Defining the problem statement

Following our individual research into topics of interest, everyone took turns pitching their ideas before we put it to a vote. Everyone had two votes - one of which could include their original idea - and the topic with the most number of votes at the end was Mental Health.

We explored this further by considering Five Whys behind mental health issues in cities and, after organising our thoughts into categories, found there were two clear front runners: Social Networks and Environment. This put us in a good position to then home in on our problem statement.

We initially tried to combine both topics with a question around how the environment could promote positive social networks. This led to an interesting discussion comparing our categories of environment and overstimulation: considering not only physical aspects such as pollution, noise and crowds, but also social aspects such as poverty and discrimination based on gender, race and sex. In the end though it made sense to combine both under a single Environment category.

Following the example in this video from IDEO, we then started to rephrase our question as a How Might We statement:

We started with How might a smart city promote positive social relationships to improve mental wellbeing? however this proved less than ideal as we quickly realised we needed to further define positive social relationships and also the concept of mental well being.

While we were initially keen to stay away from the term social network due to its predominantly digital associations (i.e. Facebook), this felt like a more concrete definition. We also changed the word positive to meaningful to give a sense of the lack of connection people can feel from superficial relationships, particularly in big cities. Lastly, we narrowed our focus of mental wellbeing to mental resilience which we all felt was more specific and representative of the conversations we had had around strong connections helping people recognise and overcome problems.

Our final problem statement therefore is:

How might a smart city promote meaningful social networks to improve mental resilience?

We are all happy with this as it's still wide enough to encompass a variety of smart city technologies and potential use cases, while also being specific enough to provoke the generation of potential solutions and ideas. We expect our problem statement will only refine further as we narrow in on a potential solution.