolution, so design was very much about white Western people making stuff and product.

Now we realize how much trouble it also causes, and what are the negative effects of designing if you don't

Tessa Clarke talks about how she created Olio, the app that is ending food waste. Olio connects people to others in their neighbourhood to share surplus food. She reflects on her journey creating a simple MVP to reaching 4 million users.



Tessa: It is possible to test your hypothesis without spending a penny

In the early days. You just need to find the super, super early adopters. They are people who you don't have to sell to, the minute you tell them you have got this thing that can solve their problem, they want to kind of rip it out of your hands and they don't care what it's called. They don't care what the colors and the design and the branding is. They just want that problem solved.

Clément: You are listening to Tessa Clarke, co-founder and CEO of Olio. In this episode, we'll be talking about food, and how she created and developed a simple solution to help fix this complex issue.

Laura: This is the spaceship podcast, part of the spaceship masterclass, where we support change-makers and entrepreneurs in their journeys to solving big challenges our planet is facing.

Here we bring the theory to life by featuring thought leaders and impact entrepreneurs from around the world. 

And in this episode we met Tessa Clark to talk about her startup Olio .  The Olio app connects people to others in their neighborhood to share surplus food. When you think about how much food goes, uneaten at our dinner tables, or it gets thrown out by local supermarkets. There is more than enough to go around and that's not to mention the fruits and vegetables that we harvest from our own gardens that we sometimes don't even know what to do with. I mean, there's only so many carrots that one can eat

Clément: Tessa started only in 2015 in the UK with a very basic version of the app.

And it was a pretty quick success. Now, all you has more than 3 million, 600,000 users. That means we are talking about almost 20 millions portions of food shared through the app.

Laura: We are really, really  interested Tessa,to hear a little bit more about how you tested the appetite for this solution. I mean, the problem of food waste is clear and the statistics are very, very poignant, and I am very curious to know how you actually went from understanding this problem to testing whether or not people were interested in even considering this idea of sharing.

Tessa: Yeah. Great question. And we went through a pretty methodical process, actually a quick bit methodical process. So I had an experience when I was moving country and found myself with some foods that the removal told me I had to throw away. But being a farmer's daughter and someone who has a keen appreciation for just how much hard work goes into producing food. I wasn't prepared to do that. So I kind of set out into the streets to try and find someone to give my food. To cut a long story short, I failed miserably. I went back to my apartment and not to be defeated, I smuggled the non-perishable food into the bottom of my packing box. And that was the point at which I realized this was crazy the lengths I was going  to avoid throwing away perfectly good food. And I knew there was an app for everything, and I couldn't believe it wasn't an app where I could just easily post my food and neighbors living nearby could request it and pop around and pick it up.

So that was the sort of light bulb moment, I guess, if you like for, for the concept of Olio the first thing my co-founder session I did was to research the problem of food waste to find out if this actually was a problem bigger than my personal experience. And we very quickly discovered that it's an enormous existential problem with a third of all the food we produce globally each...

Laura: Hi! This is Laura.

Clement: And Clement,

Laura: Co-founders of the Spaceship Academy, and the hosts of the Spaceship Podcast. We are so glad you joined us for our first season. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. Right now, we’re recording and preparing for a huge shift for season 2. 

Clement: Big things are coming! We’re moving towards more structured and tailored episodes on topics from The Spaceship Curriculum. 

Laura: So, if you’re struggling with developing your business plan, 

Clement: Or wondering how to think about scale

Laura: Our new season will be tailored towards the important and sometimes challenging questions that come with launching an impact enterprise. 

Clement: As we look forward we are also reflecting on what we learned from our season one guests!

We talked about some cool things this season, like how to seek inspiration from those facing the problem -- 

Linh: So the more you talk to the people that you want to serve, the more ideas you have, and they actually can even tell you to do different things. And at first, as it's kind of the mother of your idea, you'll be like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." But if you, if you ask ten people and eight of them tell you to do certain things differently, then maybe there's something you need to consider.

Laura: Or learning to take out time for play! 

