Highlighting Service Designer Emily Lin
Gather a core group that share your passion to make change, and leverage each other’s strengths to create impact. You cannot do this alone, and you are not supposed to.
Emily Lin is a senior service designer that is part of a climate hive at Idean, a digital design agency in Oslo, Norway. Her work focuses on organizational design for learning and development.
What has motivated you to proactively take climate action at the place you work?
In our work, we focus a lot on process and approach. I believe being honest about what we do and how we carry out our professional practice is the only way to create long term impact that will challenge the existing systematic flaws. If we expect to help our clients and partners to create better solutions, then how we can not start by showing an example with ourselves?
Design has an impact. It shapes our thinking and perceptions of the world. It’s not only about what we create, but also how we go about doing so. Design has a significant influence in the way we build our social context, and that also means we have the social responsibility to challenge when necessary, and strive for better ways of making a difference in the right way.
How did you start? What things did you do in your effort?
I don’t think there ever was a clear decision point, but more of a slow and
incremental transition. It was simply the question of “why not?”, questioning why we do things a certain way, and whether we can do better.
Many of us in the studio share the concerns of climate change and sustainability issues. We have all made small changes in our lifestyle choices, but we question the impact of our individual efforts. It started as simple dialogues, discussions about changes we can make in our studio and day to day activities. One of my closest teammates at work is another Senior Service Designer, Idun Aune. She has been the key figure in advocating for the practice of Planet-Centric Design at Idean. She and I discussed a lot about how we can use this new perspective and reflect on our way of working. Idun brought in the idea of using the Anatomy of Action from UNEP and UnSchool, and we hosted a series of internal workshops on different domains of lifestyle choices- Food, Money, Move, Stuff and Fun. Each workshop explored how we each can make small changes in our everyday, and what we can do as Idean. We then collected these input to make them into an actionable list for
the studio.
How did your company and office react?
People have been positive and curious. The idea took off easily because many people have already been thinking in a similar way. Our leadership has also been supportive in wanting to help get this implemented. I think this is largely based on all of us wanting to create a better environment for us to work in, and to contribute in creating that together as a group. That being said, we didn’t always manage to get the message to every corner. There were always some more enthusiastic than others, and that’s expected.
What were the outcomes? Were there any changes?
The most significant impact I would say is the shift of mindset. People are now more conscious than ever about how we do things, and this doesn’t just include internal activities, but also how we engage with our clients and how we want to approach our projects. This is a process, and we understand that the change will not happen overnight, so every little bit counts.
We are working towards transparency and accountability, that means knowing how well we are doing in our climate action efforts and more importantly, where we need to do better. Since spring, a small group of us at the Oslo studio has set up the Planet Centric Design Lab. One of our main efforts in the coming months is to create a studio handbook that will help to inform Ideanists how we need to set up our studio and daily operations in a responsible manner.
What worked best?
Building synergy and common understanding across the studio by opening up the discussions, allowing people to share their ideas and feedback. Having key people that keeps the momentum of our efforts by following up actions, sharing progress, and next steps so all of us can remain focused on why this is important.
What did not work so well?
I wouldn’t say it’s something that didn’t work well, but maintaining a balance can be tricky. It’s easy to antagonize those that don’t immediately jump on board. It takes time to build understanding, and that goes both ways. I am still learning it myself. Everyone has their responsibilities and tasks at hand, don’t fall into the trap of this “Us vs. Them” thinking, that not only works against your efforts, it only creates more distance and biases.
Illustration by Zhi Wang
What is your advice to someone starting out?
Gather a core group that share your passion to make change, and leverage each other’s strengths to create impact. You cannot do this alone, and you are not supposed to. This is about change of mindset, which can be seen as frightening, troublesome, even irritating to some. If you want to build momentum and a sense of responsibility in your work place, then it is important to be open, listen, build understanding and communicate.
What would you like to see happen in the coming years- what is your wish list for climate action?
I would like to see more accountability and actions on a greater scale. Although many businesses understand the urgency of climate actions, they make the choice of doing little. Our societies prioritize economic returns and the systems we have built require them to sacrifice our environment in the process of doing so. It’s the most devastating example of the Tragedy of the Commons, and I hope people will finally start saying no, and start taking responsibility of the world we creating.
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Emily Lin is the author of Beyond Empathy, an article that makes a case for designers to incorporate a planet-centric practice. She can be found at Medium and at LinkedIn.
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This article was first published on the Hive Initiative Medium account.