Discuss and learn about the progress design is making on building capacity and taking responsibility for its impact on the environment.

Last year's panel "How to make sustainability service design's business?" started a much needed conversation on the practicalities of service designers taking action on the environmental sustainability agenda. This panel is set to become an annual fixture for the Service Design Fringe Festival, creating a space to discuss the progress design is making on building capacity and taking responsibility for its impact on the environment.

The consequences of COVID-19 on public health and the economy could have overshadowed the challenges faced by the environment, such as biodiversity loss, part of the underlying cause of the pandemic. However, sustainability is still firmly on the agenda.

• Where does design fit into all of this?

• What can we do to embed sustainability in everything we do and still work successfully with clients?

• What more should design to do to demonstrate its commitment to the environmental agenda?

• How might our skills and tools change when the design is life-centered?

Prep

Please, before you join the discussion plan a short reading session. We will send you a blog post to prep you for this event.

Agenda

10:00 - 11:00 Panel discussion

11: 00 - 11:30 Q&A

11:30 - 12:00 Break

12:00 - 13:00 Showcases and lightning talks introduced by Chrissy Levett (Creative Conscience)

Speakers

Rob Maslin

In 2019 Rob organised and sat on the panel as an expert on using human-centred-design (and increasingly life-centred-design) to tackle environmental sustainability and its mutually inclusive relationship social impact. Rob’s career has seen him work in product and packaging and for the last eight years of service design, across a range of challenges such as the circular economy, climate change, and the social impacts of neurodiversity.

In his current position at the Satellite Applications Catapult, he leads design projects with the Agriculture value stream to tackle some of the biggest global challenges, such as climate resilience of farmers in emerging economies and deforestation in South America. Rob also holds a position as Design Specialist with the Design Council, where he initiated work to support the environmental capability building of the design industry.

Sarah Mann

As a Head of Programmes for the Growth and Innovation Team she oversees strategy and delivery of our Design in the Public Sector and Public Service Innovation programmes. All of the programmes aim to put the needs of people at the heart of products and processes; addressing some of the toughest challenges which face our society.

Elisabeth Graf

With experience in the fields of service design, project delivery and organisational development she is currently exploring the vast area of sustainability & design to craft engaging service experiences that are better for people and planet. Lilli is also part of Operation Green Fist, a pragmatic internal project with the ambition to incorporate sustainability into everything Idean do as an agency.

Ahsan Khan

Co-Founder of Climate Labs, a multidisciplinary design consultancy that focuses on design for sustainability.

Ahsan is responsible for discovering, strategising and innovating digital products and services for the European finance and energy sector. Supporting and running Design Sprints with a focus on sustainability and behavioural insights for the Climate Crisis.

He also consults in the voluntary and charity sector for Words of Colour and IAAAE focusing on design for good, creating real value through strategic solutions for positive impact.

Chris Sherwin

Director at world class Sustainable Innovation and Design consultancy (Reboot Innovation). He has 25 years of experience in helping create world-first and worlds greenest projects for world-leading organisations.

Chris still believes we can design a better, more sustainable world together!

Learn from three different perspectives about how to take part in service design, and different ways to become a designer.

The service design industry is too homogeneous. Currently, the people who work in service design do not represent the plethora of understanding and experiences needed in order to design for an equitable society. We are clearer in defining what service design is, and the tools and approaches needed, but we’re still very far from having an industry that is representative of society. To change this we need to craft new pathways in so that everyone can design.

Each of our panelists represent a different way into the industry with unique experiences. The aim of this discussion is to exemplify these pathways to inspire others and break down long-held ideas of who can become a designer.

Speakers

Beverly Benjamin

Beverley successfully retrained post retirement and now work as a design researcher at COMUZI.

Working on projects commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, Southwark Council, Ada Lovelace Institute and DotEveryone, Beverley’s work has contributed to a call for change in industries such as, Digital Health, AI and the Gig Economy.

Also as an Educational Specialist, Beverley brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from her time in the Education sector. Recently working with M&C Saatchi Saturday School team on their Mentoring Black Businesses programme writing the documentation for CPD accreditation, Beverley is an individual committed to social change.

Daniel Tuitt

Daniel is a corporate misfit, delightful dyslexic and a catalyst for change for challenges people face across the real world. As a senior service and business designer, he facilitates complex challenges and designs with evidence. For the last 8 years, he has inspired large organisations, social enterprises and start-ups to think differently such as Nike, Lego, VISA, British Gas, OpenIDEO and many more.

He writes, talks, lives and inspires all things creative. His expertise lies in the cross-section of systems thinking, human-centered design, business models, ecosystems and co-innovation. He is a proud failed model, athlete and conformist!