Moses: And we had one objective on lazy day. If you will call it an objective, it was to do nothing. Honestly, one of the hardest things I had to do every week was just literally have no schedule and nothing to do on a Monday, but I think that's the idea of play: giving space for spontaneity and, you know, just doing nothing.

Clement: How to seek motivation when things get complicated 

Sharath: There's always what I'd call a jujitsu point in a system, right? Where there's a role. There's a kind of person in the system who is very close to tipping, right. They really want a better outcome on the motivation side. But something is conspiring against them.

Laura: how to use inspiration from the past to look to the future

Laure: We asked ourselves, before facing our waste crisis, how did we used to live? How did we used to consume products? And so we went back to this idea of the milkman, where at the time packaging was an asset for the companies. So it was in their interest to make these assets as durable as possible. Not because of the environment...because at the time in you know, late fifties, sixties, it was not yet an issue, but really because of economics. So the milk bottle had to be durable to be reused many, many times because it was simply an asset that would depreciate over time.

Clement: And especially rethinking the potential for business to do good in the world

Matt: We don't live in a world right now where governments habitually make sensible, ambitious decisions about the public goods we need to create and then efficiently go about creating them. So, if we could pass those mandates to private companies who can do good while also doing well, if you can create a business model where doing the right thing is profitable, then you've won.

Laura: We can’t wait to jump into season 2! 

[00:00:00] Linh: So the more you talk to the people that you want to serve, the more ideas you have, and they actually can even tell you to do different things. And at first, as it's kind of the mother of your idea, you'll be like, "Oh, I'm not going to do that." But if you, if you ask ten people and eight of them tell you to do certain things differently, then maybe there's something you need to consider.

Laura: That was Linh Le, founder of AYA Cup, a startup changing the way we drink coffee all over Vietnam. Linh is building a system that encourages coffee drinkers to use and return their coffee cups to eliminate single use plastic. She reminds us to approach potential customers with an open mind, to do our due diligence prior to launch, and that ideas are cheap, but execution is definitely expensive.

Take time to challenge your big ideas and collaborate with the people you're serving to make sure your solution [00:01:00] actually aligns with their needs.

Clement: You are listening to The Spaceship Podcast where we'll be speaking to entrepreneurs and global thought leaders to highlight the theories we cover in The Spaceship masterclass.

If you are set on solving some of the world's biggest problems, check out thespaceship.org. Now let's give the mic to our guests:

Thanks, Linh, for being here today. So I wanted to introduce you to Laura. You had a previous call, but I'm really glad that we have this podcast all together and that we have you as a, as a guest. We actually met online during this coronavirus period. And we discussed, uh, sustainability in Vietnam, where you're based and where you founded AYA Cup. We would love to learn more on your journey to become an impact entrepreneur and, um, what has been the, the challenges.

And [00:02:00] also,I would like maybe to start with one question to you, which is... so AYA Cup uh, we can introduce it a bit more and you can explain, but why do you care so much about reducing plastic waste in Vietnam?

Linh: Uh, uh, the story is quite long, but, if I can answer that in three or five sentences, I will say when I first heard about one statistic, which is Vietnam is the top five country polluting the ocean the most, the moment I heard that news, I got really, um, shocked, mixed with shame.

Uh, ashamed because as a Vietnamese, we always heard quite negative facts about our country. So we are the most populated country in the world. The top 13 most populated. We're also one of the most, quite poor country compared [00:03:00] to other countries. Our money value is not the best. It's quite low. So lots of things that make us not proud as citizens.

And then when I heard that, like we are top five country polluting the ocean, the most... about two, three years ago, I was really ashamed. And then there was like, Oh, people are not going to change, nobody is going to do anything. It is what it is. I just carry on with my life. So then one day, uh, I used to work for a golf construction company in Vietnam.

We, um, put out irrigation system for golf courses' development, and I went up for a check up North of Vietnam. And I started to see people cutting off trees in the small slope of mountains to make golf courses. So after that, I told my boss, like, I've had enough of seeing my country destroyed, [00:04:00] and natural resources not used to the optimum... and I don't want to be part of the problem anymore.

