SDGC24: How designers can drive sustainability and create impact

The 2024 Service Design Global Conference held in Helsinki centred on designing for impact, with a strong focus on achieving practical, forward-looking results through service design. Nine Nitorean designers attended to gain inspiration, learn, and connect with global peers locally.

In this article series, we cover inspiring takeaways from the Service Design Global Conference 2024. Don’t forget to read part 1 on the importance of accessible design, and part 3 about complexity science.

Sustainability is something we cannot ignore, and designers have a golden opportunity to create and facilitate concrete impact. From designing against capitalism to scaling circular economy, read on to discover three great angles on sustainability.

Alessandra Molderings-Enriconi: Agents of systemic change

Alessandra Molderings-Enriconi works as an Associate Service Design Director at Denkwerk, where she leads a multi-talented team of experience and service designers. She is based in Cologne, Germany and works on projects related to sustainable design and cross-cultural user research, and is driving digital innovation in companies of all sizes.

Her talk focused on our role as agents of systemic change and emphasised the importance of being intentional about it. Bringing a systemic perspective to our projects can help us reshape business strategies, promote change at scale, and measure how our solutions impact – or reinforce – the larger systems around us.

Alessandra presented a case of a food and product delivery service that seems like a great business concept at a glance. Still, carefully viewing the whole ecosystem reveals big sustainability issues. Alessandra highlighted the less commonly discussed aspects of ecosystems that are often overlooked in business case studies.

The delivery service ended up causing unforeseen social issues, including declining restaurant culture, the closing of traditional stores, and numerous traffic accidents near a new warehouse. No one anticipated these problems in the original business plan. Alessandra's visualisation demonstrates the potential side effects of designing with a narrow focus on system purpose and profitability. 

She argues that designing software for sustainability is a challenge that can profoundly change the role of software engineering in society. Software engineers (including designers) are responsible for considering the long-term consequences of their software, irrespective of the system's primary purpose. Instead of pointing that responsibility towards the business side, we all need to understand potential impacts and share the responsibility.

As Alessandra presents, considering sustainability and ecosystem thinking together is very important.   

Anna Kholina: Design against capitalism

Anna Kholina is a Design Director and Service Designer, who works in the intersection of digitalisation, strategy and sustainability at Futurice, Helsinki. She has also recently completed her doctoral studies at Aalto University, where she wrote her thesis on urban design and suburban transformation.

I found Anna's talk deeply resonating as she addressed the critical question of why greater environmental progress remains elusive. Despite numerous organisations and millions of well-meaning individuals advocating for a better world, sustainability efforts often remain local and limited in scale. She illuminated the difficulties in achieving broader, impactful changes. 

Anna shared her experiences in sustainability projects, emphasising the challenge that while initial hypotheses for system changes are promising, projects continually yield the same outcome: they are not profitable.

She emphasised that under the current capitalistic economic system, doing business as usual is more efficient, easier and less expensive. The efforts to implement sustainable practices frequently revert to traditional capitalist foundations.

She argues that we should also understand capitalism better. Now, we take it as given; it is what it is. But it doesn't have to be.

If we, as designers, know how to create physical and digital environments that are not conducive to this, we can help contain capitalism and make space for alternative realities. Anna gave a very powerful talk on how we're more than passive consumers. She left us with a mission to recognise and cultivate the revolutionary potential of the everyday!

Gaelle Le Gelard: The challenges to scale the circular economy and how service design can help

Gaelle le Gelard is a circular service designer who supports companies in their circular economy journey. Gaelle emphasised the importance of challenging the prevailing market dynamics and exploring innovative ways to collaborate across industries.

She highlighted that while many aim to act responsibly, the financial incentives often favour less sustainable practices, a challenge rooted in capitalistic frameworks. By adopting speculative design, we can envision and prototype solutions that serve broader, long-term societal needs rather than immediate market demands.

Gaelle said that companies are not used to collaborating with their direct competitors. Doing so, however, could create more distributed supply chains and, for example, more efficient repair or reuse services that could replace the need for single-use disposable products. These roadblocks could be tackled with tools, skills, and mindsets that service designers use daily.

In addition to exploring speculative design, she encouraged us to familiarise ourselves with the concept of planetary boundaries. This framework defines nine environmental limits where humanity can sustainably develop and thrive for future generations.

Remember to tune into our next article inspired by the Service Design Global Conference 2024, where we cover complexity and systems with Jennifer Briselli.

Build a sustainable digital future

All the three talks provided fresh point-of-views that should be on every leader’s agenda, shaping behaviours by incorporating sustainability into the product vision, strategy and design to drive competitive advantage and create lasting positive impacts.

At Nitor, we are ready to demonstrate how sustainability creates value beyond financial returns, providing a competitive edge through innovative practices that align with customer needs while reducing software-related impacts on society and the environment.

Let us help you transform your product discovery process by shifting behaviours to consider more than just end-user, business, and technology needs. We ensure that your solutions deliver comprehensive and sustainable value by addressing impacts, opportunities, and risks from the perspectives of individuals, society, and the environment. 

Are you interested in creating an impact through design? Read more about our design services.