The Synergy Team
Facilitating a sustainable product-service innovation culture
Client
Steelcase
Year
2018
Role
Design Research & Conceptualisation
The central theme of the project revolves around accelerating a shift from a sustainable product to a sustainable product-service-system innovation culture at Steelcase.
The challenge was to inspire a sustainable design mindset within the company culture. We took a design thinking approach to find the pain-points of the problem, decode the question and propose a reasonable solution.
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Design Field
Sustainable Design
Communication Design
"How might we accelerate a shift from a sustainable product to a sustainable product-service systems innovation culture at Steelcase?"
BREAKING DOWN
THE BIG QUESTION
Interviews
At the discovery stage of our research, we conducted user interviews to get a holistic understanding of the problem.
Some of the people we interviewed were:
- Service Designers
- Creative Director of a Digital Strategy Agency
- Product Designers
- Industrial Designers
- UX Designers
- Anthropologist
On pitching new innovative materials, “If it does not fit into the marketing story, it will not be approved”​
“Reduction of costs sometimes puts pressure on us to overlook what is good for [our planet].”
Long-term thinking is crucial in ProductService-Systems
Never tell people what to do, instead, empower them to make decisions themselves.
“the natural environment is our preferred environment. We also like to be near places where we’re by ourselves in the context of other people…[Peoples’] cortisol levels drop and their trust behaviors increase.”
Change happens when the environment around you chang
We came to understand that identifying a need to change is just the beginning of the process - the main challenge was how.
To focus closely on underlying problems, we stopped and look critically at the central question and the insights from our research and interviews. That helped us break it down to three specific questions:
How do we shift the culture at Steelcase according to the identified tensions?
Why is it difficult to go from a product to a product service systems innovation culture?
Why is it important to shift to a product service system innovation culture?
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
To streamline our thinking process and arrive at potential ways to solve the complexities of driving change, we focussed on the following insights-
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Empowering people instead of telling them what to do, would help teams to work smoothly and independently.
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Learning from potential negative outcomes would benefit designers in their design thinking process.
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A change in the process requires a change in structure.
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Long-term thinking is crucial in product-service systems.
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Short-term goals sent companies a few steps behind in their processes.
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Work can become monotonous if there is no scope to grow or innovate.
IDEATING THE CONCEPT
FIVE WHY ANALYSIS
Dialogue, brainstorming and data collection helped us create a tangible and explicit direction with which we derived the three questions mentioned earlier. From there, the problem statement was broken down by asking why and how until we reached the potential obstacles in the journey
Why do we need to shift to a sustainable product service system innovation culture.
Why do we need to foster a sustainable mindset in the company's core values.
Why are employees facing challenges to effectively shift to a sustainable model?
How do we shift the culture at Steelcase according to the identified tensions?
CONCEPT MAPPING
Our interviews pulled up a plethora of insights that people from multidisciplinary fields dealt with professionally. By mapping key insights, we identified patterns and underlying issues to then derive tensions that were related to the issue of facilitating a change at an organisational level.
EMPATHY MAPPING
Our personal experiences with sustainability design gave us a push towards understanding our stakeholders say, think, feel and do. By empathising, we were found an important painpoint that made it difficult to create a culture for sustainable innovation - the lack of effective communication.
PROTOTYPING
Once we discovered the underlying obstacle that hindered a change mindset
- the lack of effective communication between the teams and departments of the company -
we developed the concept of a team that would be responsible for facilitating communication, gathering insights and pain points from different teams, and turning these into action points.
How it works
RESULTS
We tested our prototype in many different environments. We learned that this concept enhanced communication strategies and facilitated more actions that were otherwise never given a space to be shared and addressed.
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The major takeaway was that bringing about any change can often be a challenge when its reasons, motives, and process aren't made familiar with those it is required of.
In this project, a mindset for a sustainable innovation culture was already among the employees and stakeholders. However, by designing an environment for open communication, the teams had a better chance at exchanging their ideas and paon-points to convert them into actionable goals.