How to design for the planet… even if you’re not a designer

Unless design is part of your job title, you probably don’t think of yourself as a designer. But if there’s even the smallest bit of creativity in your role – whether that’s building spreadsheets or making policies more effective – then design is involved.

Designing sustainable business
Graeme isn’t a designer in the traditional sense. But ever since he realised that he approaches problems in his work in a very similar way to the design community, he’s looked for new ways to apply lessons from design into his own work. And in turn, he knows the design community can benefit from his expertise too.

On the Eco-I programme (run by six universities including Manchester Metropolitan University, and part funded by the European Regional Development Fund), business owners and managers can put these ideas into practice. By thinking more like a designer, you can develop greener products, create a new business model, and reduce the impact of your current operations.

Moving beyond empathy
One example of a design approach that Graeme finds valuable is empathy. It’s a key concept in design. You need to think about your end users and other stakeholders  – what they need, how they’ll use the product, how it will benefit them. But Graeme argues that this approach doesn’t go far enough.

What if we could extend empathy to encompass the whole planet and the wider communities who might be impacted by business activity? Thinking more systemically means we won’t just develop the best solution for an individual, but something that takes into account people on the other side of the world in years to come.

Learning from a new movement in design
Sustainability is becoming a top priority for the design industry. Last year, the UK Design Council launched their Design for Planet movement. And more recently a group of designers created the Design Declares campaign to help designers design in a manner that is compatible with the requirements of the climate emergency.

Design Declares sets out eight acts of emergency, from “1) Sound the alarm”, to “8) Amplify voices for change”. Graeme highlights goal three, “Bring clients with us”, as particularly key. Whether you’re in design or a completely different industry, it’s important to engage with clients and stakeholders about why these issues are important. If you include sustainability in every project, even when it’s not possible to be carbon neutral, you’ll start to make real progress. You’ll take others with you and ensure that solutions to business problems are not just sustainable because they fit the initial problem brief, but because sustainability is at the very core of the process of understanding a problem.

Every crisis is an opportunity
Climate change is usually presented as a crisis. We see natural disasters on the news and keep hearing about governments and corporations who never seem to do quite enough. And although there’s no doubt it’s a serious challenge, it also presents a big opportunity for businesses to reframe who they are and what they do.

The incremental approach to sustainability is failing. Now is the perfect time to find a radically new way of doing business. Few organisations ever reach 100 years old because they simply can’t adapt to big shifts in society – even the most successful businesses today won’t survive if they can’t adapt to the future.

Climate change is an emergency. And emergencies bring about innovation. So take this chance to tap into new markets and think about your place in a changing world.

This is the goal of the Eco-Innovation North West programme. It helps businesses understand the climate emergency and put it into the context of their own operations. Participants create aspirational visions of what a sustainable society might look like and ideate the role of their businesses in that future world. They then learn to perform a systems map on their business to get a better understanding of what they do, and use this as the basis to identify all of the extended impacts that their current business model has on people and planet.

From this, businesses can prioritise impacts put them on a timeline of action. In essence businesses then have everything that lies at the heart of a sustainability strategy – one of the most important tools in moving towards net-zero.

“This sort of aspirational, long-term thinking” says Graeme, “is essential in the business journey to sustainability.”

 
Resources for business leaders to think more creatively about climate change
ECO-I North West – develop sustainable solutions for your business with help from six universities

PrintCity Network – a programme to help you develop new products and processes through sustainable 3D printing

How to start your net zero action plan – an article by Graeme explaining the steps you could take during the ECO-I programme