And I want to change. I want to be part of the solution. And also at that moment I was quite lost. Because I've been changing jobs quite often. I'd say every two years. Not sure about the millennial problem or is it because I can't find what actually I want to do. Most of the jobs, I find they are quite cynical.

So they say one thing, they want to do the good thing for society, but then they don't actually keep their word when it comes...

[00:00:00] Laure: We asked ourselves, before facing our waste crisis, how did we used to live? How did we used to consume products? And so we went back to this idea of the milkman, where at the time packaging was an asset for the companies. So it was in their interest to make these assets as durable as possible. Not because of the environment...because at the time in you know, late fifties, sixties, it was not yet an issue, but really because of economics. So the milk bottle had to be durable to be reused many, many times because it was simply an asset that would depreciate over time.

Clement: That's the voice of Laure Cucuron, the general manager for TerraCycle Europe.

She's talking about how TerraCycle looks to the past for inspiration for the future, modeling the e-commerce site Loop after your friendly neighborhood milkman. Loop brings the circular economy to your favorite brands through high quality [00:01:00] re-usable game-changing packaging. Imagine eating Haagen Dazs ice cream out of a durable container that is designed -- not only to combat single-use waste-- but to keep your ice cream cold for longer and allow you to get every last spoonful out of the pint.

You are listening to The Spaceship Podcast where we'll be speaking to entrepreneurs and global thought leaders to highlight the theories we cover in The Spaceship masterclass. If you are set on solving some of the world's biggest problems, check out thespaceship.org. Now let's give the mic to our guest.

Nice to meet you again, Laure and, um, would be nice if you can start by introducing what is TerraCycle that, uh, you have been working on for quite a long time, and describe what you do. And then we'll go and jump into, uh, the Loop and the different questions we have on the Loop concept.

Laure: Okay. Hi guys. So, [00:02:00] thank you so much for having me.

My name is Laure Cucuron. I'm the general manager of TerraCycle Europe and I'm based in London. And so what we do at TerraCycle and Loop, well we have a big mission. We say that we're in business to eliminate the idea of waste. So it's quite an ambitious one. So, uh, more concretely, what we do is that we develop and offer solutions on recycling and reuse mostly to FMCG companies that will enable them, and also enable us as consumers to move towards more sustainable consumption choice.

We've been operating since 2001. We originally were created in US by our CEO and founder, Tom Szaky, who was a student at the time. He developed our activities all across the world. Now we operate in 21 markets, uh, including 11 here in Europe and UK. And we have a lot of exciting projects [00:03:00] happening on the recycling side, but also on the reuse side.

Clement: Okay, thanks a lot for this quick introduction and yes, it's true.

It's a big mission. I'm curious to understand what was the key insight that made TerraCycle think of? "Wow. We need to create something like Loop."

Laure:  Yeah. So I think, so TerraCycle has been around for many years. And as I said, we started by understanding what were the challenges in the recycling industry. And I think at the time, we realized that there was very little innovation in the recycling world.

That's, you know, most of the recycling services were driven by costs. And, you know, we also looked into the economics of recycling and the fact that today, if some things are recyclable or not recyclable depending on the country where we operate, is not necessarily linked to the technicality of it. We think that we can recycle most product and packaging, but, [00:04:00] um, it's related to the economics of recycling, which means that, you know, the cost of collecting recycling, the waste is usually higher compared to the value of the recycled material that we obtain.

 So that's where we started to work on...

[00:00:00] Moses: And we had one objective on lazy day. If you will call it an objective, it was to do nothing. Honestly, one of the hardest things I had to do every week was just literally have no schedule and nothing to do on a Monday, but I think that's the idea of play: giving space for spontaneity and, you know, just doing nothing.

Clement: That was the voice of Moses (Mohan), reminding us of the importance of carving out time in our daily life for nothing at all and making room for spontaneity. Like many of Moses' lessons, this one comes from his time spent as an ordained Zen monk.

Moses: I think play, in many ways, is a gateway to presence. It's a gateway to being mindful.

