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How might we navigate the complex approval process for
food entrepreneurs to start, run and grow their business in Chicago?
Fall 2018
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology
In partnership with Chicago Food Policy Action Council
Challenge:
Food entrepreneur behaviors and municipal requirements have come into conflict:
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The rules that govern the businesses’ commercial behavior are often presented in a form that is not easily accessible or understood, making compliance difficult.
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Many unique, individual, and authentic or innovative styles of food preparation are not well understood by those writing the rules or enforcing them, resulting in cultural friction or the businesses abandoning Chicago for more progressive locations.
Approach:
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Building communication channels between different stakeholders.
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Deliver understandable, easily accessible, live information by understanding how the business owner utilizes the information.
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Co-create with stakeholders. Designers might be the facilitator to bring different stakeholders to the same page and create communication tools to help them understand each other as we all share the same goals.
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Generate actionable principles for the overall system to make it resilient and transformable.
Context:
Well before big-box retailers and online stores, entrepreneurially-spirited individuals brought with them creativity and ingenuity to Chicago’s streets and neighborhoods. Meanwhile, through food policy, the local city government strive to protect the public while also educating entrepreneurs on good business practices so that their businesses may become enduring contributors to the local economy.
Understand the end user
Stakeholder
What we learnt from interviews is different stakeholders with same goals need to communicate well and work together. Yet we are short of communication channels for efficient information delivery as well as holistic view of the process.
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BUSINESS OWNERS want to open their food business quickly, efficiently, they are expected to know the technical details as soon as they start planning.
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What channels might be most accessible to different communities of business owners ?
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GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS have to both enforce rules and address changing community needs.
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What are ways that the city can co-create with new business owners ?
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CONSULTANTS and SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONS are liaisons and interpreters.
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How could all the different types of consultants work together to provide services?
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Descriptive relationships
Optional relationships
Quotes
“ I didn’t realize that you could go online and just incorporate at the beginning. I was so not savvy. I wish I wouldn’t have used LegalZoom in retrospect." - Business Owner
“ Everyone who is serving food has the same regulations applied to everyone. We don’t want people to get sick. The City gets blamed for this issue."- Government Official
“ ... the point is that a lot of folks won’t be able to navigate that if they’re starting their business on their own “ — Entrepreneurship Consultant
“ ...there are no permits for street sellers, because the procedure doesn’t exist as the old rules don’t apply, because there is a proposal for new rules. And we’re still stuck in limbo. “ — Advocacy Consultant
Actionable principles
We collect insights from interviews with different stakeholder group and cluster them based on different problem aspects. According to these insights, we generate actionable design principles for designers to explore possible areas of intervention, or facilitate conversations between stakeholders for alignment and improvement.
Dynamic network + Co-production+ Culturally cool
Takeaways
Business owners should be proactive to build network with peers, governments, associations,
Documenting a process is often an easy way for entrepreneurs to show that they are working to become licensed.
Government should improve internal alignment.
Government representatives should have equally knowledge about the law.
Strive for equal enforcement of the law. There is a gap between “legal documents and what is implemented in the world.”
Cultural differences are reflected in the legislation of regional areas. Consultants should be cognizant of this with empathetic mindset.
Entrepreneurs are experts in creating “the new.” Find ways to capture this information.
Education programs within communities are essential to create leaders of entrepreneurs.
Prototyping
Current situation:
Through our secondary research and field work, we discovered that the licensing process for food vendors was often quite difficult to navigate. The following areas stood out:
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Information is discrete and decentralized
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It is hard to keep pace with changing information
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Text is linear and hard to distinguish
Business Owners' 1st step
Our proposal 1: License Decision Tree
This is where I spent most of my time on. We want to create a
FOOD LICENSE DECISION TREE to help business owners simplify decision making process, clarify business vision and figure out the licenses they need for their types of business in Chicago. So entrepreneurs won't bear with too much uncertainty at the beginning.
Entrepreneurs need to deal with multiple licenses and need to carefully plan for the time span and sequence of application. To clarify the complex process, we experiment with different chart and go by different categories. We organized the government's regulation information from entrepreneurs' perspective, reduce the difficulty of understanding by asking questions like "What do you sell?""To whom do you sell?", instead of left entrepreneurs with a bunch of complex category like "Mobile food dispenser license" "Cottage food registration".
Our business entrepreneurs (most people are from Mexico) who presented to our final presentation give positive feedback to it.
-"By looking at this, we figure out where we are and what we might need to do next. It is every helpful for us to plan for our business with these information in hand."
-"It is a clearly organized overview of the whole process. Very easy to understand!"
After figuring out which license you need...
Our proposal 2: Process Map
Codifying processes and actions
Any visual standards need to be: clear, familiar, and repeatable across multiple agencies, licenses and permissions. So that aforementioned challenges can be addressed in a consistent and understandable way.
These are the visual building blocks... that create a family of maps to help navigate complex process
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