How do you communicate the environmental and social implications of your design choices and solutions?

2 What to communicate

When designing a solution, it is important to consider the environmental and social implications of your choices. This includes the life cycle of the design, from extraction of raw materials to disposal or reuse. It also includes the impact of your design on the natural environment, human health, and social well-being. Additionally, you should consider the values and principles that guide your process and outcomes. Does your design reflect or promote ethical norms and aspirations? Does it respect or challenge power dynamics and inequalities? Communicating these aspects will depend on your purpose, audience, and medium.

3 How to communicate

The environmental and social implications of your design choices and solutions can be communicated effectively through various strategies and tools. Storytelling, for instance, can be used to illustrate how your design solution affects the lives of real or fictional people and the environment they live in. Visualization, such as images, diagrams, graphs, maps, or models can show the environmental and social benefits or costs of your design solution compared to alternative options or scenarios. Quantification using numbers, data, metrics, or indicators can measure and demonstrate the environmental and social performance or value of your design solution. Argumentation with logic, evidence, reasoning, or persuasion can explain and justify why your design solution is preferable or superior to other options or scenarios in terms of environmental and social outcomes.

4 When to communicate

At different stages of your design process and project, you should communicate the environmental and social implications of your design choices and solutions. Before beginning, express your environmental and social intentions and criteria to align expectations with users, clients, stakeholders, and collaborators. This will help to define the scope, direction, and constraints of your design problem and solution. During the process, share progress and feedback to test, validate, improve, and refine your design solution. Lastly, at the end of the project, communicate results and impacts to evaluate, celebrate, and disseminate your design solution.

5 Where to communicate

When communicating the environmental and social implications of your design choices and solutions, there are a variety of channels and platforms to explore. Reports can be used to communicate your analysis, methods, data, arguments, and recommendations in a structured way. Presentations can be used to tell stories, visualize data, and explain arguments in an interactive manner. Exhibitions are ideal for conveying products, systems, models, or prototypes in a tangible format. All of these options should use headings, sections, tables, figures, voice, gestures, animations, sounds, effects, space, lighting materials or interactions to capture and maintain the attention of your audience.

6 How to improve

Communicating the environmental and social implications of your design choices and solutions is an ongoing process that requires ongoing learning and improvement. To enhance your communication skills, research the latest trends and best practices related to industrial design, experiment with different strategies, tools, formats, media, languages, and styles to express your ideas, evaluate the feedback from users and stakeholders, and reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses. By doing these activities, you can ensure that you are communicating the environmental and social implications of your design choices effectively.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?