Trying a test run of a sustainable product design workshop on Nov 29th in Berlin
I work as a freelance developer / user researcher / product person, and later in December, I'm teaming up with Dr Isabel Ordóñez to run a workshop, Designing Out Waste at ThingsCon in Rotterdam. We're doing a test run first in Berlin, so if you're in Berlin and you work on building physical products (and ideally, connected/IoT products) it might be up your street.
More details on the workshop for ThingsCon
Here's the workshop abstract.
Around 80 percent the environmental impact of a product or service happens as a result of decisions made at the early design phase. If you want to reduce the impact, and have the rest of the team with you, you need to know how to think about this phase, and how to talk about the trade-offs you’ll make to achieve these reductions. This is the goal of this session.
The test run
We're doing it on Nov 29th, Factory Mitte, at 6pm.
Why are we doing this?
I've blogged before about Fairphone and sustainable electronics before, and over the last 5 years, I've lead the life-cycle group when working on a programme of sorts with the IoTMark project.
Generally speaking, when we talk about the environmental impact of electronics, as an industry there's plenty of people saying how bad things are, and plenty of evidence to support this, but sadly very few good examples to point to if you want to do something responsible, and many of us don't know where to start.
When I was working in the lifecycle group, just finding a set of actions people could agree to was a huge challenge, because while there are tools and approaches you can take, they're often seen as the domain only of sustainability experts and the general level of education is absymal.
Meeting Dr Isabel Ordóñez
Fortunately, at an event in Berlin a around 6 months ago, I met Dr Isabel Ordóñez, who had recently finished a thesis investigating the blockers to adopting sustainable design. After meeting, we started talking about how to make it more approachable, and after reading her phD thesis, I found loads of answers to the problems I had encountered myself over the last five years.
A month or so later, I saw her present again at Open Source Circular Economy Days at the EUREF Campus to an audience interested in environmental sustainability but with little or no professional experience working in the field.
The ideas and measures she presented we easy to understand, and practical, and looked like they'd work in a short workshop.
Teaming up for a workshop
So, over the last few weeks, we've been meeting to work on the learning materials, and activities and we think we've got enough now to help people wanting to take their first steps, by introducing them to some useful frameworks for thinking, and some free resources.
There's more than you might expect out there now - there are tools like theoretical tools, like MET matrixes to systematically structure your thinking, the way a Business Model Canvas can help you think you how a business will work. And there are increasingly freely available resources and datasets about the materials you can work with, as well as freely available, open source software to help model this now.
We think there's enough there now for people to start seeing some value from applying what they learn, and also make some measurable improvements to their own practice.
Doing a practice run on Nov 29th
Before we run it at a conference where people have paid a few hundred euros to attend, it seemed worth doing a practice run, so that's exactly what we're doing on Thursday 29th November in Factory Berlin, Mitte.
We have a handful of spaces, so if in your line of work you design connected physical products or electronics, or are part of the team providing a service around them, we'd love to hear from you.
Releasing the workshop material after the conference
After the conference, we'll be releasing the workshop materials and worksheets under a CC license, in a format that's suitable for running workshops yourself.
We'll also be releasing a template for Realtimeboard, suitable for using in a remote, synchronous, moderated workshop format, so you don't need to physically be in Berlin to benefit from it. I'll be looking for people to try this with later in December again.
Getting in touch
You can reach me all the ways listed on this page, and on social media, you can reach me via direct message on Twitter and Facebook, and yes, even on LinkedIn.