Linzi worked as Creative Strategist & Co-Designer alongside the Wild Labs team to co-host an 'Ocean Hack' with Project Everyone & Salesforce at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

As part of the build up to Global Climate Action Summit and in pursuit of Global Goals 14, Life Below Water, One Ocean Collab in partnership with Salesforce hosted a 48 hour pop up innovation lab for the ocean.

Ocean Hack brought together a mix of creatives, designers, strategists, technologists, engineers, scientists, educators, marine conservationists and business talent with a passion for the ocean to develop prototypes with impact potential.

We focused on four challenge areas, each exploring the application of technology and human creativity to meet a specific threat and issue the ocean faces. Check out the challenges below.

This event enabled us to dream up new possibilities, harness diverse collective talent, energy and intelligence and use this unique opportunity to prototype solutions.

Sprint Challenge Areas

1. Without connection there is no protection: World Ocean Day for Schools a global experience in 2019

When we pause and reflect, much of the pressure the ocean is under stems from human impacts driven primarily by a lack of understanding of our ocean relationship, a disconnection, our ‘ocean illiteracy’ if you like. Without raising the baseline level of Ocean literacy, let’s call it ‘Ocean IQ’ across societies then we are going to be faced with issue after issue. We need the next generation of designers, politicians, entrepreneurs, teachers, healthcare staff and media owners to be ocean advocates with full ‘Ocean IQ’

In June this year, an experiment called World Ocean Day For Schools happened in the UK. The intention was simple: to kickstart a conversation between children, parents, schools and communities about the human relationship with the ocean, not just for coastal communities but urban schools in towns and cities far and wide.

No big science push, no trying to change the curriculum, not just about plastic pollution, but a day to celebrate and explore the intimate relationship we have with the ocean and how we could build a new awareness and engagement with that. It was a great success.

How might we build on this and make WOD for Schools in 2019 a truly global experience?

How can we engage thousands of schools around the world to join the conversation?

2. Monitoring ocean and coastal health: Citizen participation powered by technology with Save the Waves

The oceans cover 70 % of the earth yet 97% of our satellite coverage is on land. There is pressing need for the the ocean and our coastlines to be monitored - the citizen has never been more needed to become the eyes and ears for the ocean and coastlines.

Save the Waves has developed a prototype app Endangered Waves to engage its core surfer community in active and passive ways to notice, capture and log important and meaningful pollution data and coastal threats.

The app is currently in testing and development phase and the core mission now is to recruit thousands more users as they refine the product itself both in terms of the quality of data it collects and the capability of the app to recognise and record using AI. The challenges the STW App faces are specific yet common to many conservation projects seeking to engage the public in tech driven citizen science.

How might we incentivize users ?

How might we make data usable, shareable and actionable to partners?

How does AI become useful in more than just a buzzword?

How might long term app dev needs and evolutions be creatively financed?

3. Coral reef health the early indicator: Making the invisible visible

Coral reefs could be the canary in the coal mine for climate change. Their rapid decline is a staggering loss to humanity but only a glimpse of what is expected to come from climate change. Coral reefs are maybe more resilient than we think?

Coral reefs are home to 25% of all marine life on the planet, but without urgent action to address climate change, pollution, overfishing and other threats these beautiful and life-sustaining organisms could disappear. Roughly one-quarter of coral reefs worldwide are already considered damaged beyond repair, with another two-thirds under serious threat.

We’ve seen huge momentum on the ocean plastics issue over the last 12 months. Coral reefs are a more complex system to communicate. Bleaching events, for example are happening worldwide and at an increasing rate, but are rarely reported upon. There are successful citizen science projects for monitoring coral reefs but they are dependent on divers, who make up such a small percentage of coastal communities & visitors.

How can we find ways to connect coastal communities, and visitors to those communities, to the health of coral reefs ?

How might we get land based public engaged on this coastal health issue ?

How might technology help us?

4. Water is medicine: Hacking a new personal water story into culture with Wallace J. Nicholls, Blue Mind

When we talk about the ocean, we tend to focus on the science, the conservation issues, the life giving properties, the protein source, the value to the economy - jobs, food, oxygen etc - all critical important stuff but not personal or relevant to many people and a framing that often fails to engage or create positive action.

Meanwhile the story of the intimate, personal, human relationship with water and the wide benefits to an individual is missing from this standard framing.

If water really is medicine then why aren’t we prescribing it more frequently to ourselves, our communities, our kids and the places we live and work?

And why aren’t we looking after our waterways and blue spaces with more care?

How can we find ways for this story of water and humans to find its way into the bigger ocean narrative and discourse?

How might we ‘hack’ these stories of ‘water is personal medicine’ into culture - schools, health, sport, creativity, media, entertainment, leisure, design, politics, public places ?

What could we create to help make this happen? - tools/info/content/interventions

How might technology help us?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON WILD LABS- OCEAN HACK