WORDS BY PAUL BENNETT

After years of Covid darkness, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend the end of last year traveling around and talking to people about design and its role in the future of social welfare, business, and issues related to climate.

One of those conversations was with the country of Wales, and in particular Sophie Howe, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales and her team. Described by the Guardian as the “World’s First Minister of the Unborn”, Sophie’s role is to provide independent advice to the Government and other public bodies in Wales on delivering social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing for current and future generations. She’s a committed advocate for the voices of young people and in particular, for tapping into youth culture as a tool for creating societal change.

Sophie invited me to take part in an event she was hosting at (COP26), the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow late last year, and so off to Scotland I went. My mother, who passed away a few years ago, was from Glasgow, so returning there was bittersweet. I had not been back for over 50 years. I hardly recognized it.

To enter the conference itself, you were granted a pass to one of two “zones” — the Blue Zone or the Green Zone — loosely bundled as policy and culture. My role was to represent government and creativity in equal parts, so I was granted access to both. The contrast was startling.

The Blue Zone teemed with heads of government and policymakers. Everyone in skinny suits and pointy shoes. Cohorts walking with tremendous urgency, discussing their “key talking points.” I attended a few sessions — lots of clip art of globes, lots of numbers, lots of rhetoric, lots of the same old same old. Death by mathematics. I left the sessions thinking they were necessary, but overwhelmingly incremental, data-driven, and to be frank, massively unimaginative.

The Green Zone was the unplugged, acoustic version of the conference. Even outside the energy was different. As I walked in, a lady dressed as Evita, sang“Don’t feed the greed, Argentina, The truth is you give them Nature. All through your wildlife, Your green resilience, Just keep your glaciers, And save the planet!” This zone was full of color and life, installations of melting ice, a whiteboard entitled “What is The Feminist Future We Are Fighting For?” filled with wishes, poetry, and art. It had a kind of plaid-and-braids Taylor Swift “Evermore” vibe. I heard the participants of this zone referred to as “youth with claws”.

Back to Wales. I’d been invited by the Welsh team to moderate a conversation alongside their Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Commissioner of Wales, Taylor Edmonds. She was young and filled with heart and energy. They paid homage to a deep-rooted Welsh tradition called “Chairing of the Bard’’ that dates back to an 1176 Welsh storytelling festival wherein the Chief Bard tells stories and reads poems about the future. Edmonds’ chair, made for the occasion, was carved with the future hopes of school children. We called the event “Climate, in the Visceral Sense.” Before she spoke, we screened a short film, “Ynys Blastig Blot-Euwedd,” made by Welsh school children, about a girl who befriends and then loses mother nature. Then Taylor composed and recited a poem on the spot, called “Riverbank Guardian.” It ended thus:

Our town was built around the Oak Tree,
her underground map of roots,
her peeling bark, her curling branches.
Each day I walk to the riverbank,
standing guard, my still sanctuary
of ground where in Spring,
acorns will sprout green.

Ask yourself — will your great grandchildren
dip their feet to the low river of summers
and walk the streets you walk today?

As I walked around the Green Zone I was struck by the fact that so many businesses had a presence — IKEA, Sainsbury’s, many others. They’d built artful exhibits out of cardboard and other natural materials; there were posters inviting participation, seeds to be taken away and planted, pledges to sign, stories to carry with you. It felt hopeful, modern, joyful even.

I kept thinking to myself, why have we set up this polarity between the Blue and Green zones? One math, the other poetry. To understand the complex systems challenge of climate change, and start a global movement to address it, don’t we need both?

We Need a New Zone. Let’s call this aspirational plane The Turquoise Zone — a place where the logic of blue meets the imagination of green. Looking toward COP27 in Egypt and COP28 in the U.A.E., I’m hoping for a more holistic, integrated approach: imbuing the science, rigor, and public and private sector leverage with what makes us feel alive — music, art, movement, poetry.

This new thinking will help us design events that address the climate crisis and the movement it is giving rise to. The language of this plane is dynamic, sometimes lashingly so. It contains a million colors. The Turquoise Zone turns the flatness of linear and binary thinking into something immersive and incandescent — azure, glinting, shimmering, alive in its depths — like the ocean itself.

As human-centered designers, our mathematicians and poets know that durable climate solutions must appeal to both the head and the heart. Would you join us in bringing the brightest blue and green thinking together to create a vibrant turquoise future? We’d love to hear from you.

Read more about IDEO’s climate work: cantwait.ideo.com/climate

Posted by Dean Malmgren

Over the past year, IDEO has been working toward meeting a series of wide-ranging climate commitments. In the first phase of our work, we tackled what some might consider “low hanging fruit” in the work toward Net Zero: we estimated our carbon footprint, offset our greenhouse gas emissions, switched to renewable energy, experimented with a modest carbon tax, and improved our responsible retirement investment options.

