Sustainability Design Guild
I was co-founder of a guild of designers focused on the education and up-skilling of peers and cross-functional partners across IBM
Give me arugula & cilantro,
not CO2 laden commutes.
People, Planet,
& Better Outcomes
Engagement​​​
One of our goals was to educate designers on sustainability in general. One way we achieved this was by crowdsourcing topics of interest from the design community, and booking subject matter experts to join our monthly community calls.
Some SMEs shared experiences (one guest gave a recap of her trip to COP27), and some led interactive learning sessions (one team shared an in-progress case study of measuring sustainable AI)
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Resources
Beyond a foundational knowledge of sustainability, our mission was to provide 3000+ designers across IBM with educational resources and day-to-day tools needed to meet sustainable design standards. Two working groups focused on education and tooling.
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Tooling
To equip designers, the guild developed the Enterprise Design Thinking for Sustainability toolkit. This toolkit re-framed Enterprise Design Thinking with Sustainability at the forefront of the user-centered framework.
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Education
To educate a 3000+ community of designers quickly, with impact, developed a course centered around three tenants of Sustainable Design: Equity, Efficiency, & Teaming. For each of the three, learners were guided through individual considerations supported by real-life examples.
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Legacy
The Sustainability Design Guild continues on as a living resource for educating & equipping IBMers across disciplines.
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Check out IBM's Design for Sustainability Position Paper here
(Published by my co-founder Chris Hammond, this paper served as a guidepost for the EDT for Sustainability toolkit and Sustainable Design Course.)