Why Systemic Thinking Matters

In the realm of product development and design, sustainability is often treated as a checklist item, narrowly focused on either environmental or financiaal performance, and very rarelly introduces social considerations. Even as sustainability professionals emphasize the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and economic aspects—and insist that no product can be truly sustainable without balancing all three—misconceptions persist. This includes newer generations, who have grown up with sustainability as a core concept and encountered it in school, but in which realm, "sustainable" is often misinterpreted as merely "environmentally friendly," or worse, as synonymous with "low in embedded carbon." This narrow perspective permeates academia and the corporate world alike, leading to sustainability efforts that focus almost exclusively on environmental dimensions while neglecting social and economic considerations.

On the flip side, industries producing life-critical products, such as medical devices, often avoid addressing environmental impacts altogether. With patient safety as the top priority, there is a tendency to dismiss alternatives out of a widespread and biased belief that what benefits the environment inherently compromises human health. This dichotomy—overemphasis on environmental aspects in some sectors and outright avoidance in others—creates a fragmented approach to sustainability, hindering the development of products that can truly balance the needs of people, planet, and prosperity.

This fragmented approach may lead to products that excel in one area but fail catastrophically in another. For instance, a product may significantly reduce carbon emissions but rely on materials sourced through exploitative labor practices, or it may prioritize affordability for underserved communities while depleting finite natural resources. Such one-dimensional approaches not only fail to address the intricate relationship between environmental and socioeconomic sustainability but also perpetuate systemic issues.

While there are multiple aproaches, I like Doughnut Economics, a framework introduced by economist Kate Raworth. It offers a compelling alternative to understand better how the different environmental and social varibles interact among each other. By balancing the ecological ceiling and the social foundation, this model encourages product designers and engineers to innovate within a "safe and just space" for humanity.

At the same time, sustainability efforts often fall victim to what is known as the "Carbon Tunnel Vision"—a narrow focus on reducing carbon emissions at the expense of other environmental and social considerations. While carbon reduction is undeniably crucial, this singular focus can lead to unintended consequences, such as biodiversity loss, resource depletion, or social inequities.

The Problem with One-Dimensional Sustainability in Product Design

The pressure to innovate quickly and deliver market-ready products often pushes teams to focus on specific sustainability metrics, such as reducing carbon emissions or minimizing material costs. While these efforts are well-intentioned, they can lead to unintended consequences:

1. Environmental Overreach at the Cost of Social Equity

Take the example of electric vehicles (EVs). While EVs are often celebrated as a solution to climate change due to their reduced greenhouse gas emissions over a full life cycle, their production is heavily reliant on lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth metals. Mining these materials often occurs under exploitative conditions, involving child labor, unsafe working environments, and displacement of local communities.

In this case, the focus on environmental benefit, specifically in climate chaange, overshadows critical social considerations, creating a sustainability imbalance that undermines the broader goals of equitable progress.

2. Social Gains That Push Ecological Limits

On the other hand, products designed to improve access to essential goods and services often strain ecological boundaries. For example, single-use medical devices provide affordable healthcare solutions in underserved regions but generate significant plastic waste. Similarly, low-cost appliances may rely on energy-intensive manufacturing processes or non-recyclable materials, further exacerbating environmental degradation.

3. Carbon Tunnel Vision

Carbon Tunnel Vision occurs when sustainability efforts are overly concentrated on reducing carbon emissions while neglecting other critical environmental and social dimensions. For example, prioritizing carbon-neutral materials without assessing their impact on biodiversity, water usage, or labor practices can lead to unintended trade-offs.

• Example: A company might switch to bio-based plastics to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-based materials, but fail to consider the deforestation, water scarcity. biodiversity lost or food competition caused by large-scale agricultural production (usually monocultures) for the bioplastics industry.

By focusing exclusively on carbon, companies risk creating solutions that are unsustainable in other dimensions, ultimately undermining their long-term goals.