While these strides are significant, there is still so much more to do — and time is of the essence. There are countless ways forward, but we’re eager to share four next steps we have in mind.

1. Track and manage emissions (Part 2)

Building on our previous exploration, we’re ready to tackle phase two of emissions accounting. At the top of our priority list is identifying a comprehensive emissions accounting solution to track and manage down our Scope 3 emissions. It’s difficult to imagine how we will empower IDEOers to make sustainable decisions without giving them access to data about the environmental impact of those choices. After all, what’s the point of managing down your emissions if you don’t get credit for working with Clean Co. over Dirty Co.? Investing in an emissions accounting platform will help get us one step closer to estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint and identifying viable climate-friendly alternatives at scale. From there, we hope to experiment with things like internal carbon taxes or incentives for individuals and teams to manage their carbon footprint.

2. Embed sustainability throughout the project cycle

Despite the increase in climate-forward projects IDEO has taken on, we are still not fully set up to account for the downstream implications of our work. With that in mind, we’re exploring what it would look like to introduce sustainability at every touch point of the project lifecycle — from initial client conversations to final deliverables. In practice, this might look like sustainability design reviews with external experts or developing design principles and toolkits like The Circular Design Guide to support climate-conscious work. Ultimately, we hope to foster a culture where teams feel equipped to explore and develop best practices around sustainable work. Regardless of what form this takes, we need to develop a way to track the downstream impact of our projects and deliverables. Ideally, that system would plug into our emissions accounting platform — neither of which we have today.

3. Balance what’s impactful with what’s visible

In order to meaningfully reduce IDEO’s global emissions, we prioritized action that tends to be impactful for our carbon footprint, but invisible to everyday IDEOers and our clients. For example, while switching to renewable energy did not trigger obvious changes to the everyday experience at IDEO, it reduced our global carbon footprint by 4%. These changes can seem at odds with changes that are highly visible yet are often less impactful (e.g., eliminating single use plastics across IDEO). In order to ensure our everyday experience at IDEO does not undermine the climate commitments we have made, we need to balance what is impactful and what is highly visible. This might look like developing frameworks to help project teams weigh the tradeoffs between client travel and environmental impact, holding inter-studio competitions to switch to sustainable food vendors, or identifying a broad set of replacement suppliers for more sustainable goods throughout our studios.

4. Reset industry norms

Let’s face it. If a competitor is willing to get on a plane, we almost certainly will do the same and vice versa. To create the conditions for IDEO to thrive while meeting its climate commitments, we need to reset industry norms and work alongside other creative consulting firms to reimagine the ways of doing business in the 2020s and beyond. This may look like joining or starting a creative climate pledge for companies operating in a climate-forward way, or inviting direct competitors to join our kyu climate action learning group.

As we make progress toward IDEO’s climate commitments, we will continue to experiment, iterate, and learn. Most importantly, we’re eager to learn alongside you. Time is precious and we all need to collectively accelerate toward our respective commitments. In the spirit of co-creating a more sustainable future, we invite you to continue the conversation with us by reaching out to Dean here. We’re eager to learn about the steps you are taking, the lessons you’ve learned, and what’s next.

Words by Dean Malmgren, Michelle Santana, Nazlican Goksu, Tom Cohlmia & Uvini Lokuge

In 2019, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released an updated climate report reiterating how critical the 2020s will be in curbing wide-ranging and destructive climate impacts. The report outlined that over the next decade, we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% annually, a daunting reality that has been reiterated in recent IPCC updates. That means reducing our emissions by over half in less than 8 years. This is one of the most critical challenges of our decade, if not century.

As part of IDEO’s Net Zero strategy, we knew we couldn’t just invest in carbon offsets, we also had to do our part in removing emissions from the atmosphere. In many ways, the pandemic accelerated us toward that path. From 2019 to 2020, our emissions were slashed from ~14,500 t CO2e to ~6,400 t CO2e respectively. But we knew we needed to do more, especially with IDEO’s shift to embracing hybrid working models and their unknown travel-based emissions implications.

In 2021, we implemented three interventions to further reduce our carbon footprint. We switched to renewable energy, incentivized reductions in project-based emissions, and made improvements to our responsible retirement portfolio. Some of these efforts were successful, others less so. We’re eager to share what worked and what didn’t.

Intervention 1: Switching to Renewable Energy

There are several options for switching to renewable energy, including purchasing rooftop solar grids, participating in community solar programs, purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), and more.

In evaluating these approaches, we ran into a few setbacks. Since IDEO doesn’t own any of its buildings and each of our studios consume about as much electricity as a couple of big houses, we optimistically hoped that we might be able to sign up for community solar programs across the board. But we quickly learned that community solar wasn’t available for all of our locations. To make matters more complicated, many of our locations didn’t even have the ability to choose their electricity suppliers.

