How to move away from human-centricity – Future-proof your capabilities

1. Familiarize yourself with the organization’s goals and ask hard questions. 

Investigate how responsibility is represented in the organization’s strategy and whether the goals translate to practice. Use sustainability goals as the drivers of your design work and involve experts from different disciplines. Collaborate with a sustainability expert and study the sustainability and environmental reporting of your organization or that of a competitor. Gather information on the pitfalls and opportunities of the industry. Think about the first concrete thing you can do and start with that. Even the small steps matter.

Remember that responsibility begins where legislation ends, since current legislation does not reflect the actions that are truly needed. As legislation continues to change, being a pioneer becomes an advantage. Afterall, being prepared is easier than rushing to keep up with each new development.

2. Look beyond our anthropocentric design drivers. 

Traditionally design has focused on understanding and catering to people’s needs and desires. While human-centricity has been an essential step away from production- and technology-centric design approaches, it is no longer a sufficient design principle in the era of interconnected sustainability challenges.

Although conversations regarding sustainability and planet-centricity have entered the design community, we still lack expertise in addressing novel challenges in a concrete manner, hence it is essential to recognize that human-centricity and planet-centricity are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, a solution that is bad for the planet cannot be good for humans.

In Western countries, people’s present relationship with nature could be described as detached. In the current system, the impact of human activity on nature has been overlooked and a declining number of people feel connected to nature. Therefore, in your work, seek new ways to articulate how humans are intertwined with the biodiversity of our planet. Shifting your mindset can open entirely new perspectives for your design work. Sitra’s “Humans as Part of the Biosphere” report (only in Finnish) challenges the perception of humans and nature as seemingly disparate and delves into this issue further.

3. Bring your design tools up to date. 

Many service design tools are inherently human-centered (e.g., customer profiles, service blueprints, and customer journeys). Update them and introduce new tools to the palette. For example, the basics of systems thinking can help unfurl broader connections and impacts on sustainability.

Designers are good at applying tools – so be active in seeking new perspectives in your work: Make strategic sustainability goals concrete in relation to services, determine the sustainability desires of customers and depict relationships and attitudes towards nature and responsibility in customer profiles. This increases the organization’s understanding of approaches for promoting responsible customer behavior. For example, see Metsähallitus’ Hiker Profiles.

Avoid adding responsibility as a superficial layer to your tools. As a perspective, environmental responsibility does not run parallel with human-centricity, profitability, or feasibility, instead it redefines these concepts from a new angle.

Remember that design tools and customer research provide an excellent means for highlighting and clearly defining the importance of sustainability in service development and supporting behavioral change.

4. Bring the future into the design process. 

Are you familiar with your organization’s vision? Does your organization engage in foresight and how are the limits of our planet taken into account? Forecasting alternative futures can reveal new business opportunities whilst preparing the organization for upcoming changes. Does your organization’s vision consider climate change mitigation and adaptation?

To achieve a desired future, we must first be able to imagine and envision it. Most of the future scenarios offered to us today are dystopian, making it difficult for us to imagine optimistic futures. However, through design, we can make desired futures visible and create hope. As futurist Perttu Pölönen says, “It’s too late to be a pessimist.”

Collaborate with those who are doing foresight work in your organization – assist with your design expertise and propose imagining different scenarios. At best, the scenarios can guide your design work, making the desired future a reality.

5. Sustainability is not an end product but a continuous process. 

The role of a designer is to help organizations, products, or services in the process of change, and we have many important skills and abilities for this. Each of us is also responsible for developing and updating our own skills. Adopt an attitude of curiosity, start small and apply what you’ve learned to your work, discuss with colleagues, and see where the journey takes you.

Tackling sustainability challenges requires changing the practices and processes of an organization as a whole, instead of creating isolated development projects that focus on one specific area. Sustainability is not an end product but a continuous process. It requires updating tools, creating shared future visions, and fundamentally shifting mindsets from human-centricity to planet-centricity. The potential of design to influence people’s behavior and mental models is what makes designers key players in the sustainability transformation.