4. Technological Solutions Without Systemic Thinking

Even when design for sustainability principles are applied, their success often depends on broader systemic factors. For instance, a product designed for recyclability is ineffective if the local infrastructure cannot process the materials. Similarly, a repairable product may fail to deliver its intended benefits if spare parts are inaccessible or prohibitively expensive.

Without addressing these systemic dependencies, even the most innovative designs risk falling short of their sustainability goals.

Connecting the Dots: A Holistic Approach

Doughnut Economics is one of the frameworks that offers a more integrated approach to sustainability by defining two critical boundaries:

1. The Ecological Ceiling: This represents the planet's biophysical limits, such as climate stability, biodiversity, and freshwater availability. Crossing these boundaries leads to environmental degradation that threatens the planet's capacity to sustain life.
2. The Social Foundation: This encompasses essential human needs, including access to food, water, healthcare, education, and equity. Falling below this foundation leaves people in poverty and vulnerability.

The "safe and just space" lies between these boundaries, where humanity can thrive without exceeding the planet's limits. For product development and design, this framework challenges teams to innovate in ways that respect both ecological and social dimensions.

Product Development with a Systemic Approach

Integratina systemic approach into product design requires a shift in mindset, moving from siloed thinking to a holistic approach. Below are strategies to apply this effectively:

• Expanding metrics' scope: Extend your analysis beyond carbon footprints by conducting a comprehensive assessment of a product's entire lifecycle. Consider its impacts on water resources, biodiversity, social equity, and other relevant factors. Integrate social life cycle assessment, life cycle costing, and organizational life cycle assessment alongside environmental life cycle assessment. If a full-scale assessment is resource-intensive, conduct a thorough qualitative environmental and social risk assessment. This evaluation should identify potential negative impacts, pinpoint the life cycle stages where these impacts occur, determine the timeframe of their effects, and outline the necessary design controls to prevent, mitigate, or even reverse them.
• Considering multi-Stakeholder Perspective: Ensure that the perspectives of all stakeholders throughout the entire product lifecycle are considered, extending beyond the final user and manufacturing employees. This necessitates to consider ecosystemss and communities as stakeholders too, and understanding the interactions between stakeholders and the product at every stage, from raw material extraction to end-of-life, including its components, materials, and packaging.
• Systemic approach: Understand the Interactions. Not only at product level, but also with externalities, such as political, economic, social, technological, environmental or legal (PESTLE) externalities. At the saame time, all effects should be understood. Some effects might trigger other ones, that could be positive effects, or negative effects or trade-offs, that shall be identified in early stages, and risk controls set.
• Balance trade-offs: Trade-offs can arise when attempting to balance environmental, social, economic, and functional requirements. Recognizing and addressing these trade-offs systematically ensures that decisions align with both sustainability goals and the overall product objectives. Trade-offs may occur when improving one aspect of sustainability negatively affects another or impacts the product's performance, cost, or usability.
• Set baselines to compare. Since all products inherently have negative impacts, sustainability assessments aim to determine which are less unsustainable by using a baseline, often derived from existing solutions with similar functions, and applying quantitative data or expert judgment to assess performance.

2. Designing Within Planetary Boundaries

Respecting the environmental cealing, begins with understanding the environmental of a product across its full lifecycle. This includes raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and end-of-life disposal. For this, making a Life Cycle Assessment could be beneficial, or, as exposed previously, make a qualitative analysis of the potential environmental impacts at ech life cycle phase by evaluating the impacts in each of the nine planetary boundaries.

While the conventional Impact Categories of an Environmental LCA align with the nine planetary boundaries, LCAs primarily provide comparative information, indicating whether one product performs better or worse than another within each impact category. Normalization methodologies can facilitate comparisons across impact categories, but few can effectively assess the collective impact of all products produced and consumed within a given period relative to each planetary boundary.

