Planet Centric Design at Vincit
May – July 2019
Vincit’s Planet Centric Design offer is a way to transition how digital designs and development companies are working to include the changing demands of the consumers and the earth. At its core it’s a new offer to include the complexity that comes with creating new products and services and their impact on the environment.
The Challenge:
We are using up Earth’s resources fast with no backup plan to replenish them. Digitalisation is further exacerbating this problem. The upcoming consumers are asking for things to change, and we as designers and developers should help create that change. How can a digitalisation companies help their clients make new products/services but do so with regard for the environment and climate change.
My Role(s):
– Identifying stakeholders to involve in co-creation
– Developing discussion guides to gather insights from meetings
– Leveraging my engineering background to explore the IoT and technology work at Vincit and develop a process map to adapt PCD into
– Setting up and facilitating workshops with Vincit designers and developers to adapt design methodology
– Project managing this phase of PCD
– Co-creating the PCD website, tool-kit and final presentation with the team
Tools & Methods Used:
– Co-creation workshops using: systems mapping, process mapping, designer/developer journeys, ideation, brain-writing, circular design methods, and other adapted workshops
– Stakeholder interviews
– Squarespace + Adobe Creative Suite (Visual material)
The Process:
INVESTIGATION – IDEATION – IMPLEMENTATION
Under Vincit’s former Head of Design, Anton Schubert, our team worked to complete phase 1 of this project which was to understand how work like this could be structured into archetypes by researching the work Vincit and digital design companies do to fit into their way of working.
It involved a lot of user and customer research involving Vincit designers, developers, sales as well as external partners working in sustainability whom we had discussions and workshops with to gather insights into how exactly this new way of working would be implemented. An example was working with the Baltic Sea project to help them gain more insight specially from a systems thinking perspective.
I was involved in and facilitating some of these conversations and workshops, and one of the key insights we gathered was that developers and designers have yet to figure out how to “know the unknown”. We learnt that they need to involved the right experts in their work flow whether they are creating a new product or service, to give them the insight they need to learn about the environmental impacts that new product or service might have.
It is all about working across the silos that exist in digitalisation companies today, and we selected, refined and developed methodology that can help break those siloes and include all key stakeholders to move towards a planet-centric mindset and create products/services that do not leave a good impact on the planet instead of a carbon footprint.
The Outcome:
Project archetypes for PCD defined with a way of working adapted to Vincit current process, an initial toolkit of methods and canvases to use that are specially tailored to these projects, a website to open source the tools, marketing content to introduce important concepts of PCD, a project plan for the next phase of the project to launch into market in 2019.