Our next best bet was to either purchase RECs for our global energy consumption, or opt for location-specific solutions. In pursuit of progress over perfection, we purchased 750 MWhr’s of RECs from Bonneville Environmental Foundation to cover energy consumption across all of IDEO’s locations. This not only reduced our carbon footprint by 360 t CO2e, but also meant that effective January 1, 2021, IDEO switched to renewable energy globally.

Looking ahead to 2022 and beyond, we will continue to evaluate and implement the best renewable energy solutions on a local level. To date, we have switched to renewable energy in two locations:

• Chicago: We switched our energy supplier from ComEd and enrolled in community solar through Solstice. Solstice also offers a renewable energy program for employees to mitigate energy impacts from working from home. For every employee that signs up for Solstice’s community solar program, Solstice donates $100 toward their nonprofit arm, Solstice Initiative, to make renewable energy accessible for underserved communities.
• Munich: We switched our energy supply from Stadtwerke München (SWM), Munich’s municipal utilities company, to renewable hydropower from Polarstern, a Munich-based renewable energy pioneer and social business promoting the energy transformation in Germany and worldwide.

While it took more time and resources to explore local renewable energy solutions than to purchase RECs, we felt it was important to switch to local alternatives wherever possible.

Intervention 2: Incentivizing Reductions in Project-Based Emissions

“But what about the emissions from our project operations?”

In our journey to Net Zero, this question came up time after time. It turns out, over a third of IDEO’s non-wage-based expenses come from project-based expenses like flights, food, prototyping materials, and research incentives. When we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint, we saw that a significant fraction of our emissions came from everyday decisions made by project teams.

After some digging, we saw that consulting firms similar to IDEO approach emission-reduction incentives differently. Some impose strict travel guidelines, while others set a steep internal price on carbon. The concept of a carbon tax as an incentive was appealing, but would clients go for it? We decided to find out.

Inspired by 1% for the Planet, we started a pilot that added new language about emissions reductions in all of our statements of work. In addition to our standard language about project-based expenses, we added:

Expense invoices will include an additional 1% of all billable expenses to offset greenhouse gas emissions arising from this work.

For a project with $100,000 in expenses, we would add a $1,000 fee to fund carbon offsets. From our preliminary estimates, this would sufficiently cover the emissions from our projects and allow us to purchase ever higher quality emissions over time.

While promising in theory, the execution has been difficult. Of the 33 statements of work signed over the past 6 months, only 4 of them included the 1% fee. In some cases, clients objected to paying for IDEO’s carbon offsets and the language was negotiated out of the contract. In other cases, the language was never included to begin with. Many IDEOers were apprehensive about broaching the topic with clients.

Despite the slow start, we are continuing this pilot so that we can gather more data and design an informed approach to reducing project-based emissions.

Intervention 3: Improving Our Responsible Retirement Portfolio

While IDEO will continue to vote with its dollars to reduce our emissions, many of those dollars have their own environmental and social implications. With ESG frameworks and ratings agencies scrambling to answer calls to action from BlackRock and beyond, there are a dizzying number of ways to evaluate responsible investments.

Our third intervention involved scrutinizing our existing 401(k) portfolio. Alongside Fossil Free Funds, a non-profit that grades investments using a variety of social and environmental considerations, we evaluated IDEO’s existing 401(k) and came up with a system — or score — for each of the available funds in our portfolio. We then supplemented this analysis with data from Morningstar Sustainability Rating to provide another perspective on how our investments were, or were not, meeting environmental, social, and governance challenges.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many funds in IDEO’s 401(k) were poorly rated. Our portfolio, like most, is dominated by index and mutual funds that track the market. Since the Fortune 500 account for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and only 11% of these organizations are hitting their emissions goals, our portfolio wasn’t tracking in accordance with the climate commitments we’d set.

Our Talent team sprung into action. Together with our Empower Retirement administrators, they identified new funds that we could add to our investment mix. In addition to the Vanguard Social Index Fund that was already in our portfolio, we added two new funds: Calvert Balanced Fund (R6) and Calvert Short Duration Income Fund (R6).

A year later, about 1% of IDEO’s $140m 401(k) assets are in these ESG funds. While this is certainly a move in the right direction, we are continuing to explore how we can improve our responsible retirement portfolio even further.

***

More than anything, these three interventions have highlighted an intrinsic dilemma of reducing emissions at scale: distributed behavior change is challenging and incremental. We’re still grappling with questions like: Are we focused on the right things? How might we design better incentives that accelerate emission reduction? How might we incentivize our partners to change alongside us?