And it's always mindful of something, whether it's being mindful of the way you're engaging with your stakeholders... being mindful of the way you're engaging with yourself, your team... I think play offers a very wonderful, easy way to be with that.

Clement:  [00:01:00] Moses sits at the intersection of mindfulness and leadership, supporting multinational corporations and organizations in mindfulness and compassion training. As a coach and facilitator, his work serves to cultivate mindfulness, find resilience and remind us of what it means to be human.

You are listening to The Spaceship Podcast, where we'll be speaking to entrepreneurs and global thought leaders to highlight the theories we cover in the Spaceship masterclass. If you are set on solving some of the world's biggest problems, check out thespaceship.org. Now, let's give the mic to our guests.

Laura: Go ahead and tell us in a show who you are now. I guess it's always hard to put it into words and put it into context, but... you were talking about being a traveler.

Moses: Yeah. Yeah. So I currently apply myself in bringing... basically the [00:02:00] wisdom traditions and methods from the wisdom traditions into the space of leadership and daily life.

That's the essence of what I do right now. And specifically that takes two forms. One is really bringing the tools of mind training to large organizations, trying to create more human, thriving cultures that... hopefully care [about] more than the profit line and, you know, into people and into the planet. So that's one way of that application right now.

And the other really is bringing tools of self-awareness and coaching to bear on a one-on-one and team basis. So that's, that's the context of who I am right now, uh, both professionally and somewhat personally, in a nutshell.

My background is from strategy. I spent most of my career in management consulting... quite quickly looked around and saw that there was a huge amount of suffering. You know, the classic things like alcoholism, overwork, sexual misconduct, you name it. And I thought to myself then, if these were the smartest people in the room, something's not right here.

[00:03:00] So that got me to exploring the space of coaching for a period of time as a way to be of service and really as a way to uncover who I am and to operate more from a place of purpose and a place of intention.

And long story short, that led me to also spending some time as a monk, which I considered, actually, as a full-time career. But I ultimately felt that I needed to bring the monastery out here rather than people into the monastery... which is why I'm here having this conversation and doing what I do, hopefully making a little bit of change in my own way. And so, yeah, that's, that's about me in a nutshell.

Laura: So how does someone come from a monastery setting, as a monk, and leave that full-time job and enter back into this so-called real world rat race, working with, you know, large companies. You've worked with government, you know, FMCG you've worked with Ikea, Unilever, you name...

[00:00:00] Sandeep: I, I think, you know, you have to keep on struggling to really get the right people who are motivated by what you are saying, speaking in their language, changing the communication so that they get convinced and what works and what doesn't work. So when you get the first five to say, "yes," by then, you will know what works and what doesn't work.

And figuring that out is the most important part.

Clement: We have the chance today to speak to Sandeep Patel, founder of Nepra and Let's Recycle. Sandeep is a successful serial entrepreneur who has always been fascinated by the waste issue our society has created and too really challenged. He's the pioneer when it comes to waste management in India.

Today, Sandeep solves more problems than he could have imagined when he started. He works with people experiencing some of the most intense poverty on the planet and inspires their family's life with [00:01:00] determination, trust, and care. In solving the waste problem, he tackles gender inequality, unemployment, and poverty.

Giving us a strong lesson of humility, perseverance, and accessibility, here's Sandeep Patel.

Laura: So, Sandeep, I'd love to hear from you in your own words. What is Nepra? What is Nepra all about?

Sandeep: We started thinking all about sustainability. For us, Nepra is about sustainability. It was coined from two words, "Neha" and "Pranali." Those are Indian words where neha means love and pranali means system. So love thy system was the logic behind Nepra and all the business we do is surrounded to sustainability.

And for us, any action we take has to be people-centric as well as environmental-centric. [00:02:00] So that's what Nepra stands for us.

Laura: So when you say it's about sustainability, it makes me think of a couple of things right away. Either you're saving something or you are fixing something...it's like there's two, almost like two strands of sustainable businesses out there, ones that are producing goods that are sustainable and others that are cleaning up the mess of other people's goods.

And it's, it's, it's really interesting that... actually, this is our first podcast with a entrepreneur who's in the waste management space. So can you speak to a little bit as to why you even fell into this sustainability space in the first place? What made you turn to this?

