A more human-centred approach to sustainability.

Izzy Fenwick / Sustainability Design Principal

For many years DNA has worked with organisations to improve their customer or digital experience and increase the value of the products and services they deliver.

We have most often worked with large, complex organisations trying to improve customer experience in critical interactions and at scale. For the most part, alongside enhancing internal systems and lowering the cost to serve, this has been focussed on designing experiences that result in better access to services, improved understanding of products or enabling better outcomes for customers.

When it comes to the impact on our environment, we have seen the mounting evidence that science has presented to us. While we have taken steps to offset our impact – individually, as teams and as a business, we have realised that individual efforts are not going to alter our current trajectory fundamentally.

Science has been good at highlighting the data and the impact of our collective actions on our water, soil, climate and air. It has not been so good at helping humans understand how to fix the problems they have caused.

We believe that a more human-centred approach will enable the more effective design and implementation of the solutions needed to fix these often complex problems.

With this thinking in mind, we saw an opportunity to leverage the same human-centred design methods, activities and programmes we deliver every day to understand the human needs and behaviours. These could contribute to solving these sustainability challenges and deliver on the opportunities to make improvements at scale.

Having significant relationships and access to leaders in many of New Zealand’s important businesses and government agencies, we felt that we could offer a fresh perspective and capability to the problems they face. We could ensure sustainability is factored in when we are designing new service offerings and experiences with them.

Sustainability Design is a new practice area we have formed to design strategy, structures, systems, human experiences and digital experiences that will help businesses improve and deliver on their sustainability goals.

Combining expert domain knowledge with our established human-centred design capability, we are looking to help organisations’ identify commercially appropriate sustainability opportunities, to optimise existing programmes and swiftly meet the changing demands of customers, teams and partners.

Our teams can facilitate and direct the work needed to uncover the capability, culture and structure required to help future-proof your efforts, achieve your goals and reduce the impact on our natural resources. We will also help identify the scale of change needed, dependencies and contributors, opportunities and risks.

Straight-forward programmes of work will develop strategies to leverage the enablers and minimise the blockers in your current systems. We will be able to test and validate new ways of working, design frameworks, strategies and build these into systems, plans and solutions.

We are privileged to partner with two of New Zealand’s leading organisations supporting improved sustainable outcomes. The Aotearoa Circle and the Sustainable Business Network. With both partners, we have been working to deliver research-based experience insights. These insights are being used to inform a better understanding of the change needed to accelerate sustainable development in line with their goals.

If you want to know more about our Sustainability Design practice, then drop me a line.

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Photo by Tobias Keller on Unsplash