The missing box in your business model canvas
Are we designing innovations that are serving us and humanity in the long run? Redesigning our tools might be a starting point to make sure we do.
Most of the designers I know want to have a positive impact on the world. In some cases, it’s even what brought us to design in the first place.
When we are designing, we are essentially putting something into the world that wasn’t there before, and that will influence people’s behaviors. By doing so, we are to some extent shaping the future.
And that makes us proud.
Many of us find satisfaction in the fact that, thanks to our designs, we are making the lives of people simpler, smoother, more delightful.
Or, yeah, let’s say it out loud. That we are making the world better.
Designing a better world. Is it really what we’re doing?
Design has allowed for some great innovations to happen and brought some of the most profound changes in our society. Industrial designers helped to shape the previous industrial revolution, drastically raising living standards across the developed world. Today’s User Experience Designers are creating tools that allow billions to interact with their friends and families, to find jobs, to find love.
However, it is becoming more apparent every day that all this hasn’t only brought wonders to the world. It has at the same time created a fair amount of externalities impacting society in as many negative ways.
Design is a holistic practice. Maybe just not holistic enough.
Design is inclusive and welcomes stakeholders and their views from all corners of the innovation room. Design cares for users and their needs. It cares for business and its priorities. It cares for tech and feasibility. It cares for aesthetics and culture. So yes, in the process of diagnosing problems and envisioning solutions, design is holistic.
However, Design is also narrow in the sense that it doesn’t consider the impact that new ideas will have in the world, beyond their intended effect.
Design and its unexpected consequences.
Industrial designers of the past decades have created the modern standards of living in the developed world, crafting objects of utility and desire. Though they also fast forwarded the world into a significant environmental crisis, missing to consider the ecological aspect of manufacturing and selling as many products to as many people as possible.
Today’s Digital and UX Designers have helped to make the digital revolution happen, allowing billions of people to access information, content, education, services, and goods with just a few clicks. They’ve made it easier to stay in touch, to meet people, to share opinions and spread positivity.
By making digital interactions so good, pleasurable and somewhat addicting, they also contributed to creating a world in which we prefer looking at our phones rather than engaging in the conversation happening at the dinner table.
By creating apps that anticipate users’ needs thanks to a deep understanding of their preference, Designers also remove free will form hundreds of actions we take daily. Letting my phone chose the best itinerary, what song to play next or what article to read, by themselves aren’t all that bad. If you look back and list the number of daily choices you are not making by yourself any more though, the picture gets scarier.
Similarly, Service Designers and Business Designers are brilliantly disrupting industries with breakthrough business paradigms. They introduce new standards of convenience (think Uber) and radically cheaper access to experiences (think Netflix or Airbnb). But often, the new value they create is at the expense of established social ecosystems, and end up deconstructing the fragile social fabric on which our societies are running.
Under the banner of greater access, lower prices, convenience and instantaneity, companies like Amazon and their same day deliveries are exacerbating the worse parts of capitalism. People are unconsciously spending more money on more things they don’t need, increasing the already high pressures on our planet and the workforces behind the screens.
The environment, the global health, users’ free will, social equality or democracy to name just a few, are often the forgotten children of design and innovation.
Design meets sustainability
These unintended consequences easily end up backfiring against the innovators, destroying what is the foundation of their original success. When the externalities get too apparent, there comes the point where the world naturally attempts to get rid of their causes.
Now, I don’t see the Amazon empire crashing anytime soon, although, the recent protests against the construction of the company’s new offices in New York, or the boycott of the platform for Black Friday, show clear signs that the company’s practice is not sustainable anymore.
We can tell a similar story around Facebook or any other social media. The business model of social platforms relies on the time users spend on the app. More time on the platform means more eyeball-time to sell to advertisers, which means more revenue for the platform.
And yet, as the world starts to realize its prominent addiction to posting, to swiping, to creeping and double-tapping, the screen time of our devices — and especially on social media platforms — gets monitored to actively reduce it (cf. iOS and Android screen time control features).
