In sustainable design and innovation, appreciation of the Planet as an equal stakeholder with humans and businesses continues to rise. Yet a consistent challenge arises in that people have difficulties relating to the nonhuman and interpret the world in terms of human values and experiences. We need more practical tools to stimulate a connection, especially in its affective dimension, to the Planet and to include nonhuman stakeholders in sustainability developments. To anchor Planetary understanding and considerations, we investigate the role of participatory storytelling to stimulate a reappraisal of the needs of nonhuman stakeholders through empathy building. To posit this, we defined empathy for the Planet as a holistic relationship with human and nonhuman stakeholders. We facilitated workshops where design students, design professionals, and business stakeholders could co-create environmental stories using human and nonhuman character personas. We analyzed the personas, stories, and participants’ feedback on the process experience and impact and observed that story creators experienced empathy for the Planet through projecting and blending their own emotions and intents onto the characters. We discuss, therefore, how ecological story co-creation can be a tool for self-reflection, collective sense-making, and the inclusion of the voice of Planetary stakeholders relevant for sustainable design and to drive sustainability engagement in general. This research confirms the role of stories and imagination in creating a bridge to the natural world through new, human and nonhuman, perspectives.

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This research uses systemic design to develop interventions for sustainable change in a business context. The primary objective is to address the communication and translation of systemic insights into practical business actions. Bridging the gap between research and practice is a major challenge in effectively communicating systemic insights and guiding actionable decision-making. Therefore, the research question guiding this study is: “How can systemic insights be effectively translated into feasible actions for businesses?” To address this question, a combination of established methods was applied in the business case study of sustainable parenthood. The systemic analysis involved defining system boundaries, gathering data through desk research and interviews with business stakeholders, and creating a causal loop diagram. Further, Donella Meadows’ theory was applied to identify leverage points for behavioural change strategies. To make the complexity of the system map and its leverage points comprehensible for stakeholders, it was translated into a story map and subsequently into insight cards. In-depth validation and analysis of the systemic insights were done through qualitative user interviews (n=10). The main contribution of this paper is the use of insight cards, which offer a tangible and accessible format for conveying systemic insights. The cards allow the communication of complex systemic language and bridge research and practice. However, while insight cards were a valuable tool for the development of concrete solutions, further strategic considerations are needed. Thus, the study highlights the need for further research in effective communication strategies and systemic language to facilitate the translation of systemic insights into tangible business actions.@en

Successful implementation of sustainable innovation requires strong collaborative ecosys-tems. In particular, collaboration between scientific and people-centered expertise (e.g., designers) is essential to bring technical innovation through contextualized, meaningful and attractive experiences. However, in practice, these types of expertise are siloed and struggle to communicate and think together. We present a creative design method based on participatory story building to support collaborative user-centered ideation between technology scientists and designers. The core of the method is a new story creation model, the three-tension framework, that facilitates the exploration of users’ experiences and needs during ideation. To evaluate the method’s effectiveness, we conducted open-ended interviews with participants. We found that the method facilitates the expression of different perspectives and outside-the-box creative thinking. An originality and strength of our method is that it favors the discovery of new issues and pain points—rather than only solutions. This, combined with idea enrichment by multidisciplinary expertise, contributes to generating ideas in a broader range of application areas than usual. Our results indicate that participatory storytelling has the potential to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration and to bring user-centered thinking to non-design stakeholders in order to envision user needs in future scenarios and new ecosystems.

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