But this is a design challenge that cannot wait to be solved. We’d love to learn alongside others and hear how others are tackling behavior change within their firms. Please share your reflections, questions, and insights by getting in touch here!

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change. Join us for weekly updates on The IDEO Journal.

Words by Anna Várnai, Dean Malmgren, Jenny Gottstein & Mike Sakowski

“Genuine question: are offsets a useful thing?”

That was the question that we woke up to from our colleague, EJ Baker, on IDEO’s #climate Slack channel in mid-September. For months, Anna Varnai, Jenny Gottstein, Mike Sakowski, and I had been evaluating potential providers and projects to offset IDEO’s carbon footprint in our journey to becoming Net Zero.

EJ’s inquiry brought us back to a question we had been debating for months: Is it better to invest in voluntary offsets or invest more deeply in reducing emissions? While there are legitimate arguments to be made for each path, we felt that emissions reductions weren’t enough. We urgently need to remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. And since we are driven to design the world we want to live in, we chose to meet in the middle — both reduce our emissions and offset what we are unable to reduce. Despite its limitations, offsetting offers a way to strengthen our climate commitments as we ramp up our emissions reduction efforts.

In principle, voluntary carbon offsets appear simple; in reality, they become complicated very quickly. We reached out to offset providers and offset purchasers to learn about their approach and experiences, but instead of walking away with clarity, we realized that no one had really figured it out yet. Even the experts were still grappling with questions like what types of offsets should be used and when, or whether offsetting is even a credible means of achieving Net Zero.

In search of answers, we set out on a quest — diving into academic literature, researching industry best practices, and following countless startups in the space. We learned about the permanence, additionality, and vintage of an offset and how each relates to the quality of an offset project. We learned about the potential social benefits — from community employment to energy access — that come from different projects. We learned about the entities that verify and certify offset efforts. And, we learned that the more we uncovered, the more questions we had.

Should IDEO invest in high-quality and expensive carbon sequestration solutions aligned with our ambitions for the future? Or should we invest in readily available and affordable nature-based solutions? How much geographical representation should we have? How do we know that our investments won’t go up in smoke? How should we think about the intersection between our offsets, climate justice, and IDEO’s DE&I commitments?

The considerations for what to invest in went on, and the dilemma was paralyzing. On the one hand, we wanted to do it all. On the other hand, we had a finite budget and the clock was ticking. What was the right way to get started?

We contemplated having employees vote and help us pick offset projects. While this approach empowered employees to directly shape our company investments, in an area as complex and opaque as the voluntary carbon market, it would be hard for all participants to have an informed perspective in voting.

We contemplated creating a committee that would select projects based on a set of established needs and values. While simple in practice, we weren’t confident an internal team could navigate the magnitude of the task in a manner that fully represented IDEO, and the inevitable scrutiny that comes from decisions like this.

We contemplated seeking advice from third-party experts, but found that many of them sold offsets themselves, raising all kinds of questions about their motives and whether there was a conflict of interest (even though they were extremely generous with their perspective — thank you!).

We needed to get reasonably smart about this space to make informed decisions.

Enter the Oxford Offsetting Principles, a series of guidelines put together by Eli Mitchell-Larson et al., that outline how offsetting should be approached to achieve Net Zero. Informed by these principles, we were drawn to two start-up offset providers, Lune and Patch. These providers stood apart for several reasons. First, they allowed us to select a broad portfolio of high-quality carbon offset projects. Second, their projects had an international reach. From the get go, we knew we wanted our carbon offsetting efforts to reflect IDEO’s global presence, impact, and responsibility. Both Lune and Patch offered a way for us to do so.

From there, having estimated our carbon footprint at around 4,950 t CO2e for 2021, we intentionally over-offset our emissions by purchasing 5,500 t CO2e.

Based on the Oxford Offsetting Principles, we spread those offsets across:

• Global renewable energy projects for Type I (22.5%)
• Forestry protection projects in Asia and Latin America for Type II (22.5%)
• Methane capture at landfills in the United States for Type III (5%)
• Reforestation projects in Africa and North America and regenerative agriculture projects in the US for Type IV (45%)
• Enhanced weathering projects in Europe for Type V (5%)

Overall, we spent a little over $20 per tonne of CO2e with about 92% of those fees going toward the projects themselves. (You can see a visual breakdown of our project bundles with Lune, here.)

Are we confident that our offset strategy is the gold standard? Not quite. But we do feel confident in our approach, and as the voluntary carbon market matures, we will continue to iterate alongside it. We’ve learned that climate action, like design, requires us to get started with curiosity and humility. It demands a learning mindset that seeks progress over perfection.

To those who have purchased or are considering purchasing offsets of your own, we’d love to hear about your approach and what you’re learning.

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change. Join us for weekly updates on The IDEO Journal.

