design&assembly: Can ‘Agencies+Clients’ Really Design Sustainable Products?

If your company makes products, you’ll know they are your biggest opportunity to achieve positive sustainability goals. But are you really clear about how your company can achieve your ambitions?

I can ‘reveal’ as an agency leader - what’s frustrating for us is knowing that we're capable of creating business and world-changing solutions. We can even do this in intelligent, risk-managed steps for you. But the old client to agency supply relationship seems to make this really hard, serving neither of us.

There’s a real opportunity to improve how we work as a partnership.

So I want to share insights from the first “design&assembly” sustainability event in Bristol last week. This was organised by Sam Mytton , Realise's Sustainability Lead, as a forum for industrial designers to talk openly and share learnings.

First up I am hugely grateful to Sam for organising this – it is entirely his own initiative and he did a great job! More on the need for ‘instigating’ to come…

After reflecting on the event over the past week, my biggest realisation is that our energy as leaders, required for driving sustainability, needs conscious tending and renewal. And this can come from unexpected places.

If I am honest, I went to the event, off the back of a tough few months, feeling a bit jaded and not really expecting to hear anything new. Instead, what we got was inspiring talks, with some really honest conversation about the challenges and ‘where people are at’, which echoed much of what Realise is trying to solve with Positive Products.

To my surprise, I came away with a renewed sense of clarity and determination. Ha, sharing your struggles with your peers is a good thing… Who knew!?

The excellent talks by John Macdonald Director at Matter and Kerry Briggs VP of Design (Europe) at KD both provided examples of successes and learnings, each with a different lens. What stood out to me as common was:

The Client+Agency Relationship Needs Work

Agencies can unlock real change through our outside perspective, elite-level creative thinking / process and flexibility to plug into your teams. But the commercial reality of the agency+client relationship contains 3 key problems:

• Space for Change: The standard 'tactical' brief > delivery engagement and budgeting doesn’t allow the space for us to develop system approaches that can create real positive change.
• Ambition Disconnect: Most people in companies responsible for delivering the board's sustainability ambitions, struggle to know how, or even what those ambitions mean.
• Poor Briefs: Consequently, briefs are often too prescriptive about outcomes and not clear or open enough to deliver a strategic ambition. When people are under pressure, writing a brief can be seen as just another thing to get done; when in reality, it's a key direction-setting device, which done badly can result in baggage you won’t want.

My takeaway? We need to recognise this stuff is hard. On the surface, the new thinking needed to break old patterns appears risky to people at all levels - so building confidence in how to proceed is a huge factor.

The Solution?

John suggested an excellent 3 word manifesto, which I've expanded on as:

• INSTIGATE: We as agencies have to learn to be more proactive. This means intelligently challenging and improving briefs. And we should be trying to develop briefs ourselves for you. Agency and client leaders need to encourage and welcome this. The instigators need to learn how best to approach leaders and the resilience to keep trying.
• COORDINATE: One of Industrial Design's most undervalued skills is stitching things together across whole supply chains, understanding everyone’s motivations and issues, and communicating solutions. We're humanists and creative coordinators. So we can and must step into this role to improve sustainability, just as we do with profitability, product safety and quality.
• DEMONSTRATE: Back to the need to communicate and build confidence, designers are fabulously good at breaking problems down into smaller chunks and demonstrating solutions, visually, through prototypes or with user and market validation. Use it.

My takeaway? Strategic use of Design is the solution… Half of our job is to challenge, so we end up with something truly better. The other half is to take away the risk, by proving that better works.

In Summary…

This stuff is really hard, so let’s not beat ourselves up, but talk with open hearts, and support each other in keeping our sprits and fighting energy up. And remember that design, (as pragmatic, commercially applied creativity) is the superpower for breaking through the existing, into new that’s “better for all” - people, planet and profit.

And that means we the Designers will try to remember we’re helping you to take calculated steps into the new, not idealistic shots in the dark.

Now What?

If this sounds like sense to you and you want to know what it could mean for your company, then don't let this opportunity float away... as you'd never then find out what we could have added to the world if that happens!

So get in touch - we'd love to learn more about your ambitions and sketch out a plan of what we could Realise together, with some simple steps to start moving forward. Let's get positive!

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