Designing the Future We Need

The concept of sustainability embraces a wide range of opportunity areas, as the diversity of the United Nations’ Sustainable Devel- opment Goals (SDGs) demonstrates1. What role might service design play to address the SDGs and help steer the transformation to sustainable and resilient solutions? We explore how organisations might respond strategically to these challenges and opportunities through the practice of strategic foresight and design.

As catastrophic climate events spur dis- astrous human and planetary impacts, it’s Clear that current sustainability strategies aren’t meeting international sustainability targets2. Decades of minimal responsive- ness and incremental action have failed. As sustainability practitioners alarmed by the slow pace of change, we set out to gain a deeper understanding of why we are stuck in an incremental change process when bigger action is urgently needed. We started by exploring the interconnected nature of the sustain- ability challenge and what’s holding transformative change back (see Fig. 1). We also sought out new and emerging approaches and tools for defining and designing for sustainability. Of particular inspiration was Ezio Manzini, Professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic and a leading expert on sustainable design. His focus is on scenario building toward improved environmental and social outcomes. At Barcelona’s Elisava- Design School and Engineering, his work draws inspiration from the practice of collaborative food networks, describing sustainability at its core as ‘new ways of living and producing’. His work informs an emerging definition of sustainability which is rooted in “a multiplicity of initiatives performed by a variety of people, associations, enterprises, and local governments who, from different starting points, move towards similar ideas of wellbeing and production”4. Our resultant understanding of the macro-systems and current trends that are shaping the sustainability landscape, and emerging models of design for community resilience, provided the foundation for the design case study explored in the article.

TREC (Toronto Renewable Energy Co-op) is a non- profit leader in community-scale renewable energy and social finance in Toronto, Canada. TREC believes in a democratic, community-scaled vision of sustainability. In the past 15 years they have incubated community- financed solar and wind power cooperatives and a social finance service that helps organisations leverage community capital to support iconic local projects. Their approach is highly aligned with Manzini’s community- based solutions. In early 2020, TREC intended to conduct a strategic planning process to determine their next direction to propel the clean energy and sustainability sector. They were keen to try something new and different, despite the global pandemic, which introduced a new layer of complexity to planning. We jumped at the invitation to design a process for TREC that would inspire creativity and spur participants to make some big but relevant bets on what a sustainable future and strategic direction might look like. Designing a participatory and collaborative creative design process, dubbed FutureTREC, allowed our case-partner to engage its robust community, clients and stakeholders. Over a five-month timeline, we leveraged strategic foresight to explore the use of future scenarios to help spur transformative change. The process involved using persona mapping and prototyping to situate emergent strategies and ideas, and mapping insights across an innovation matrix to support TREC in resourcing the transformation. The process evolved at each phase, as we iterated based on emerging knowledge from our research and, more importantly, with the insights and feedback from TREC participants. Defining Sustainability for the FutureTREC Project The concept of sustainability embraces a wide range of opportunity areas, as the diverse list of the SDGs demonstrates. In the FutureTREC project, we worked with management to pinpoint what types of projects and opportunity areas embraced the SDGs and aligned with the organisation's core values. We landed on five opportunity areas that were then tested through a TREC community survey: 1. Driving the Circular Economy: Educate, advocate and incubate inspirational projects that help decouple local economic growth from the consumption of finite world resources; 2. Improving Lives in our Cities: Create breakthrough urban experiences by leveraging democratic, collaborative, community-building financing, tools and systems; 3. Promoting Local Energy Independence: Accelerate our transition to a zero-carbon future through locally owned, community-scaled energy projects; 4. Facilitating Inclusive Communities: Amplify and prioritise projects led by members of underserved communities including youth; 5. Community Economic Resilience: Help our communities thrive in the face of unprecedented challenges, through local investments in projects that promote sustainability and foster local job growth.

Towards Sustainable Futures: The FutureTREC Case Study.

The TREC Board collaborated on a definition that reflected their collective insights. The ‘working definition’ that the group landed upon was this: Resilient local economies are those that can provide fulfilling livelihoods and create emotional cohesion within a community of people, who are using their fair share of resources to generate a range of community assets and transaction types – personal, economic and governmental – that build the capacity to move forward sustainably in response to short term shocks and long-term changes, whether they be ecological, social and/or economic. And with that milestone accomplished, the strategic foresight planning process for TREC was underway. Five Phases of the Strategic Foresight & Design Process Below we breakdown each phase, showcasing the tools used, outcomes gained and the practitioner learnings gained along the way. Phase One was rooted in one of three emerging pathways identified by Manzini, building a new set of boundaries around the value and role of connected places and local economies. Local food networks are an example: they offer an alternative to an already precarious globalised supply chain by building a collaborative network based on bottom-up initiatives and an openness to grassroots social innovation. Phase Two pushed participants into a creative space, challenging them to imagine potential futures within the guardrails of two critical uncertainties facing TREC as an organisation. This phase inspired four distinct future scenarios which would serve TREC in designing multiple opportunity spaces based on their organisational strengths. Our approach aligned to a second pathway highlighted through Manzini’s work, the need for feasible, flexible and attractive visions of sustainable and reimagined futures, allowing people to see themselves in a range of better environments. Phases Three and Four shepherded earlier creative activities into a focused strategic plan and set of actions. Phase Three helped participants build out community-centered solutions using Manzini’s final pathway, with a greater emphasis on designing product-service innovations to provide new ways of doing things and to re-organise supply systems to avoid the incremental eco-efficiency trap. Phase Four of the project brought the focus back to TREC: Which of the ideas and strategies put together by project participants aligned best with their innovation ambition? Which best helped to accelerate TREC towards their vision of a sustainable and resilient future? The goal for this phase was to support TREC in articulating their innovation ambition and creating a sustainable and manageable portfolio of innovative ideas.