Sandeep:  Right. So, no, I, I did my masters from Leeds business school in the UK.

And since that time I was very keen on waste management and retail. When I came back to in India in 2002, it was too early for waste management and I had no idea how to go about doing it. So I did a lot of [00:03:00] businesses in the past, which came my way and I, I could see businesses as an opportunity coming my way rather than going away from me.

So I did a lot of businesses, which initial days allowed me to learn a lot of things. But in 2006, Nepra was born. Well, you know, for me, it was calling from day one, that waste is something which I want to do. And I don't know, you know, it was always something like a magnet, which was pulling me towards it.

And it's a problem of magnitude, which people always complained about. I could see everybody complaining about it, but nobody really looking at a solution. And I think that really gave me a big challenge and I wanted to solve that challenge.

Laura: Interesting. Was there, was there a moment in time that you can pinpoint that you feel really launched you in that direction?

Was it...was it a day where there was just too many complaints and you realized, okay, something needs to be [00:04:00] done. Yeah. What was the catapult to even, it's one thing to make you want to study, you know, sustainability, but it's another thing to...

[00:00:00] Sharath: There's always what I'd call a jujitsu point in a system, right? Where there's a role. There's a kind of person in the system who is very close to tipping, right. They really want a better outcome on the motivation side. But something is conspiring against them.

Clement: Today we speak to Sharath Jeevan, one of the world's leading experts on how to practically re-ignite the inner drive or intrinsic motivation in our lives.

He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Roehampton University for his contribution to the field in 2017, was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2014 and was recognized as one of the United kingdom's 10 leading social entrepreneurs in 2019.

But when it comes to his work in deeply understanding intrinsic motivation, he gained firsthand experience through funding STiR Education in [00:01:00] 2012. STiR is the world's largest initiative to improve interest stigmatization, specifically in education. It now supports 35,000 schools today across India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. That basically equates to 200,000 teachers and 6 million children with a better understanding of their own motivation in life.

Sharath: Social entrepreneurship is a prime example. We're almost weaned away from intrinsic motivation and trained to really do things because there's something at the end.

Clement: What's especially interesting about Sharath's story is his experience as an entrepreneur himself. Prior to starting STiR, he held a senior corporate role at eBay, and then launched his own startup, a social network platform called ContactDetails.com -- this was before the Facebook era!

[00:02:00] Here to dive deeper into the connection between intrinsic motivation and entrepreneurship, is Sharath Jeevan.

Laura: What is intrinsic motivation? What is the definition for you of what that is? Because I think those two words, intrinsic motivation just seems to encapsulate so much of the work that you do and, and, and who you are. And I just would love to hear what you have to say around that definition.

Sharath: Thanks, Laura. And yeah, I think for me that the real definition of intrinsic motivation is about doing something...really because it's inherently rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Not because of the external reward or status or money or any other kind of benefit you receive from pursuing that thing. So it's kind of doing something for its own sake, in a nutshell.

And it sounds very simple, but I think in, in many areas of our life, and I think social entrepreneurship is a prime example, [00:03:00] we're almost weaned away from intrinsic motivation and trained to really do things because there's something at the end. I think that's my sort of mission in life, if you like, is to try and change that balance our lives and see if we can...see if we can challenge ourselves as people, as societies, as organizations to rethink that and apply that to how we live and work really more generally.

Laura: And why do you think it's so hard to align this motivation with the actual work that we do or our everyday lives? And, and I mean, I think that that's a challenge that so many of us face.

Why do you think it is such a challenge?

Sharath: Yeah, I think what we've done a lot of, in many areas of life stories, Laura, is we've sort of confused what motivation thinking would call the true motivators, right? And with what it would call hygiene factors. So hygiene factors, that's a strange name, but it's really something where basically if that thing is not there, it will demotivate you.

Right. So let's say, you know, Uh, decent working [00:04:00] conditions, right? If you're an office where you can't hear, you don't have space to put your laptop down, if people constantly disturbing you, that's clearly...