Lessons learnt from using a planet-centred persona

Service Design working group notes

Kin + Carta has committed to helping our clients reduce their carbon emissions by a total of one million tonnes over the next 5 years. This requires a daily practice of figuring out how to make products, services, businesses and their cultures more sustainable, both in terms of reduced carbon emissions and a lower impact on nature and biodiversity.

A lot of important decisions are made in the discovery and delivery stages of a project. Decisions that are difficult to reverse if they turn out to have a negative impact. Unpicking decisions made early on in the project further down the line can be like trying to unscramble an omelette.

From an environmental perspective, we can avoid this by incorporating sustainability into our decision-making from the start.

With that in mind, we’ve started a journey to change our mindsets and approach to designing products and services so that we can help companies generate fewer carbon emissions and have a lower impact on the planet, whilst still providing a great experience.

As stated by Leyla Acarolgu, when sustainability is framed as a set of technical skills and processes and then applied at the decision-making level of business, it can dramatically improve the social and environmental performance of the products and experiences.

There are an array of tools that are used to help us bake sustainability into our practice. We started by looking at the Planet Persona created by team from Smaply

The tool focus on:

• Visualising the environment’s needs and pain points in a business context
• Giving the planet (and even future generations?) a voice within your design and innovation process
• Getting alignment, internally and even externally, on planetary needs

“Much like all personas, a planet persona can be tailored to showcase the most important information found in your research. In this case, the research might rather be guidelines from your local government or municipality on how to combat climate change. Or perhaps even your employee and customer feedback for improvements in sustainability (planet pain points)” Paul Cook

Source: Planet-centred design from Smaply

We put the tools into action with different project teams and this is what we learnt:

• We might not know enough about what “good” looks like: To complete the given template (specifically the action section) we needed a better understanding of what good looks like — without that we found ourselves referring to the same things that are most frequently mentioned in news articles, (e.g. green coding, data storage, renewable energy, etc.). We quickly realised that we don’t know enough about what is “bad” and “good”; what is actually harming or could harm the planet? And here I am thinking that there is a knowledge gap on causes and effects and what are other alternatives/solutions available. This meant that we were probably missing a lot of ideas and opportunities here.
• It’s all about what happens before and after: For this exercise to work the research that has been done previously needs to also have been done with a sustainability mindset, and we need to find ways of utilising and advocating for this persona to be used throughout the design process. Using the tool in isolation would already be beneficial, but I felt that it would be much easier to utilise if the whole process have a sustainability foundation.
• It can be challenging to understand non-human ‘needs’: and that’s the exact reason why we need to do this type of exercise. However, it turns out that putting yourself in the shoes of the planet will require a lot more empathy. We found it challenging because we can quite easily get the planet and business sustainable goals mixed it up — this perhaps happened because in the tool we are framing the questions from both the business and the planet perspective. For example, the pain point section is from a planet perspective, which can be common pain points such as waste and Co2 emissions, but to make it specific to the project it should be in relation to the business context, otherwise, we end up with very generic answers, moving away from the objective of driving empathy.

After using the tool, we were inspired to make some tweaks and imagine what we would do differently next time:

• First of all, as part of the workshop, we should give time for people to prepare beforehand, or account for the research time during the session, and provide guidelines to them on what “good looks like”, common problems and solutions;
• In the framework, we thought that separating the business from the planet would help the exercise. So we are proposing to have two sections:

Section 1: Understanding your project

• We are adding one section for the team to reflect on and add what is the problem statement
• As part of educating ourselves and understanding the business, we added a section to outline what are their sustainability goals and a section to list existing initiatives: what are the things that the business is already doing that contributes

Section 2: Understanding the planet in relation to your project

• We kept the quote and pain points section, with the emphasis that the pain point should be in relation to the problem statement.
• We added a section for needs: what are the planet’s needs in this context?
• And similar to a traditional persona template, we modified the action section to be more like an ideal experience: what would an ideal experience look like for the planet
• Finally just as some other persona templates as well, we added another services section — what are other services, products, and brands that the planet would like to use? This would be great to give them some inspiration and to also help them to do some market research

See below what our new template looks like. You can access the template here.

I have to say, it’s amazing that we have so many tools at our disposal, but it really isn’t just about taking the tool off the shelf and putting at use. As designers, we still have a bit to do to make sure we can use such tools in our daily practice. Using these tools is part of a broader scheme of how we currently design. Nonetheless, this is no reason to not do it, we need to start somewhere right? I will carry on trying as many tools as possible.

I would love to hear about your experience with adding sustainability to your practice, or about trying and using some of these sustainability tools. If you do implement our feedback, let me know how it goes! It would be amazing to keep iterating.

Our Design Practice is growing. We’re a 70+ strong team of designers covering a wide range of design specialisms, from Service and Product Design to Brand Experience and Content Strategy. We’re organised in PoDs — People of Discipline and we meet regularly to grow our capabilities and advance our service offering.

Join us, we’ve got open roles across the board. Don’t see any roles up your street? Get in touch, we’re always keen to meet new talents!