Just a quick note to mention that I’ll be participating in the panel at July’s IF Talks, on the topic of “Sustainable Future & Pure Living”:

Our environment is currently facing huge obstacles that have the potential to seriously disrupt our future and the future of our shared environment. Whilst there is speculation, the current apocalyptic predictions for our planet tend to paralyze people rather than motivate people to take action.

However this is changing and Australia is home to some of the world leaders in environmental, sustainable and pure living methodologies, practices and knowledge.

IF set out to find the innovators who seek to create a better future for humanity by improving our shared environment. Be it through design, business, collaboration or strategic thinking and action.

This IF talk is an enthusiastic and informed look and discussion around the future of pure living, why, how and more importantly, how business, corporations and organisations can and should be applying this type of thinking to modern companies in the immediate future.

The Eventbrite page for the event has more details about the event (and you can also purchase tickets there if you’re interested in attending). All profits from IF talks are donated to STREAT to help provide homeless youth with a pathway to full time employment.

While researching my report on design thinking and sustainability I finally had a chance to read some of Ezio Manzini’s papers on the topic. While I’d heard many good things about Ezio’s work (especially from Dave and Penny), I’d not had much of a chance to really dig into it.

The focus of the papers I read were on the concept of “enabling solutions” – that is designs that, rather than taking away problems, build people’s efficacy to solve the challenges they face, increasing their “resourcefulness” (to borrow a term from Emily Campbell’s RSA paper You know more than you think you do: Design as resourcefulness & self-reliance [PDF 356KB]).

While at the time I didn’t fully appreciate the relevance of these papers to my intended report, by the time I’d finished writing it I realised Manzini’s ideas had been very influential. Which is why I’m so excited to see that Ezio is speaking in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney next month in a tour co-organised by ASIX, TACSI, and the Centre for Social Impact.

In each state Ezio will be doing both a public forum: “Small, local, open, connected” and masterclass: “Next economy – enabling sustainable ways of living”. From the masterclass blurb:

Perhaps the world’s leading expert on sustainable design, Ezio Manzini sits at the interface between design, community and social innovation with a focus on scenario building toward solutions encompassing both environmental and social quality.

This masterclass will explore how the interplay between social and technical innovation is opening up brand new opportunities. How can we conceive and deliver “enabling solutions”? How can individuals, businesses, institutions, associations and communities collaborate in the framework of viable business models to support sustainable ways of living?

This masterclass is for policy-makers and practitioners who are interested in sustainability, social innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

I’d thoroughly recommend this tour/series to anyone interested in sustainability and/or social innovation – I’m sure it will be an engaging and inspiring set of sessions…

Posting has been light here the past few weeks, partly due to most of my writing energy being focused on my project report on Design thinking and sustainability (PDF 1.5MB), my first major assessment for the Master of Sustainable Practice postgraduate degree I’m currently undertaking at RMIT.

The summary of the report is:

Media coverage of the impact of ʻdesign thinkingʼ – also described as ʻhuman-centred designʼ or ʻservice designʼ, among other terms – on business and society seems to be on the increase, with much of the discussion focusing on its application to innovation practice.

Simultaneously, the need for business and public services to integrate socially and environmentally sustainable practices is becoming more urgent and important to address pressing issues such as climate change, resource scarcity, environmental degradation and growing social challenges and perceived deterioration of community.

This paper briefly explores the impacts of design on business before providing a working definition and overview of the key themes of design thinking. It then outlines commonly recognised environmentally-focused sustainable design principles and considers how design thinking could be applied in support of these.

Although a (non-exhaustive) review of specific examples of design thinking applied to environmentally sustainable objectives was undertaken in preparation of this paper, such examples are relatively few. As such, while specific examples are touched upon, the primary focus of the paper is on the potential application of design thinking in this context.

While academic in tone (it is a uni assessment after all) and relatively long (20+ pages), I thought it might be of interest to some readers of this blog given the topic/focus.

As is often the case with this sort of things there are elements I’d improve/extend if I had more time – particularly I’d like to provide more than just passing comment to the link between sustainability and innovation – but I do hope the result provokes some interesting and beneficial dialogue.

I’d also like to publicly thank the following folks for their support through inspiration, conversation, experience and pointers to examples and resources before and during the preparation of the paper:

• Penny Hagen
• Duncan Underwood, Dave Gravina and all the crew at Digital Eskimo
• Suze Ingram
• Natalie Rowland (from Redrollers)
• Rachel Botsman

Dan Pink, animated by the RSA, on what motivates us. Turns out meaning is better than money, and perhaps more surprisingly, that more money may actually result in worse performance.

Via the Nudge blog.