Beautiful design is insight-driven, inclusive and sustainable

At Crux, we are driven by design that positively impacts people’s lives and is developed responsibly. Our passion is to design products and experiences that are inclusive and sustainable, minimising their environmental footprint. For us, that is the true essence of beautiful design.

Our industry is in pole position to help clients innovate and invent great things while minimising their impact on the environment. We need to collaborate, challenge and innovate to deliver solutions and experiences that meet needs while ensuring the way we do it – including processes, methods and materials – is sustainable. It’s a big responsibility and a tough balance to achieve for all of us - here are the key ways in which we at Crux are approaching it.

Early insight

Spotting problems in the initial stages of a client project helps us greatly reduce downstream risk, saving valuable time, effort, energy and resources. We front-load projects with a mix of expertise, techniques and tools to smoke out problems. It’s easy to be carried away by a beautiful design that later on doesn’t work as needed, so we use highly sophisticated predictive modelling techniques to understand from the start how it will perform, say, along a high-speed filling line or in an eCommerce scenario. These techniques are in a highly repeatable virtual environment which allows us to make constant changes to ensure a design is exactly right before we go on.

Apply learnings across sectors?

The consumer sector has been pioneers in sustainability. In particular, the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) world has made great advances in design optimisation, material use, manufacturing methods, circular design and loop systems. We look to apply this learning to other areas such as the pharmaceutical and medical device sectors which, like many other businesses, are under constant pressure to be more sustainable. For example, they currently make widespread use of high-volume, single use drug delivery devices which after use are typically incinerated or end up in landfill.

A good example of a high-impact and relatively easy win from the FMCG sector is how component optimisation on injection moulded parts can reduce material usage. On a high volume product or device – say about 120 million units per year – a single gram of resin saved on a component can save approximately 27 dumper trucks of raw material per year and bring big cost and waste benefits.

Using complementary perspectives to get design right from the start

At Crux, we have grown to be a team of 100+ specialists across core disciplines such as Usability & Human Factors, Design, Engineering, Technology, Applied Sciences, Software & Electronics and Project Management.?Working together, these complementary lenses give us game-changing insight from the start, enabling us to deliver innovation that works.

Our thinking is grounded in a solid understanding of the people for whom we are designing. During these discovery phases, we are able to deploy specialist data capture capability to add extra layers of resolution and depth to our findings.?This provides a rich starting point for our ideas and enables us to answer the question, “are we designing the right product?” early on and, if we are, make sure that we design it right. This minimises potentially expensive and wasteful changes later in development.

Sustainability begins at home

We realise that responsibility is not just part of our work with clients and try to build it into all that we do. It’s an ongoing task, but we hope we are making some good progress. We were fortunate to have been able to design our own offices, with environmentally-conscious factors being a chief influence. For example, our roof is covered with the latest solar panel technology which provides for much of our energy consumption.

We also have an internal sustainability team, charged with regularly auditing our operations and identifying gains to help us get closer to our carbon-neutral ambition. They review all our activities and have helped us make some important shifts. Technology, for example, plays a vital part in our business and the team has implemented green computing choices to cut down the environmental impact of all our computers. They have prompted us to shift to card packaging for physical models and prototypes sent to clients and ensured that we provide monthly bike maintenance and energy efficient showers to encourage colleagues to have a carbon-free and two-wheel commute.

Being ever more sustainable is an ongoing challenge for everyone. It’s an area in which our design industry can have a huge impact and we have summarised the key ways in which Crux can strive to achieve this. We’d love to share more and find out what you are doing so please get in touch.

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