Article by Dean Malmgren

For IDEO to commit to Net Zero or to prioritize emissions reductions initiatives, we first needed to understand the magnitude of our global carbon footprint and which factors were the greatest contributors.

We quickly realized the complexity of the challenge. There are hundreds of people across IDEO, and each of them make purchases on behalf of the firm in the running of our business — from video conference subscriptions to user research project expenses. With at least 80–90% of any organization’s carbon footprint coming from Scope 3 emissions (including upstream suppliers), calculating one’s carbon footprint is a significantly distributed issue.

But we knew we had to get started. We began by exploring a wide variety of emissions accounting solutions, from countless start-ups in the space to corporations like Salesforce repurposing their internal tools for emissions accounting. In our view, the ideal carbon accounting solution possessed several qualities. It would be accessible and intuitive enough for IDEOers to understand the tradeoffs they are making during everyday purchases. It would be shareable with our clients who are increasingly invested in our sustainability efforts. It would be reasonably priced for a small-to-medium sized business that intends to spend in the low six figures on carbon offsets and hopes to reduce its emissions by 7–8% per year. Most importantly, it would track emissions down to the company level to make it possible for us to vote with our dollars when considering prospective suppliers.

Unfortunately, most of the existing carbon accounting solutions haven’t met our particular set of needs. They often involve cumbersome, manual data entry. The carbon footprint is often estimated at an industry, not company, level. And when you’re hoping to use such a tool to save 7–8% of low six figures per year off your carbon offset budget, emissions accounting solutions can be disproportionately expensive. These are early days for the greenhouse gas accounting industry and, as momentum builds, so will the quality of accounting options available.

After exploring the many solutions in the market, we ultimately embraced a carbon accounting technique shared by Jane Yang, former Head of Data & Senior Policy Analyst at Basecamp, who used academic literature to convert dollars spent in a particular category into the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. This method gave us a framework to pull data from our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and estimate the carbon footprint of emissions-intensive categories like energy consumption, travel, and food. While this technique is not perfect, it was a critical step in better understanding which areas of our business contribute most to our global carbon footprint.

Of these areas, airline travel was having the most detrimental environmental impact. As a consulting firm with offices, clients, and research across the world, we will need to be very thoughtful in how we balance the benefits, and environmental costs, of travel. More on this in a subsequent post.

Estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint also revealed another dilemma: our ERP systems had no data on the downstream impact of our work with our clients. In speaking with experts, we received mixed messages on how to properly account for emissions outcomes from consulting firms like IDEO. On the one hand, our deliverables are often digital assets that have a negligible carbon footprint. But on the other hand, these deliverables represent strategic recommendations or new products and services that could have significant environmental implications. It’s complicated. While we have a clear ethical responsibility to set our clients and the planet up for success, we have chosen not to include the downstream impact of our client work at this time. This is a decision that we will continue to assess going forward.

With that, we turned our attention to the data on hand. Our team’s background in scientific research gave us enough familiarity with the academic literature to find relevant conversion factors for the emissions per dollar spent on different categories of expenses like travel, for example. Using this methodology, we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint at around ~14,500 t CO2e in 2019, ~6,400 t CO2e in 2020, and ~4,950 t CO2e in 2021. The good news is that these numbers are trending in the right direction, although these improvements were largely side effects of the pandemic (as with many companies). As we plan ahead, we intend to take another look at third-party products to see if any have started to gain an edge, and we’d enjoy the opportunity to learn alongside others that are going through a similar process. Any takers?

This is the second article in a six-part series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change. Join us for weekly updates on The IDEO Journal.

Author Iain Roberts

Those were the words that Tim Brown, co-founder and co-CEO of Allbirds, uttered to me just before the pandemic began. We were at a conference that IDEO was hosting in the Bay Area. We’d just been jamming on the approach Allbirds was taking to carbon labeling its products and he was chastising me for IDEO’s lack of visible progress in addressing the climate crisis.

His feedback stung. But isn’t that what friends are for — to call you on your BS?

I went home and dug into IDEO’s growing portfolio of work in the climate space. We had written a guide to circular design with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, hosted open innovation challenges to redesign single-use cups and plastic bags with Closed Loop Partners, explored potential scenarios around the future of regenerative food systems, and had begun coaching many of our clients towards work that directly tackled climate change and sustainability. But in poring over our work, I realized that what we were doing so well for our clients, we were failing to do for ourselves. How could we expect our clients to partner with us on such important challenges when our own house wasn’t in order?

Luckily, I wasn’t alone in my desire to catalyze IDEO’s efforts around addressing climate change. Many of my colleagues were grappling with the same questions, including IDEO Partner, Dean Malmgren. As we dug into where we could and should take action, we began to grapple with the impact of Scope 3 emissions.

