Designing the Future: A Review of Some Existing Frameworks

Why We Studied These Frameworks

We work with climate tech companies to design digital products that can help us mitigate and adapt to climate change. These products are critical to building a thriving future economy. The urgency of creating and scaling them is undeniable, and digital product design can play a pivotal role. 

Our colleagues in the design world have been having conversations about sustainable design approaches and processes for years. There are an abundance of existing and emerging guidelines, frameworks, approaches, tools, reporting standards, and taxonomies to guide businesses in sustainable design. Despite the volume of these ideas and materials, or perhaps partly because of this volume, we haven’t seen many climate tech founders or their teams using them. Given what we know about the power of good design to increase sales, adoption, and use as well as reducing waste in product development lifecycles, we got curious about why. 

What We Did 

We selected a small sample of sustainable design frameworks to explore. Our sampling strategy was designed to capture a range of different types of design frameworks, from certification systems like LEED to conceptual principles like circular design to toolkits like IDEO’s Little Book of Design Research Ethics. For a more comprehensive description of design frameworks out there, see The Life-Centered Design Guide by Damien Lutz. We evaluated each framework in our sample to understand: 

• it’s intended users

• the context it is expected to be used within 

• the degree to which it provides practical tools and support for implementation

• the degree to which it includes specific metrics for assessing what “good” looks like 

We were particularly interested in the metrics question because we are grappling with impact measurement/management and how these can be embedded into product innovations. 

What We Learned

Each of the frameworks and systems we looked at provide valuable direction for designing better. They are based on guiding principles that are necessary to create a future economy we can collectively experience as prosperous. These fundamental principles are a meaningful baseline and a lower barrier to entry for companies to fully integrate these ideas into their businesses would be helpful. 

Detailed Implementation Guidance: Many of these tools and frameworks provide high-level principles and guidelines but do not offer step-by-step blueprints or actionable plans. People without detailed designing training may find themselves needing more concrete guidance on how to translate these principles into tangible design solutions.

Standard Metrics: Success and impact are multifaceted concepts with no universal definitions, making measurement challenging and often necessarily customized. The discrepancies in tools and frameworks used to evaluate success hinder comparisons between different approaches. Inconsistency blocks the identification of best practices and informed decision-making, making it difficult to determine the most effective strategies in designing for impact. Certification boards and standards can help address this issue. Founders operating in problem spaces where no such standards exist may struggle to define the metrics that matter for their context. 

Technical-Centricity: Some tools and frameworks prioritize technical or scientific considerations over user/stakeholder experience design principles. This can lead to solutions that are technically sound but lack accessibility, inclusivity, or resonance with those impacted by the solution.

What We Think It Means

There is an opportunity to integrate and build on existing and emerging design frameworks to better serve the needs of climate tech founders and their teams. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to climate tech product innovation. Each situation is unique, but within that truth is also the reality that interdependencies and commonalities exist within problem-spaces, industries, companies and projects. Without reliable qualitative and quantitative measures and a shared understanding of why they matter, we are working in darkness, siloed from one another, trying to make a difference. We can develop specific toolkits and guidelines for world-changing design within the context of a problem space. We’re thinking a lot about how to leverage the collective intelligence reflected in these design frameworks. If you’re interested in these questions too, reach out to us at brain@allelodesign.com.