Should we stop innovation from happening simply because it might hurt people and society in ways that we couldn’t anticipate?
I don’t think so. All of these brilliant new tools and services are helping humanity to get moving. But to quote the Philosopher Alfred Armand Montapert:
“Don’t confuse motion and progress.”
We should be more mindful about the innovations that we are introducing to the world. Are they advancing humanity in the right direction? In a direction that isn’t destroying the very foundation on which they rely: the broader social and environmental ecosystem.
Essentially, we could be more mindful with our design choices, spending more time anticipating their potential unexpected consequences.
Or in other words, we should think about the sustainability of our design choices.
By racing to disrupt industries, to hack growth, to overtake the competition, or iterating like chickens running with no heads, we lost the ability to look at the big picture and see if none of our designs would harm us in the long-run. “Move fast and break things” has been applied to the letter. It’s time to handle the consequences.
In 1987 the “Brundtland Commission” a UN initiative with the aim to unite countries to pursue sustainable development, famously defined sustainable development as:
“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
How might we design for today’s need in a way that doesn’t compromise people’s ability to meet their needs in the future?
Once again, most designers are I know are very well intended and would prefer in any situation design for the greater good, and more sustainably.
I believe that the reason why designers aren’t thinking about sustainability is that we are never asked or reminded to do so. Designing is like solving a complex equation with human, business, tech and cultural variables, and without the proper tools, it’s too demanding to ask designers to bring the ethics or sustainability conversation to the table.
A design process that’s more sustainability-aware
The design process is what guides us through our work. Over the years, designers have learned that how we design truly shapes what we design. That a well-framed process helps to create more robust solutions.
For you, it might be an iterative 3-phases process or a 5-step journey. It might start with research or favor an agile approach. Regardless of its shape, the design process most of us use ensures that our creations are human-centered, feasible, tested, usable and vetted by the stakeholders in play.
Although nowhere in our process are we asked to think about the impact of our choices on the greater social and environmental ecosystem in which they will live.
How might we introduce a new variable to the design equation? Human, business, tech. Sustainability.
Designers perfectly know that artifacts and environments have the power to change the way people think and shape their behaviors. After all, it is the essence of our craft.
We are commonly applying the same principle to our work. By relying on tools and artifacts, we are shaping our thinking and influencing how we design.
Personas and Empathy maps help us to be more empathetic with users and stakeholders. Competitive mappings and matrix help us to see the world more systemically. Flows, site maps, and user journeys help us to see experiences more holistically.
I believe the secret to designing more sustainability, is to include a “future consequences” dimension to our tools.
The missing box in your business model canvas
Purely for illustration purposes, let’s take a look at the Business Model Canvas. The well framed and now famous tool designed by Strategyzer to help designers envision new business models. It is by nature holistic, forcing designers to look at the many facets of a business model: partners, customers, costs, revenues, channel. resources…
Now, what if we added somewhere in there a sustainability box?
Externalities: future consequences this model will have on the greater environmental and social ecosystem.
A simple reminder to take a few minutes to consider the impact that this business model idea would have on the world, in the long run.
So the next time we’re thinking to curate and select product offers based on the user preferences — we should also consider that we are reducing her ability to make that choice by herself.
Next time we are thinking to offer an express delivery instead of pick up in store — we should also be reminded that it doubles the carbon impact of the service.
Or next time we are thinking to include advertising into the product to lower the cost for both the company and the user — let’s remind ourselves that we will introduce one more source of influence in our user’s life, tempting her with products she doesn’t need.
How else can we remind ourselves that the design we put into the would have unintended future consequences, and how can we design in a way that limits these externalities?
Disclaimer: The Business Model Canvas is the work and property of Strategyzer, and my intention is not to criticize it in any way or to offer an altered version of it. It was used in this article to illustrate a point of view on how to better include sustainability in the design process and tools. Anyone interested in utilizing the Business Model Canvas should refer to the Strategyzer platform.