What are Scope 3 emissions? Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are categorized into three “scopes” according to the world’s most widely used accounting standard, the GHG Corporate Protocol. Scope 1 emissions cover direct emissions from sources an organization owns or controls. Scope 2 emissions include indirect emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, heat, steam, or cooling. Scope 3 emissions, or “value chain emissions,” are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by an organization. These indirect emissions occur outside of an organization’s operations — think business travel, commuting, or purchased goods.

Interestingly, 80–90% of an organization’s carbon footprint comes from Scope 3 emissions — or from their upstream and downstream suppliers. So in order to reduce IDEO’s carbon footprint, we would need to carefully consider the suppliers with which we work and the impact of the work IDEO delivers.

At the same time, we’ve seen many of our clients wrestling with this challenge. While comforting to see, it also gave us a second, much needed, wake up call.

If our clients — many of whom have made public Net Zero commitments — were working on the same problem, they’d quickly arrive at a similar conclusion and start considering the climate impact of their business partners to manage-down their own footprint. We immediately saw the future: IDEO was going to increasingly be put under the microscope to understand whether we were the right partner for their business.

As we socialized this realization, we quickly learned that we’d already seen a steady uptick in clients and procurement partners requesting details about IDEO’s sustainability programs (and rightly so!). Not only are climate initiatives a moral imperative, but there was also a clear case for business risk associated with languishing. We were staring that business risk straight in the face.

And so Dean, I, and many others across IDEO made the decision to “just get started.” Because it’s the right thing to do for the planet. And because it’s the necessary thing to do for our business and for our clients’ businesses.

We made a commitment for IDEO to reduce our emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and to be Net Zero effective Jan 1, 2021. We estimated our carbon footprint. We purchased voluntary carbon offsets for our 2021 emissions. We switched to renewable energy across all of our locations globally. We experimented with addressing emissions offsets in our project plans and contracts. We offered more responsible investments in our 401(k). We have been regularly meeting with our sibling firms across kyu and the broader design consulting industry to share learnings and best practices for evolving our business model for the climate era. And many of IDEO’s locations have taken on a smorgasbord of initiatives to make their operations more climate-friendly as well, from switching to LED lighting, to serving local food and composting whatever we can.

We have made progress, but we are far from perfect. And unfortunately, we are unlikely to be perfect any time soon. That’s where you, dear readers, come into play. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share some of the work we have done and the dilemmas that we have run into along the way. We’re hoping that this is the start of many conversations, ones that not only help us consider different perspectives and approaches, but also help others get started too.

To progress, together!

This is the first article in a six-part series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change. Join us for weekly updates on The IDEO Journal.

This story is part of a series of design fiction that explores what a new era of public service could look like in 2025, five years after COVID-19. Learn more here.

Taniel gets a laugh whenever they tell anyone what it’s like to work at the DMV. “You work in hell” is a typical reaction. To which Taniel replies, “Hell is a world without the DMV.”

This is the truth. During the COVID-19 crisis, every DMV office in Tennessee closed down, including Taniel’s branch in the Pie Town section of Nashville. During that time, Taniel certainly kept busy; they mostly answered the phones. Many folks called asking how to register vehicles when the DMV’s doors were locked, and it felt good to be able to extend everyone’s registration through the pandemic. But privately Taniel wondered if they were giving the right kind of help. They worried civilization itself was breaking down.

All during the months of lockdown, it seemed like none of the big stuff got done. Mortgages, marriages. Kids deciding against college and putting off their education indefinitely. Many couldn’t get job training, and many more couldn’t collect unemployment benefits. It broke Taniel’s heart.

When the city reopened, the DMV was crazy and busier than ever. In droves, Nashvillians were abandoning public transit and buying cars to feel safe. With ridership at an all-time low, the city of Nashville faced a dramatic choice: Discontinue its bus service or reinvent it.

Nashville chose innovation, and starting in 2024, public buses became traveling public services. Now, residents living in marginalized communities can access the public services they need, wherever they might be. The bus comes to you, gets you where you need to be, and lets you get things done on the go.

Each bus line has a unique purpose. The blue line is the education bus: job training, continuing education, and a curriculum based on Nashville’s history. The red line is City Hall. You could access the deed to your house, pay a parking ticket, and get married all in the same trip, if you were so inclined.

Taniel works on the green line: the DMV bus. It might seem strange to renew a driver’s license on a rolling city bus, but Taniel has never felt more in sync with the people they serve. And, Taniel’s happy to report, civilization is alive and well.

How might we amplify access to public services and meet residents where they are?

Where to go from here

There are numerous ways to take this profoundly unusual year as a chance to permanently transform. Governments at national and local levels that embrace this “reset opportunity” will emerge stronger. It’s time to listen to people, learn what has changed in their lives, and find new ways to address their needs.

