Opportunities to create change and the approach
By: Sampada Muralidhar
Tags: Service Design, Decathlon, Sustainability

When you truely want to do something opportunities show they say, this became a literal reality in my case. I always somehow saw myself as an environmentalist at heart and through my major project i wanted to do address the global climate change and make the most of my role as a climate advocate.

My drive for climate action and sustainability comes from a very personal space. We lost our old family home to the floods that happened along the west coast of India in 2019. I always knew the impact of climate change and how important it is to take action, but this incident stirred something deep inside me. It was a reality check of what we have done to the planet and how it is impacting us, and if we don’t act now, it is not long before we lose it all. This fuels me everyday and every decision I make. To become a more responsible global citizen. Climate action/ steps towards sustainability has become the need of the hour. And I try to make the most of every opportunity I get to be able to make some positive change towards our planet.

Well i was given an opportunity to work with decathlon on their sustainability visions for the company and I grabbed the opportunity with open arms. It was interesting to learn how large global organisations like decathlon approach sustainability and how they build sustainability around their core values as an organisation. They had their goals set around a few key pillars like energy, transportation, awareness, circular economy.

During my work at decathlon I would really like to build or contribute my work around the awareness and the circular economy initiatives of the organisation. Through practice learn and implement a more sustainable practice with in the organisation.

The plan to approach the project is to work closely with one or multiple organization over the next couple of months. Work in close proximity to understand there values and working patterns of the people of the organization. Begin with understanding there current perspective of sustainability and the emergency of the climate action. And the organizational stance on the topic by an audit. And co design solutions with them and find effective solutions that would add value to the organisations while being kind to the planet.

I would like to use the double diamond as an overarching framework to guide me through the design process. My approach would be to keep it people centred and participatory to the most possible extant. I would also like to use a few agile principles in the approach of the project which would emphasise on the iterative nature of the project keeping it open and flexible.

By, The Design council

Further more I would love to explore the research through design methodology in my project to understand how can design be used to explore open-ended questions? I want to leverage on the availability of some key stakeholders and users in the early stages of my project by using the research through design I would want to explore on making my research phase of the project highly collaborative and iterative.

by Holly Ribbions http://www.hollyrobbins.com/research-through-design

Further more i would like understand the impact that my project would have in the real world. I would like to test my idea/ prototype in a different organisational set up to understand the flexibility of the concept and find ways to make it more robust.