Mike McDermid is the program manager for Ocean Wise, a conservation program of the Vancouver Aquarium, which helps restaurants, retailers, and their customers make environmentally friendly seafood choices. Seafood offerings are rated according to recommendations and research findings by leading governmental and non-governmental institutions. Best choices are then highlighted on menus by the Ocean Wise logo, which now can be found at over 300 restaurant locations, 6 market locations, 2 culinary schools, and a university campus.
Why are so many restaurants and retailers reluctant to commit to sourcing sustainable seafood?
Many aren’t involved because it’s so difficult to find and understand the information—it’s too time consuming. They’re busy with their jobs as it is.
How do you work with your restaurant and retail partners?
We work individually with each partner to help them make sustainable seafood purchasing decisions. We do the homework, dig through the literature, and make recommendations of what are the best options. For restaurants, all they have to do is buy the recommended fish, make changes to the menus, and the program allows them to highlight efforts they are making. For the customer, it makes it easy to identify the best seafood options on the menu.
Read the rest of Mike’s interview by clicking on the pdf image at right.
While planning our workshop it was important to make sure that we invited the right mix of attendees. That included, of course, a healthy dose of industry experts. But it was also equally important to bring some new thinking that we hoped might spur innovation. To that end, we asked people from many different industry sectors to bring their creative thinking to the group. That included NGO leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs, and even actors.
Kristofor Lofgren is a young restaurateur who owns and runs Bamboo Sushi in Portland, Oregon, the only MSC certified sustainable sushi restaurant in the world.
This round of interviews with our workshop guests covers the ideas around information gathering and development. How it often begins with chaos, then develops into noticeable patterns, and, if you structure the process right, ultimately forms into ideas that can make a difference.
Watch some of the guests we invited discuss their reactions to the workshop, why they chose to participate, and their thoughts on group dynamics, the issues facing sustainable fishing, and making a difference.
Sometimes the best ideas come from just “playing around.” For the guests of our workshop, we designed a session that required them to, well, play, as they imagined new approaches to the sustainable fishing industry.
After eight months of research and synthesis, we decided we could use some outside perspective. So in August we invited 22 leading minds from various industries to attend a two-day workshop in Sausalito, CA. Damien walks through how he decided to design the event to keep them all engaged and productive.
Creating a problem statement helps you define what—and for whom—you’ll ultimately be designing. Damien and Cheryl explain what the problems statements ended up being for Future of Fish and how they’ll guide our design process. We thought it might help to provide the steps by which we arrived at ours.
When Patricia Majluf, a marine biologist in Lima, Peru discovered what was happening to the anchovy population there, she began a campaign that eventually changed the eating habits of the entire country.
When working on a system level problem, often made up of lots of different kinds of characteristics and attributes, it’s important to provide a problem area before refining insights further into an official problem statement.
