Taking the high road towards sustainable mobility

The past few years have seen a rapidly growing degree of awareness on sustainability, and more importantly, increasing adoption of sustainable practices in businesses across industries. This is particularly important for work against climate change, which depends on collaborative effort on a global scale.

Make no mistake, organisations in the mobility business are at the very centre of this transformation. Roughly a quarter of global CO2 emissions come from the transportation of people and goods, which is a fairly clear indication that prompt action is needed.

This, of course, applies to developing new services and offerings as well as adapting existing ones to better tackle the challenges at hand. This article will discuss different ways for the mobility industry to approach sustainability challenges.

The future of mobility requires a shift from individual to collective optimisation

For the past few decades, human-centric design has been a key element of design and innovation studies as well as a prominent principle in real-world use. Building on Maslow, human-centric design is largely based on the fulfillment of basic human needs such as physiology, safety, social and individual needs as well as self-actualisation.

This mode of thinking, however, comes with a major issue: short-term thinking and emphasis on individual needs at the cost of the big picture and society – things like the environment, overall traffic flow, or safety – does not contribute to a sustainable world for the collective. As we’ve already learned in several large cities, e-scooters are admittedly very convenient, but they are also problematic particularly for the elderly and people with disabilities when haphazardly parked. We believe it’s possible to change the direction of this development, but we need to adapt our thinking, tools and models.

What is the next step after human-centric design?

People have the tendency to favour comfort, and often choose the path of least resistance. Preferences don’t change overnight, but we can help change behaviours by incorporating the UN’s sustainable development goals into product and service development to create services that are better for the planet and people.

To make this happen, it’s time to evolve human-centric design thinking into something larger and more sustainable, and embrace planet-centric design instead.

This shift involves not just updating methods, but also including sustainability into criteria for deciding between different options and courses of action. We need to start asking ourselves what impact our opportunities have on the environment and society, and only move forward with business cases with a positive sum total. Our Lean Service Creation methodology, for example, approaches this with a canvas dedicated to sustainable design that helps teams assess the overall impact of their products and services also beyond the individual user.

The idea of planet-centric design is to take the foundation of human-centric design and build on top of it towards common good, rather than abandon the previous paradigm altogether. Planet-centric design isn’t concerned solely with the environment, but also covers social issues, economic stability and sustainability on a strategic level.

Properly addressing these issues can offer significant competitive advantages and help secure new business as well as solidify relations with existing customers. Post hoc greenwashing efforts, unsurprisingly, lack this effect.