These six provocations are more than hunches; we believe they will be critical territories in the new landscape of leadership. Read more about the visions behind these questions:

1. How might public services and spaces provide a contactless option?

2. How might we incentivize mobility and upskilling within government?

3. How might city, state, and federal governments reallocate resources to meet emerging needs?

4. How might we support marginalized communities and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks?

5. How might we amplify access to public services and meet residents where they are?

6. How might we give both residents and public servants more access and more choice?

Red, Blue & Green: The Primary Colors of Service was originally published in IDEO Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story is part of a series of design fiction that explores what a new era of public service could look like in 2025, five years after COVID-19. Learn more here.

“It’s complicated.” That’s Sander’s stock answer whenever anyone asks him about his visa. As a citizen of Estonia and an in-demand journalist, Sander has had just about every kind of visa you can get: student, working holiday, employer-sponsored. These days, Sander works for a London-based firm at a studio in Singapore — and his visa expires in three weeks.

Back when he went to grad school in the Netherlands, Estonia wasn’t a member of the EU. Now, of course, Britain isn’t a member of the EU. Over the years, that has caused some serious headaches. But the biggest headache of all? Time zones. Right now it’s 9:00 a.m. here in Singapore and Sander has all his renewal paperwork ready to go. In the past, he might’ve had to fax everything over to an embassy in London and wait for them to fax it to another embassy in Tallinn, Estonia. The problem with that is bureaucratic offices all run on an old-fashioned schedule: eight to five, Monday through Friday. Total nightmare. And at the moment, it’s 2:00 a.m. in London, and 4:00 a.m. in Tallinn.

At least, that’s how it used to work. Even after the vaccinations, a lot of people didn’t want to work in an office ever again. And two years into the new era, 35% of work-from-home employees prefer “non-traditional hours.” Sander’s in luck, because both Estonia and the UK have teams of superstar public servants who are self-proclaimed night owls — and even in the wee hours of the morning, they’re ready to rock.

The governments leading the new era realized long ago the advantages of asynchrony. Whether it’s big business or the public sector, never having to roll out the “Closed” sign makes a lot of sense — and employees who work their preferred hours are happier than those who don’t have a choice. This has given rise to a fluidity of public services, which makes it easier for people to be borderless and follow their dreams. At the same time, it enables governments to collaborate on services even as they compete for talent, and meanwhile seamlessly collect taxes on the money those dreamers earn abroad.

Sander logs into OnePortal, the intergovernmental service platform, and instantly connects to Madge, the agent in the UK, as well as Darja, Madge’s Estonian counterpart. The lingua franca, for the moment, is English, and the three of them banter as Sander scans and uploads his renewal forms. He watches as two official stamps materialize in real time, first Britain’s and then Estonia’s. Sander’s visa is approved.

“You’re all sorted, love,” says Madge. “And it’s a good thing too, my shift’s about to end.”

“Really?” says Darja. “ Mine’s just beginning.”

How might we give both residents and public servants more access and more choice?

Where to go from here

There are numerous ways to take this profoundly unusual year as a chance to permanently transform. Governments at national and local levels that embrace this “reset opportunity” will emerge stronger. It’s time to listen to people, learn what has changed in their lives, and find new ways to address their needs.

These six provocations are more than hunches; we believe they will be critical territories in the new landscape of leadership. Read more about the visions behind these questions:

1. How might public services and spaces provide a contactless option?

2. How might we incentivize mobility and upskilling within government?

3. How might city, state, and federal governments reallocate resources to meet emerging needs?

4. How might we support marginalized communities and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks?

5. How might we amplify access to public services and meet residents where they are?

6. How might we give both residents and public servants more access and more choice?

Going Borderless & Hacking Time Zones was originally published in IDEO Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story is part of a series of design fiction that explores what a new era of public service could look like in 2025, five years after COVID-19. Learn more here.

Sue is an Enabler. No, that doesn’t mean she encourages bad habits in her friends. And it doesn’t mean she’s a pushover as a mom — though, to be fair, it’s hard to say no to her twin boys. An Enabler is a special role designated in 2023 by Services Australia in response to the catastrophic COVID-19 era — and Sue’s one of the best there is.

The pandemic exposed terrible fault lines in our social systems. On one side was the small business whose loan application froze in the government portal. On the other was an entire community without access to Wi-Fi and science-based evidence about the virus. On one side was the family of six unable to obtain unemployment support. On the other was the deaf woman who could no longer read anyone’s lips on account of their masks, and whose isolation precipitated a mental health plummet. More than half the people who lost their jobs during the pandemic could not get the assistance they needed. Simply too many people fell through the cracks.

