Sustainable Practices in Design
Design Management and Sustainability
During this course, we have discovered that design management methods and sustainability models are very similar. Both are based in systemic thinking and a holistic approach to problems. This is because both emerge from the urgency of changing the way society develops. “The Industrial Age has brought extraordinary improvements in public education, human rights, and material wellbeing, but it has also destroyed ecosystems, swallowed up traditional cultures that had thrived for centuries, and created a way of life that cannot continue for much longer” (Peter Senge, 2008). We are shifting towards an era where the only way to bring development to everyone and guarantee a safe future is to start a truly sustainable way of living. Business models need to incorporate systemic thinking and “invest seriously and immediately in building a regenerative economy and society that mimics nature as fully as possible” (Peter Senge, 2008).
Sustainable Practices in the City of Savannah
The Sustainability Assessment
At the beginning of the course, we were given the Sustainability Assessment from the Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability (OESS). The Sustainability Assessment was a draft document that included a comprehensive overview of data about current and past sustainability metrics in the City of Savannah. The assessment is the result of almost two years of work and the contribution of SCAD sustainability students serving as interns within the Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability. This document helped our class to have a better understanding of the context in which our work will take place and to leverage this quantitative information towards a qualitative-based research study to understand the emotions, concerns and thoughts of those in the city department.
Our Mission
We will empower the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability (ESS) through building alignments and a shared vision for the different city departments so they can work together towards the goals of the 2016 ESS Sustainability Assessment.
Our Method
Case Studies
As a team, we began with a case study approach to understanding sustainability in city initiatives by looking to other cities for inspiration. The specific efforts and practices in each city are different and are influenced by the city’s history, culture, location and particular conditions. However, many of the issues they face align with one another and with the City of Savannah. Each case study city has made sustainability a priority and has developed practices that allow these initiatives to take place by working across city departments and with external organizations. In the case of the City of Savannah, this seems to be the most important initial step to a more sustainable, integrated practice and therefore our primary focus.
Interviews
As design management students, we have conducted primary interviews in several classes, but the interviews for this project were unique in that the subjects were city officials. We were excited as a group to visit their offices and gain a better understanding of the City of Savannah.With the help of the Department of Environmental Services and Sustainability, we were able to contact several department heads within the City of Savannah as interview subjects. Our goal in these interviews is to understand the mission and methods of each city department so that we may find areas of convergence and opportunity for sustainable driven departmental collaboration.
Filtered Affinitization
After gathering all of our interview data, we developed a more unique and effective method of analyzing our interview data as a class. In design management and related disciplines, we use the process of affinitization to analyze and group data points in order to discover patterns that generate insights. While this method is largely effective for both designers and researchers, we wanted to filter the affinitization process through frameworks in order to guide the insights and maintain the nuances and integrity of each individual interview. The two primary frameworks we used were the Systems Map and the Empathy Map.
Systems Map
We created a system map to understand our perceptions of the relationships between the departments interviewed. While system maps can represent multiple scales, our scale was the City of Savannah with the hubs of interaction being the departments themselves. This is a working map, rather than a static artifact, that will continue to evolve and grow as we work with the departments to learn more about their dynamics.
Empathy Map
The empathy map embodies the notion of empathy through six sections. These sections relate to the senses: think & feel, see, hear, say & do, pains, and gains. Applying the empathy map method to departments is a method of personification; while the empathy map is traditionally used for human personas, we can see that organizations, businesses, and groups can be successfully used within this framework. Additionally, the systems map and empathy work together to inform and advise one another; while the empathy map provides insights relating to unique perspectives, departmental vision, and needs or concerns, the system map relates this qualitative data back to the larger system as a whole that is the city government.
Our Pilot Opportunity
Although we thought of several different types of concept deliverables, between our insights and our feedback from the ESS, we decided to pursue workshop design as our primary opportunity. As designers, we not only design products and services, but also work to design the ways in which teams and stakeholders interact with one another. In design management, we have had several classes in which we have been tasked with designing workshops for clients and stakeholders with the intent of helping them solve specific problems or needs. In the case of this project, we were informed about workshops that are currently held between the different City of Savannah departments and felt that we could infuse our research findings and insights into their future workshops. However, simply passing along these insights is not enough to ensure the success of meetings. Therefore, we created a 3-tier plan to help the ESS facilitate productive, forward-thinking workshops that foster sustainability through collaboration and mutually beneficial projects.
Adressing the Mission
We have addressed our mission with our pilot opportunity by empowering the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability with workshop and facilitation tools in order
to better align goals and mutually beneficial projects with other departments. These goals and achievements between departments, not matter how small, will add together towards achieving the 2016 ESS Sustainability Assessment in addition to improve the relations between city departments overall.
Our Conclusion
One of our strongest skills as design managers is facilitating collaboration, and that was exactly the main objective of our work with the ESS. We helped them to visualize how the city departments are currently connected and how they would like to be working together in the future. We also provided them with tools to further nurture those relationships, and had the opportunity to test our strategies with outstanding results: a trustworthy environment of collaborative work where every participant was committed to keep being actively engaged in future projects. We hope this ‘pass-it-on’ provides the ESS and other city departments with inspiration and motivation to keep connecting towards the vision of a sustainable Savannah.
