Summing up CircleUp in a sentence
If someone asks us to sum up the CircleUp project in a single sentence, sometimes we have to pause for a moment. There are so many different parts to the project, it can be hard to tie it all neatly together. Over the last few months, we’ve started our work with the CircleUp households, and we’ve needed a clear and simple explanation. It’s forced us to strip away the dense academic framing, and articulate each part of the project in clear, simple language. And it’s probably given the CircleUp partners as much clarity as the households we’re working with.
We recently put together a set of one-page summaries, that describe each of the main parts of the project. Each one gives some detail about what’s involved, what households need to do, how it might benefit households, and the story behind the research including the research teams that designed it. We’ve decided to turn these project summaries into a series of blogs, diving into detail about how each part of the project works.
But before we get sucked into the detail, let’s take a quick look at how the different parts of the project fit together.
Balancing research and action
Every activity in the CircleUp project is a balance between two goals: helping households to take practical action to reduce their waste, and doing research to check whether the help given to households is having the effect we hope. Some parts of the project are mostly about changing behaviour, some are mostly about monitoring that behaviour change, but it can be very difficult to disentangle the two. For example, giving a household a survey to assess their habits could make them reflect on their behaviour and change the way they act. Even so, understanding the main purpose of each activity helps to give a sense of how they fit together.
Changing habits
At its core, CircleUp is about helping households to make a difference and much of the project is dedicated to interventions to help change habits.
- App Challenges: Most of the CircleUp app is based around a series of challenges; a collection of practical tasks designed to help households become more circular, one step at a time. Each challenge focuses on a different material (clothes, electronics, food or packaging).
- Community building: Many of the CircleUp activities encourage households to work together to make a difference. This emphasis on community action aims to connect households with each other to share experiences and inspire each other.
- Interactive Learning: A digital simulation tool lets families virtually test how making small changes to their behaviour leads to different environmental impacts.
Blending doing and measuring
Many of our measurement approaches also give real-time feedback to the participating households, giving them the tools to track their own progress even whilst collecting helpful data for CircleUp.
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): Households answer a quick survey to estimate the environmental impact of the changes they’re making.
- Circular stories: Households write short stories about their experiences in the project, sharing with each other what’s working well, where they’re struggling and how they’re feeling throughout the challenges.
- Smart bins: Bins with built-in weighing scales give households live feedback about how their waste is changing over time.
Measuring change
As much as we try and make every activity with households as engaging and enjoyable as possible, there are some parts which are pretty clearly there to help achieve CircleUp’s research aims rather than inspire households to change behaviour.
- Think and draw task: Households are asked to draw a simple mind map at the start and end of the project, depicting how they view various material flows in their households. The change in the two mind maps is used to infer how their thinking has changed.
- Surveys and interviews: We check in with households at four moments during the project and ask them questions to see what’s changing in the project and why.
What’s Next?
Over the rest of the year, we’ll share more detail about each of these project parts, reflecting on how they help households, how they help the project’s research, and the story behind the research and what it aims to achieve. We’ll end the series of posts with a reflection on our material efficiency advisors, who are visiting the CircleUp households in person and who are the glue that hold all these other project parts together.
So how do we sum up CircleUp in a sentence… we probably still need at least a page.