Mia Peters

Mia is the Digital Service Design Manager for the London Borough of Southwark. She tumbled head-first into the wonderful world of service design from a background in marketing, customer experience and strategy in the private and public sectors. She is passionate about delivering better outcomes for local residents and businesses by designing services that are easy to use and do the job they are meant to. She is committed to helping colleagues understand user research and design thinking by leading from the coal face and delivering results.

Find out about three organisations who are working to up-skill underrepresented people in the design industry and break down hierarchies.

In order to live in a more just society, we need to increase representation in the design industry. This is in order to design unique experiences suitable for the billions of people on our planet. Only by proactively upskilling people to design, and breaking down structural barriers can this be done.

Each of our panellist brings with them a wealth of knowledge in upskilling underrepresented people with skills to design and will share how they are doing this. The aim of this is so that we as students, designers and leaders can reflect and take positive action to provide more opportunities ourselves that are relevant to our context.

Speakers

Annette Joseph

Diverse & Equal (D&E) Founder, Annette Joseph, is an award winning Agile Coach/Delivery Manager. As Chair of Co-op’s BAME colleague network, Annette was instrumental in affecting lasting change in the organisation. In D&E, she marries her varied experiences -- in tech and behaviour dynamics with equality, diversity and inclusion.

Vimla Appadoo

Vimla is the Culture Director at Honey Badger and the Head of Experience at Culture Shift. She is an international speaker and advocates for changing the way businesses think: using technology, design and culture to align profit and purpose. She works across large scale organisations, small businesses and scaling startups, bridging the gap between the public and private sector.

Zaire Allen

Zaire is a professional UX designer who set up Love Circular. Love Circular drastically improves accessibility to design by training from zero experience to Junior level UX/UI Designer in 90 days. Their main focal point is to support under-represented people into the world of design. Current UX/UI courses price people out. The course is tailored to get people a foot through the door. They’re currently on their second cohort and have partnered with Kwanda to offer a handful of scholarships.

Space is at a premium: so often it seems other drivers take precedence over people- and planet-centred values. How can design help?

This panel is for insights and inspiration into creating the homes and neighbourhoods we want to inhabit.

This should start with you and I: as residents, citizens and custodians of our built and lived environments, and the users of services and infrastructures. But how do we (as ‘users’, or designers, of place) get a sense of agency and control? The seeming complexity of development projects and the divergence of interests between stakeholders and 'the public' makes it challenging to create places that work for everyone.

Design needs to activate better, fairer and more sustainable models of housing and living, here are some examples:

Participatory Cities is building the largest prototype of its kind: building new networks of friendships, ideas and activities. Find out more about the Every One Every Day initiative, launched in 2017 and which has been growing a Participatory Ecosystem, where neighbours and local organisations cook, grow, learn, make, recycle, play and build together. Nina Timmers, Co-Production Lab Director, will share highlights, and also talk about the programme Tomorrow Today Streets.

Bristol Housing Festival is re-imagining better ways to live in our cities. Join Jez Sweetland, Project Director, to see how this five-year project is taking on the national housing crisis, climate and sustainability issues, and supporting communities. Significantly, the festival brings together what might seem quite separate worlds: hosting conversations between local authorities, government and suppliers, acting as incubator and piloting scheme, creating conditions to prototype new ideas and making it safe to ‘go first’.

Learn from Liam Dargan: who before becoming Service Designer at the Connected Places Catapult, launched the award-winning project Heart of Darwen, an initiative which turned the demolition of one the town’s markets into an opportunity for idea generation, collaboration and debate around the future of the town centre and market.

Our chair is Payal Wadhwa, Service Design Principal at Idean and Co-founder of PlaceLabs, cross-pollinating perspectives on placemaking, better cities and public spaces.

Life-centred design: skills for an uncertain future

“How might our skills change when design is not human-centred but life-centered?”, asks Rob Maslin for SDFF 2020: in other words, considering both people and planet. Equity lies at the heart of this question. I ask what parallels and lessons we might draw from three areas of profound challenge and risk – climate change, coronavirus, and my own experience of cancer – to help us navigate uncertainty and design a better and more just future.

Tamsin Edwards is specialising in quantifying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet contributions to sea-level rise.

She is a Lead Author of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (to be published in 2021) and a Contributing Author to the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019).

Tamsin regularly advises the UK Government on sea-level rise, climate science and science communication, and provides expert comment to international media and business. She is an award-winning communicator, including through Twitter (@flimsin), her blog for the Public Library of Science, PLoS (All Models Are Wrong) and articles for the Guardian.

She is also the director of the MSc Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy.

Tamsin regularly appears on various news outlets as an expert commentator for climate-related news stories, included BBC News at 10, ITV News, BBC R4 Today Programme.