Even if a single product has minimal environmental impact but is consumed infrequently compared to hundreds other products with higher impacts, its overall contribution to the total impact remains negligible. Therefore, even if a company strives for minimal environmental impact, the collective impact of many other companies operating "business as usual" can overshadow these individual efforts.

This underscores the critical role of intersectoral collaboration. The planetary boundaries represent a holistic framework for the entire planet, demanding an understanding of how every product and service collectively impacts the environment. By acknowledging the interconnectedness of these factors, the focus shifts away from solely evaluating individual products or companies and towards understanding how similar products can be improved collectively.

Intersectoral collaboration becomes crucial for effectively addressing this challenge.

3. Supporting the Social Foundation

Meeting the social foundation involves designing products that enhance human well-being, promote equity, and ensure ethical practices throughout the supply chain. This requires a deep understanding of the social context in which a product operates, but too how a poor environment could affect the wellbeing of communities, and how social dynamics affect the environment.

Social well-being and environmental impact are intricately linked. Environmental degradation, such as pollution and climate change, negatively impacts human health, livelihoods, and exacerbates existing inequalities. Conversely, social factors like poverty, inequality, and consumption patterns drive environmental degradation. Addressing social issues like poverty and inequality, while simultaneously promoting environmental protection, is crucial for achieving both social and environmental sustainability.

However, we need to think twice what we consider "human wellbeing", preciselly because it seemss that the western concept of "wellbeing" is what is affecting our planet.

One particularly noteworthy study that shows the interrelaation of social wellbeing indicators with the environment, is 'A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries' from Leeds University. This research provides valuable insights into the intricate connections between social and environmental factors. It is both fascinating and concerning to observe how improvements in social parameters, such as reducing inequality and ensuring access to essential services, are often linked to a decrease in environmental impact, but under certain limits.

The latest World Happiness Report reveals too this concerning paradox: while more developed countries, with higher consumption and production levels, tend to exhibit greater perceived well-being, this often comes at the expense of significant environmental impacts. This observation highlights a critical disconnect between individual well-being and collective planetary health, particularly in relation to Sustainable Development Goals 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and 13 (Climate Action).

This discrepancy underscores the urgent need for a re-evaluation of our current economic models and consumption patterns. It suggests that prioritizing individual well-being without considering its environmental consequences may ultimately undermine long-term human flourishing and the health of the planet.

To support the previous, we have the Overshoot Day, and we can observe that most of the countries that will run-out of their planetary budget during the year, are considered rich or developed countriess, or have a very high GDP.

From the oposite perspective, policies which solely seek to protect and enhance the environment without considering the affectations to wellbeing and economic growth, considerably affect these last ones.

However, not everything is lost or hopeless. This other recent study suggests that, while a transitional period with potentially no immediate environmental gains may occur as societal well-being improves, ongoing efforts to enhance social and economic conditions will ultimately lead to environmental improvements. On the other hand, several studies have shown a strong correlation between human health (and thus, less expenses of the public health sector) in countries or regions that impose more strict environmental regulations. This is complemented that the very well studied fact that climate change exacerbate poverty and leads to a significant reduction to competitivity, while inequalities lead to environmental degradation.

The OECD ahe OECD and the UN concur that addressing inequities and enhancing overall societal well-being will ultimately lead to reduced environmental impacts. However, they emphasize the importance of carefully considering and mitigating potential trade-offs. While a sense of urgency prevails regarding the need to address environmental challenges, ignoring social well-being risks a social and political backlash if segments of society are left behind in the pursuit of environmental goals. Strategic and systemic thinking is crucial to understand the social and political context and prioritize social features in product development.

