The time for Environment-Centered Design has come
In times of Covid-19 taking its toll on almost every industry on this planet, we all must finally embrace the lesson on what’s at risk if we continue to overstep Earth’s environmental boundaries. Or, to use terms originating from human-centered design: what’s at risk for all living beings if we, humans, continue not to address Earth’s needs, limitations and preferences in the process of the design and delivery of products and services that we help to build. It’s high time to level up and welcome a new design framework: environment-centered design.
What is environment-centered design and how can you start practicing it? In my view it’s the next iteration of the well-known human-centered design framework and is better fitted for the environmental, social and technological context in which we live.
Being anthropocentric-by-design, human-centered design overlooks the incorporation of environmental or non-human factors into the design/management process. Environment-centered design aims to fill that void and to add this missing, yet important piece, to the design process. If I were to build a definition of environment-centered design, it would sound more or less like this:
Environment-centered design is an approach to product or service development that aims to make products or services environmentally, socially and economically sustainable by focusing on the needs, limitations and preferences of target human audience and non-human strategic stakeholders. It involves knowledge and design techniques developed at the intersection of human-centered design, usability, ecology, and sustainability science.
Consider that: for the past couple of weeks SARS-CoV-2 has been the most important non-human stakeholder of every business and public service around the world. Despite it is not a human, not even a living being, it still acts as a prominent actant of our natural, social and business environments.
Whether you work (or used to work, sorry) for an NGO, the local government, a startup, or a global enterprise, you are definitely being affected by this tiny virus one way or another. It’s everywhere. It’s shutting some businesses down and leaving others struggling to survive. It has the power to unemploy millions of people and to force millions of others to work tirelessly nonstop.
Have you ever considered any virus as an essential stakeholder of a product or a service that you helped to build? Have you ever thought about a deforestation, species extinction or an ocean pollution in the same manner? Probably not. Let me try to guess why:
a) Because you design for humans, not for non-human creatures. Forests and coral reefs will not buy the software that you’re building, right?
b) Because your mentor, manager or employer did not ask you to search for data on how rising global sea levels (you can put any environmental threat here) can affect the success of the service that you develop.
c) Because as a designer you were not presented or did not come up yourself with tools that would make you consider non-human stakeholders as valid stakeholders.
So which answer is right in your case? For the majority of us, it will be all of them. When designing and building business the “human-centered” way, we barely ever focus on what our natural ecosystems needs, wants or desire. I am certain we will not be able to continue business-as-usual once Covid-19 will be over. In fact, will it ever be over? Or is it simply one of the many incarnations of the VUCA times that are yet to come?
You may be wondering how to survive in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (“VUCA”) times as a business or a service provider. One of the paths you should consider is to start perceiving non-human actants as valid stakeholders of your practice. If the example of SARS-CoV-2 is not enough to see how non-human parts of the environment that we are dependent on shape our social, business and economic surroundings, there are more:
- Rising sea levels threaten the habitat of millions of people living in coastal countries (which may cause mass migrations to other countries);
- Serious droughts in central European countries (including my home country, Poland) affect the livelihood and the crop yields of farmers who feed the entire nation and export their products abroad;
- Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest (and other rainforests) impacts the global air circulation and the amount of oxygen being produced into the atmosphere (wait, what human and non-human animals use to breath?).
I guess you see the pattern now. All human activity in the Anthropocene era — whether small or large scale, happening in a digital or physical environment — is affecting our biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. I am convinced that by changing the way we design, develop and distribute our products and services, we can at least minimise the devastating effects of our human activity. The best-case scenario is that we can contribute to seeing this planet thrive again. Environment-centered design is here to help us achieve that. However, it all starts with a shift in mindset.
How do you start working within an environment-centered design framework?
For starters, you need to set aside all of the ideological or religious beliefs and convictions that were shaping the choices in your professional designer life until now. Instead, you need to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution (meaning: non-ideological and non-religious):
- CLIMATE CHANGE: “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver” (statement on climate change from 18 scientific associations);
- BIODIVERSITY LOSS: “As with climate change, humans are the main culprit in biodiversity loss. People have converted somewhere in the region of 50% of Earth’s surface for human activities, and researchers warn that the resulting loss of animal and plant species is leading towards a mass extinction” (statement on biodiversity loss based on the work of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES, a lesser known twin sister of IPCC);
- ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION: Land and soil, water, air and other types of human-driven pollution are causing severe health problems in newborns and adults human beings, as well as driving the climate change and biodiversity loss than can lead to irreversible damage in complex ecosystems and supply chains across the globe (You can learn about the consequences of humans polluting our environments HERE, HERE or HERE).
Secondly, you need to be sure you want to survive in VUCA times as a business developer who makes sustainable products and services (where “business developer” is used here as an umbrella term encompassing all business roles: business owner, CEO, designer, manager, and so on).
Finally, you can start using environment-centered design tools to put your freshly adopted science-driven and fact-based business mindset into practice. You do that by addressing the needs, limitations and preferences of your human and non-human stakeholders evenly, during your design and product development process. I’m here to propose the tools you can use to achieve that.
In the following articles I will present the environmentally-upgraded versions of some well known human-centered design tools, as well as try to create some new tools. I am going to start with Actant Mapping Canvas and Non-human Persona. Stay tuned!
