Design as facilitation: Weaving sustainable impact, innovation and collaboration.
In the book Factfulness, Hans Rosling shines a light on the current condition of the world — how it’s getting better, not worse. It’s still bad but it’s better than it was many years ago. He (or rather the facts) speak for issues like child mortality and gender inequality; the only issue stated to be getting progressively worse is global warming and climate change.
Even though some of these issues are getting better with time, with a population of our scale, all of them warrant our attention.
When I look at my field of work as a service designer and researcher, I feel a natural sense of responsibility. Facilitating design, conversations and creative action always has a butterfly effect, so what butterfly effect has my work been creating? In the past, I have worked on many projects across India and the Netherlands in the fields of healthcare and education. I have always made it a point to be naturally inclusive in the work I do, view myself as a facilitator, take a bottom-up approach and practice mindfulness toward the tangible/intangible artefacts produced and the subsequent impact they might have on the environment — both socially and environmentally since social action is intertwined with environmental action.
This inspired reflections within me as to what more I can do, what gaps exist in my knowledge and who really has the power? Who are the heavy hitters whose actions affect the world most? And what role does creativity, design and innovation play in this? Around the same time, I stumbled across Impact Hub Amsterdam. Impact Hub Amsterdam is part of the global Impact Hub network of 17,000 entrepreneurs and innovators in 102+ locations worldwide in 50+ countries spanning five continents. They facilitate collaboration by connecting entrepreneurs and innovators to each other, as well as to large organisations, investors and the public sector.
If I connect the dots between the work of Impact Hub and my work as a service designer, I see golden opportunities for exploration regarding how I define myself as a ‘service designer and researcher’, what it could mean, and perhaps even what it should mean within the context of our melting ice caps.
Currently part of the innovation sourcing team at Impact Hub Amsterdam, I support my colleagues with brainstorming and sourcing impact innovations for a diverse clientele, ranging from omnichannel packaging for IKEA to waste management for Renewi. I have also had the pleasure of applying service blueprints and customer journey maps within these projects in order to get a deeper, systemic view of issues.
Facilitating this connection between organisations that want to impact-innovate and startups that are impact-innovating creates new pathways for change. Furthermore, my knowledge about circular-economy related product and service offerings in the current market and the B2B collaborations and conversations that can be fostered has increased exponentially.
Using my lens as a designer, I am observing where I can extend design methods/tools beyond the realm of traditional design teams and agencies. I notice that there is not always a need to design something new, we can also design meaningful connections between organisations — organisations who, if mindful about their impact, can very quickly accelerate a better world.
Herein we can start viewing innovation not only as creating something new but also as transformation — meaning changing what already exists.
When we aim for sustainability from a systemic perspective, we are trying to sustain the pattern that connects and strengthens the whole system. Sustainability is first and foremost about systemic health and resilience at different scales, from local, to regional and global. A regenerative culture will emerge out of finding and living new ways of relating to self, community and to life as a whole. At the core of creating regenerative cultures is an invitation to live the questions together. (Wahl, 2017)
Currently, I am undergoing a transformation of self as related to my design practice and sustainability knowledge — a cultural shift of sorts. These deeply impact-related ways of doing are being embedded into me and I look forward to applying them in my future roles.
I would also like to develop a framework inspired by my learnings — a framework related to service design and impact that the larger design community can be inspired by. This is still somewhat ambiguous to me but as I have more moments of reflection, I hope to further solidify my ideas.
In the meanwhile, I’m happy to chat about these topics and collaborate with interested folks. As Margaret J. Wheatley so eloquently puts it, there is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. 🌳