But, which are those features that depend on design, and not on corporate practices or purchasing policies? I have already explored this in my previous entry "Social aspects of different design approaches", where I state the importance to make products that are Reasonable priced, Reachable, Rememberable, Respectfull and Reliable, or the the Five Social Rs for Circular Economy. As a reminder, I list below some features that need special attention:

• Have a positive social impact: Meaning that every single product existing in the market should make people's life easier and create or maintain the wellbeing. Products with a social purpose offer a distinct advantage over those that solely focus on profit. By integrating social and environmental considerations into their design, production, and distribution, these products not only fulfill consumer needs but also contribute to a more just and sustainable society. This approach fosters stronger customer loyalty, enhances brand reputation, and aligns with the growing consumer demand for ethical and responsible consumption, ultimately creating a more meaningful and impactful business model.
• Safe and healthy during sourcing and manufacturing: Understand how the workers are exposed to the product, its components and materials or substances during the manufacturing process. Being it ensuring that the ergonomy of a process is not compromised due to a poor design, or that the manufacturing requires unnecessary hazardous substances or process that could be avoided with a change in the design.
• Avoid critical or conflict materials: If, from the very outset of the design, the materials selection process identifies materials with a high risk of being critical, both in terms of availability or risks related to human rights, including the human right to a clean and safe environment. The engineering team can proactively explore and implement alternative materials that offer equivalent quality and cost performance while avoiding those with higher risk. This proactive approach involves identifying and selecting suitable alternatives to mitigate potential issues, and thus, boosts innovation in the seek to new materials or new ways to create and apply them.
• Create a sense of belonging: This focuses on fostering a long-term relationship between the user and the product. This can be achieved by emphasizing the product's durability, repairability, and upgradability. By encouraging users to maintain, repair, and upgrade their products, companies can extend product lifespans, reduce waste, and minimize environmental impact. Furthermore, fostering a sense of community and knowledge sharing among users can empower them to care for their products more effectively and contribute to a more sustainable product lifecycle
• Make an universal, inclusive product: This comes hand in hand with diverse product development teams. Having different points of view, different colour skins, different genders and even functional diversities in the R&D team can provide insights on how to avoid leaving others behind.

4. Balancing Trade-Offs

Trade-offs are inevitable in product development, but understanding social and environmental interrelationships will make easier to identify them and set control actions, and prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term gains.

Case Studies: Learning from Success and Failure

1. Electric Vehicle’s Lithium Dilemma

Electric vehicles (EVs) have significantly reduced tailpipe emissions, marking a crucial step towards a more sustainable transportation sector. However, the widespread adoption of EVs presents new challenges.

• Reliance on Critical Minerals: EV production heavily relies on critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements, often sourced from regions with poor labor and environmental standards.
• Resource Scarcity: Even with 100% recycling rates, the projected demand for these critical materials within the next decade will likely exceed supply, creating potential shortages and price volatility.
• Social and Environmental Impacts: The extraction and processing of these minerals can have significant social and environmental impacts, including human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and geopolitical risks.

To address these challenges, the industry is actively exploring:

• Novel Materials: Research and development are underway to identify and develop alternative battery chemistries that minimize reliance on critical minerals.
• Closed-Loop Systems: Implementing robust recycling and remanufacturing processes for batteries is crucial to recover valuable materials and minimize waste.
• Supply Chain Transparency: Enhancing transparency and accountability throughout the supply chain is essential to ensure ethical and sustainable sourcing practices.

2. Fairphone: Good intentions to set new parameters

Fairphone, a modular smartphone company, exemplifies a balanced approach to product development by prioritizing both social and environmental considerations. While meeting product performance requirements, Fairphone focuses on sourcing components from fair suppliers with demonstrated working conditions standards, and designing for repairability and upgradability as its core business model. This approach minimizes electronic waste and promotes fair labor practices within its supply chain, aligning with the concept of a "safe and just space."

However, Fairphone has faced challenges. Some users have expressed concerns regarding the product performance compared to competitors. Additionally, repair technicians have historically preferred working with other brands due to factors such as spare parts availability and repair downtime. Fairphone has actively addressed these concerns through continuous improvements in product design, repair services, and spare parts availability.

3. Single-Use Plastics in Medical Devices

The medical industry heavily relies on single-use plastics, posing significant environmental challenges. While crucial for patient safety, this reliance contributes to plastic pollution and resource depletion.