As a nation, Australia realized that those who need the most are often represented the least. For people to live their best lives and get the services they need, public service itself has to change, and that’s where people like Sue come in. She’s part sponsor, part advocate, part life coach. She’s the point of contact within the government for a whole roster of residents: She’s their voice inside the system, and she knows how to work it to meet their needs.

Today she’s in Queensland, driving farm to farm for annual consultations. Some of her clients are the farms themselves, who qualify for benefits reserved for small businesses. Others are laborers who work the farms, some of whom don’t have internet access and may not realize that a new stimulus program just launched which they might be eligible for.

Nigel is one of those laborers, and he finds himself feeling a little lost whenever Sue wades into bureaucratic complexity. But Sue knows how to switch gears and meet him where he is. Over the better part of an hour, Sue and Nigel co-design what the next year of public service could look like for him and his family. Sue walks Nigel through the stimulus application, which they agree is a no-brainer. She shows him where to sign and says, “Right I’ll pop this in the mail, and next week you’ll wake up to 900 dollarydoos in your bank account. Sound alright?” He nods.

“Any questions, Nigel?”

“I always think of a question about two minutes after you drive off.” They both chuckle, and Sue reminds him of the Navigators Network. Because she can’t be by his side round the clock, Nigel can call the non-emergency hotline for any questions related to public services — and, of course, drop Sue’s name to the expert on the other end of the line. Because Sue not only enables Nigel to obtain the support he needs, she vouches for him. And she’s rooting for him, too.

How might we support marginalized communities and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks?

Where to go from here

There are numerous ways to take this profoundly unusual year as a chance to permanently transform. Governments at national and local levels that embrace this “reset opportunity” will emerge stronger. It’s time to listen to people, learn what has changed in their lives, and find new ways to address their needs.

These six provocations are more than hunches; we believe they will be critical territories in the new landscape of leadership. Read more about the visions behind these questions:

1. How might public services and spaces provide a contactless option?

2. How might we incentivize mobility and upskilling within government?

3. How might city, state, and federal governments reallocate resources to meet emerging needs?

4. How might we support marginalized communities and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks?

5. How might we amplify access to public services and meet residents where they are?

6. How might we give both residents and public servants more access and more choice?

Stitching a More Human Safety Net was originally published in IDEO Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story is part of a series of design fiction that explores what a new era of public service could look like in 2025, five years after COVID-19. Learn more here.

Lyn Li loves her job. She started as an administrative assistant at a physical therapy clinic, but these days, she wears multiple hats. One week she’s untangling IT snarls, and the next she’s doing the books and keeping the clinic financially fit. Lyn Li has become a critical member of the team, and she’s proud of it.

Before the pandemic, Lyn Li commuted all the way from Forest Hills, Queens, to Lower Manhattan — more than an hour each way on the train. But after the crisis, her clinic moved into telehealth, and today only a quarter of appointments are in-person. That means Lyn Li can do her job remotely. She sure doesn’t miss the alarm clock going off at five in the morning! With a virtual commute, the internet is Lyn Li’s public transit.

There’s just one problem: Lyn Li’s not alone. The practice of working from home quadrupled in the years after COVID-19, and broadband providers struggled to keep up with demand. Like so many others, Lyn Li can’t risk a spotty signal — it looks unprofessional.

Seeing an opportunity, the NYC government piloted an initiative long under consideration: Outfitting the city’s public library branches to be local internet beacons. At first, the program started slowly: Just a few neighborhoods with the highest need for a reliable, fast, and free Wi-Fi signal. Forest Hills was one of them, and the experiment meant that Lyn Li could not only keep her job, she could thrive in it.

The city learned a lot from the pilot branches, including that the need was even greater than anticipated. The program expanded, and soon every library branch was broadcasting free internet. The result is a network of strong internet signals blanketing nearly the entire footprint of New York City. A gap in that signal blanket is one of the primary factors in determining whether or not a new library branch gets built.

Lyn Li remembers having to pull out her Metrocard back when she took the subway each morning. She never would’ve guessed, but more valuable by far is her library card.

How might city, state, and federal governments reallocate resources to meet emerging needs?

Where to go from here

There are numerous ways to take this profoundly unusual year as a chance to permanently transform. Governments at national and local levels that embrace this “reset opportunity” will emerge stronger. It’s time to listen to people, learn what has changed in their lives, and find new ways to address their needs.

These six provocations are more than hunches; we believe they will be critical territories in the new landscape of leadership. Read more about the visions behind these questions:

1. How might public services and spaces provide a contactless option?

2. How might we incentivize mobility and upskilling within government?

3. How might city, state, and federal governments reallocate resources to meet emerging needs?

4. How might we support marginalized communities and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks?

5. How might we amplify access to public services and meet residents where they are?

6. How might we give both residents and public servants more access and more choice?

The Most Valuable Thing in Your Wallet was originally published in IDEO Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.