This is a wiki post - anyone can edit it and add links, extra text, and resources. Don’t be shy!
The graphic recording from the day, lovingly crafted by Anja Reise
These were key challenges listed in the workshop:
1. Lack of tangible incentive to change
Right now, even if there is an incentive to do something, it’s not tangible, and more urgent incentives frequently take precedence.
2. Lack of transparency - greenwash vs true sustainability
Many of us don’t know how to assess if actions an organisation taking (or indeed stuff we might do) are meaningful, or if they amount to greenwash. We don’t know if there things we can measure, or if we even should be trying to measure them. If we have agreed to measure something, having trustworth numbers is also a a challenge.
3. It’s difficult to see the impact of your decisions
the feedback loop is often very slow, and even in places where people try to track the environmental impact of what they do, because reporting might happen yearly, it’s difficult to learn about what works and what doesn’t
4. Lack of knowledge of effectiveness
Even if you do accept that you can’t see the impact of something, many of us still have no idea what decisions have impact, and which ones don’t.
Links and resources
There’s some good work coming from Doteveryone and Further discussion on the limits of user centred design, for complex problems
Going from product design to service design
Deliberate one planet co-design of living spaces - with service design firm Holon in Barcelona:
Where service design ends and system change begins
And yet, if we look at the language, tools and practices that are commonly applied in the social and public sector, they are largely founded on a very different premise. More often than not, they reinforce an unhelpful ‘producer-consumer’ distinction. Some actors (organisations/experts) are seen to ‘produce’ (innovate, design, deliver) value, whereas others (‘beneficiaries’ or ‘users’) are seen to ‘consume’ it.
Resources for thinking more widely than user centred design
There’s some good writing from Design Dialogues, with links to some new tools, including a systems design toolkit to facilitate discussions. It’s free to download and in use in a number of larger organisations.