To address this, the industry is exploring alternatives like bio-based polymers (e.g., Polyhydroxyalkanoates, Polylactic Acid, Polyglycolide) for applications like tissue engineering and drug delivery. The imminent ban on PFAs is further driving the search for novel materials, particularly for non-patient-contact devices.

Furthermore, recycling initiatives are gaining traction. Mechanical and chemical recycling methods are increasingly incorporated into packaging systems, often as secondary or tertiary barriers. Reusable packaging, especially for outer layers, is also becoming more prevalent in hospitals.

This transition towards sustainable practices is essential to minimize the environmental impact of the healthcare sector while maintaining patient safety and quality of care.

4. The challenges of fast fashion

H&M, a prominent fast-fashion retailer, initially garnered attention for its use of recycled materials, aligning with consumer demand for sustainable products. However, the company faced significant criticism for its broader environmental and social impacts.

• Environmental Concerns: Critics pointed to the environmental footprint of its fast-fashion model, including the excessive use of virgin materials, the generation of significant textile waste, and the environmental impacts of its global supply chain.
• Social Concerns: Allegations of low wages, poor working conditions, and human rights abuses in some of its supplier factories further tarnished the company's image.

In response to these challenges, H&M has taken steps to improve its sustainability performance:

• Expanding the use of recycled materials: Increasing the use of recycled materials across its product lines.
• Improving product quality and durability: Enhancing the quality and durability of its garments to extend their lifespan and reduce waste.
• Addressing supply chain issues: Implementing initiatives to improve working conditions, ensure fair wages, and address human rights concerns within its supply chain.
• Promoting circularity: Launching initiatives to collect and recycle old clothing, aiming to close the loop and minimize textile waste.

While these efforts represent progress, challenges remain. Ensuring living wages for all workers throughout its complex supply chain and minimizing the environmental impact of its production processes continue to be significant challenges for H&M.

This example demonstrates the interconnected nature of environmental and social challenges within a globalized supply chain. Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach that considers the entire lifecycle of a product, from raw material sourcing to end-of-life management, while simultaneously ensuring fair and equitable treatment of workers throughout the supply chain.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Holistic Product Development

To truly integrate social, environmental, and economic factors into a holistic approach to product development, it's crucial to recognize and address common pitfalls:

Overlooking Social Equity in Environmental Solutions:

• Environmental innovations, such as biodegradable products, often assume the existence of supporting infrastructure. For example, a biodegradable packaging material that requires industrial composting facilities may be ineffective in regions with limited access to such infrastructure, effectively excluding low-income communities and exacerbating existing inequalities.
• Solutions must consider the social context and ensure equitable access to and benefit from environmental technologies. This may involve developing alternative waste management solutions, providing subsidies for composting infrastructure, or designing products that can be composted in home environments.

Ignoring Environmental Limits in Social Solutions:

• Products designed to address social needs, such as affordable housing, can unintentionally contribute to environmental degradation if they rely on resource-intensive materials, unsustainable supply chains, or promote unsustainable consumption patterns. For example, mass-produced, low-cost housing often utilizes cheap but environmentally harmful materials, contributes to urban sprawl, and requires high energy consumption for heating and cooling.
• Sustainable social solutions must prioritize the use of renewable and recycled materials, minimize environmental impact throughout the product lifecycle, and promote sustainable consumption patterns among users.

Failing to Account for Systemic Dependencies:

• Sustainable products often rely on supportive systems to achieve their intended impact. For example, a product designed for easy repair requires access to repair services and readily available spare parts.
• Similarly, a product designed for recycling requires robust recycling infrastructure and consumer education to ensure proper disposal and material recovery. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the broader system within which the product operates, identifying and addressing potential barriers to achieving sustainable outcomes.

By carefully considering these pitfalls and proactively addressing potential challenges, companies can develop products that not only meet the needs of users but also contribute to a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.

