Carnegie Mellon University
Alison Hu, Gary Tang, Sarah Xi, Emily Wu
Description
Nearly 40% of adult Americans are diagnosed with obesity, a preventable disease with links to heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. Globally and nationally, one in five children and adolescents are overweight. Obesity itself does not discriminate – the basic assumption is that anyone can experience it, largely due to their own choices. However, our map seeks to dissect the myriad of systemic issues that concentrate obesity likelihood at the lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. We aimed to depict the complex issues overshadowed by base assumptions.
Since obesity is preventable, it would seem natural to simply cut back on the calorie intake and perhaps hop on an elliptical. However, to approach this wicked problem without realizing the various effects of environmental, political, technological, and economic factors is to not see the issue at all.
Our team created the following map to draw out the causes and implications of the multi-faceted problem. This map uses categorical labels to develop a rich holistic picture of the problem, allowing us to understand obesity as a problem of many roots and within multiple hierarchies. Our group could create this visual guide that tells the story of obesity as we know it and granted us the knowledge to propose design intervention through Meadows’ leverage points.
Citation
Author. (2020). Article title. In Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD9) 2020 Symposium. India, October 9-17, 2020.
