Highlighting Service Designer Idun Aune
Just dive in, don’t wait on the mandate but take charge and start the conversation. Any leader would be glad someone presented them with solutions to such an important topic.
Idun Aune is a planet-centric senior service designer working in Idean, a strategic design agency in Oslo, Norway. She is leading the global community of Planet Centric designers at the company.
What has motivated you to proactively take climate action at the place you work?
I have always had a strong need for my work being meaningful and making a difference. I wanted to take this a step further to bring the efforts from a personal-level dedication to an organizational-level dedication. It is not that we haven’t addressed this before at work, but not as strategically and strongly.
How did you start? What things did you do in your effort?
It started with me just doing research on ways design could make a difference, reading everything I could find about it from sustainability to circularity to systems design. There are a lot of methods and tools, but the landscape is chaotic and it can be hard to get an overview. I ended up doing a pitch for my managers for dedicated time to develop this area.
How did your company and office react?
It was received really positively. I got the mandate and time to further develop this area for us, and they have been really supportive the whole way.
What were the outcomes? Were there any changes?
Growing from a personal project to getting local, and then global acknowledgement and mandate, Planet Centric Design is now one of six strategic areas in Idean. We are now a community of 120+ designers inside the company working to develop this. This has all happened within a year, and it is truly amazing.
What worked best?
We ran small workshops mapping problem areas and opportunities as a studio, and we got great ideas and engagement.
What did not work so well?
A lot of the actions needed are within someone’s responsibility, and it can be hard if you don’t have the mandate to deliver extra tasks to that colleague. That is why you do need some allies in the management to be able to follow up on the actions.
Illustration by Zhi Wang
What is your advice to someone starting out?
Just dive in, don’t wait on the mandate but take charge and start the conversation. Any leader would be glad someone presented them with solutions to such an important topic.
What would you like to see happen in the coming years- what is your wish list for climate action?
I want Corporate Social Responsibility departments to be something of the past, as a result of businesses integrating this practice into their core, making sustainable business the only way of doing business in the future.
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Idun Aune is the author of Moving Away From Product Focused Wellbeing, an article that makes a case for moving from user-centric to planet-centric design and Human Nature is the Biggest Challenge in the Climate Crisis which outlines why behavioral change has been difficult. She can be found at Medium and at LinkedIn.
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This article was first published on the Hive Initiative Medium account.