The Role of Product Teams

For product managers, engineers, and designers, combined models provide powerful frameworks for navigating the complexities of sustainability in product development. By embracing this framework, teams can:

• Foster Deep Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Move beyond traditional silos and actively engage with experts in environmental science, social policy, supply chain management, and community development. This collaborative approach ensures a holistic understanding of the product's impacts and enables the identification of innovative solutions that address both social and environmental challenges.
• Leverage Data-Driven Insights and Tools: Utilize tools like Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) and Material Flow Cost Accounting to quantify the environmental, social and economic impacts of product design, production, use and final disposal. Leverage data to identify areas for improvement, track progress towards sustainability goals, and communicate the value proposition of sustainable products to stakeholders.
• Innovate with Purpose: Shift the focus from incremental improvements to creating products that contribute to systemic change. Explore innovative business models, such as product-as-a-service, platform based economy or others that fit circular economy, create wellbeing while reduce consumption. Think how to make a product regenerative both during its use and end of life, to address root causes of environmental and social challenges. Prioritize the development of products that meet human needs while staying within the ecological boundaries of the planet.
• Cultivate a Culture of Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Regularly review and refine product development processes based on feedback from different stakeholders, new research, and evolving understanding of environmental and social impacts. Embrace a culture of experimentation and learning, iteratively improving product designs and business models to maximize their positive impact.

This involves not only developing innovative and sustainable products but also actively contributing to systemic change within their organizations and across the broader value chain.

The Role of Policy Makers & Lobbyst

Policymakers play a pivotal role in shaping the market conditions that incentivize sustainable product development. By creating a supportive policy framework, governments can encourage businesses to prioritize environmental and social considerations throughout the product lifecycle.

Sadly, many companies still operate within a framework of compliance when it comes to sustainability, meaning they primarily focus on meeting minimum legal requirements rather than proactively pursuing ambitious sustainability goals. While voluntary frameworks are crucial, government intervention often remains necessary to drive significant progress towards sustainability when voluntary approaches fall short.

As we have explored, policymakers bear the significant responsibility of finding the right balance to avoid harming the social fabric by inadvertently threatening the welfare state when implementing environmental policies. Conversely, they must also avoid creating social policies that inadvertently increase pressure on ecosystems.

Effective policymaking requires a strong evidence base and a willingness to make sometimes unpopular decisions for the long-term benefit of society and the environment. In this sense, public awareness campaigns are crucial for informing citizens about the rationale behind policies and their broader societal benefits. However, these campaigns must be based on sound scientific evidence, involve diverse stakeholders and be systemic, to ensure transparency and avoid the spread of misinformation

The role of lobbyists within corporations remains a contentious issue. Ideally, lobbying should serve as a platform for constructive dialogue, fostering regulations that balance social and environmental value with the ability of businesses to generate economic value. However, many companies still allocate significant resources to lobbying efforts aimed at delaying, weakening, or reshaping regulations to serve their interests, often prioritizing short-term profits over long-term sustainability.

To address this, companies must rethink how they approach economic value creation. Lobbying should transform from a tool of resistance to progress into a mechanism for collaboration—one that aligns corporate goals with societal and environmental well-being. Instead of acting as opposing forces competing for limited natural resources, businesses and societies must work together as interconnected entities, driving mutual prosperity while safeguarding the planet.

Conclusion

In an era of climate change, resource scarcity, and social inequality, product development must evolve beyond one-dimensional sustainability. By innovating within the "safe and just space," design teams can create solutions that not only perform well but also contribute to a thriving planet and society.

The path forward is clear: embrace complexity, prioritize balance, and design with the three dimensions of sustainability in mind, not just one. Only by addressing both environmental and social dimensions can we achieve truly sustainable product development. For product teams, the challenge is not just to create better products but to build a better future. This necessitates a shift in mindset, a commitment to continuous learning, and a willingness to embrace innovation and navigate the complexities of the interconnected world we inhabit.