Designing Sustainable North Stars

A new holistic approach to design truly sustainable products, that takes into account product, user and system

Hosted by Accenture

This project is now archived and was part of DDW23

This project is part of
The Language of Sustainability

Bliss, a baby monitor Sustainable North Star

A newly developed design approach to tackle complex sustainable challenges in a holistic way. A unique process which show cases elements of physical and digital design, product engineering, user research, system thinking and service design, applied to a consumer electronic product: a baby monitor!

Bliss: a tangible concept to show case the effectiveness of the Sustainable North Star approach

Sustainability represents the next step for the design & innovation competence. Truly sustainable solutions require a much more holistic way of investigating and tackling design challenges: from product and user, to a system perspective. In this exhibition we will show case how five different competences worked together in an organic way to develop Bliss, a Sustainable North Star for baby monitors. This concept represents a new value proposition, which leverages core user needs to enable a more sustainable consumption. A solution designed to provide an engaging experience, from its first use till its last. After creating a tangible proof of concept of the key technologies behind this concept, a detailed transition roadmap was developed, to guide a manufacturer from the design of today to the long term vision. Join us to learn more about this new process and engaging concept!

The power of visual thinking unleashed

Sustainability is a systemic and complex challenge. In this exhibition we will show how we used visual thinking and storytelling to synthetize system complexity and a large number of insights, into one single visualization. We called this visualization Product Journey Map, and we used it guide the development of Bliss. This single Map integrates the full Value Chain of the product, the User Journey, the End of Life, the Environmental impact of different phases of the product life cycle. Key insights collected during the process are then mapped throughout this comprehensive visualization and used to spark design ideation and guide the redesign.

Sustainability as a spark for radical innovation

With this work, we want to show how sustainability is not just important because of upcoming regulations, to follow marketing trends or to avoid a climate disaster. It can be a powerful way to design new propositions and innovation to solve core user needs in a completely different way. When designing in a sustainable way, we are looking at the same problems with a new lens and perspective. This can lead to creating completely new value propositions; entirely new product segments. Sustainability can trigger new competitive advantage in sectors where innovative advantage is saturated.