Project outcomes

Today, TREC is exploring innovative community economic resilience ideas and strategic opportunities, which emerged through this foresight and design project. The FutureTREC innovation portfolio consists of core, adjacent and transformational initiatives9 and includes a range of ideas that span from building on core competencies, to those that require entry into new areas, to transformational opportunities that require exploring by leaps. The common denominator is they all have the potential to accelerate TREC's vision of community economic resilience. Feedback on the foresight and design process from participants highlighted their appreciation of: — Context-driven future scenarios that were hyper- local, with people at the forefront; — The systems design approach, which mapped the complexity and interrelationships of possible innovation strategies, helping participants to better understand the dynamics of change – including unintended outcomes – and create insights allowing for solutions that better support authentically SDGs; — The emphasis on enabling knowledge generation and skill-building by participants throughout the process. By developing an understanding, appreciation, and comfort for the uncertain nature of futuring work and the ambiguity of possibility, participants felt they were better equipped to continue to iterate and build upon their visions of sustainability. What we learned as designers As researchers, designers and practitioners of strategic foresight for sustainability, our impact will arguably only be as strong as our ability to engage organisations that want to discover transformative innovations, and to provide meaningful experiences that generate exciting and actionable results. The TREC project put this premise to the test. Execution matters. As we reflected on our strategic foresight experience from the perspective of process designers, we explored what aspects not only broke down barriers towards transformative change but were core to the service design approach. Here we share the values that supported our research and sense-making process. They act as guideposts when designing and executing strategic foresight processes for transformative sustainability. 1. The process is collaborative: While collaboration is so deeply embedded in service design work as to be assumed, our experience highlighted how designing in pervasive collaboration for sustainability solutions opens space for participants to co-create new positive visions for the future while reframing individualistic or competitive approaches to solution-making. The collaborative space and process also supports moving beyond incremental change mindset to leverage collective creativity. The process encouraged participants to re-think current systems of doing and making at a time when large-scale transition and alternative sustainability solutions are pressingly needed. The collaborative approach may also address the growing incidence of climate anxiety at the individual level through enabling, collective solutioning. 2. The process empowers intersectionality: It’s often the most vulnerable people who are excluded from the decision-making table. As designers, we grounded this experience in the needs of the community by opening space for a diversity of participants, perspectives and voices, and extended the inclusive and equitable approach when developing future actors, scenarios and solutions. Actively and consistently practicing Design Thinking helped unearth unmet needs, driving creative and unexpected solutions that authentically solve real problems at the human and community level. 3. The process helps to rewire systems: Focusing on product-service innovation restores individual and collective agency and moves away from an over-reliance on breakthrough technology to solve social and ecological challenges. By focusing on new ways of doing and making, we can accelerate the shift to a circular economic model that helps refocus local economic growth from the consumption of finite world resources.

All (designer) hands on deck

The conversation and action around sustainability is evolving quickly. In the summer of 2021, the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) landmark report by the world’s top climate scientists showed that Earth’s climate is warming at a faster rate than previously thought, forecasting greater and more widespread consequences for society and the planet10. The new urgency spurs individuals and organisations to rethink their existing models and incrementalism overall. As designers, the FutureTREC project gave us confidence that inclusive, agile models of research coupled with collaborative foresight tools can deliver valuable, actionable and authentic insights into ways in which organisations might strategically steer the transition to more sustainable solutions. We encourage other designers to explore service design and strategic foresight as frameworks for building disruptive and transformative approaches to sustainability, to build the future you desire and the future we need.

References

1 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ 2 Hrvatin, V. (2016, May 31). A brief history of Canada’s climate change agreements. [article]. Canadian Geographic. Retrieved July 14, 2021, at canadiangeographic.ca/article/brief-history- canadas-climate-change-agreements. 3 Black, R. & Rebello, S. (2021). Towards Sustainable Futures – Using strategic foresight in the design of transformative sustainability [Masters Thesis]. 4 See Manzini (2013), Resilient Systems & Sustainable Qualities. Small, local, open, connected: An emerging scenario [report] 5–7 Black, R. & Rebello, S. (2021). Towards Sustainable Futures – Using strategic foresight in the design of transformative sustainability [Masters Thesis]. 8 Black, R. & Rebello, S. (2021). Towards Sustainable Futures – Using strategic foresight in the design of transformative sustainability [Masters Thesis].

9 Nagji, B. and Tuff, G. (2012). Managing Your Innovation Portfolio. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2012/05/managing-your-innovation-portfolio 10 IPCC (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis [report] accessed at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/ report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf