Future thinking — Celebrating our partnership with thinkstep

This November, Locus and thinkstep got together to celebrate the next step in our longstanding and successful partnership.

Fifty people joined us after work on a Tuesday to hear how some of the best in the business are innovating in sustainability. It was a chance to celebrate a lot of hard work, but more importantly, it was a chance to look forward to a more sustainable future.

Here at Locus, we believe that we have a responsibility to design products that tread lightly on our environment. The environmental stakes here are high. Getting a design wrong can mean producing thousands of polluting products. On the flip side, getting it right can mean designing the waste out of product systems altogether.

You may have heard of the Circular Economy, that is, aiming to keep resources in use for as long as possible. This is an excellent approach to reducing waste, using resources efficiently, and cutting carbon emissions. However, it requires real innovation to succeed. New and smarter ways of recycling will only get us so far. The real challenge is in taking a life cycle thinking approach to designing product systems in the first place.

This is why we have teamed up with the clever people at thinkstep to bring the skill of Life Cycle Thinking to businesses across NZ and AU. The goal here is to systematically integrate design and sustainability. By taking a strategic approach, we’re working to create products that don’t create waste in the first place.

So what does this look like?

We’ve developed a workshop series for anyone interested in designing for the circular economy. These are designed to equip people with the skills to approach sustainability from a strategic angle.

Targeted at those involved with product and service development within an organisation, these workshops introduce a design-led approach to life cycle thinking. This includes how to apply the ideas, tools, and techniques to your products, services, and business.

Effectively, we want to help you close the gap between product development and sustainability.

Workshop topics include:

Life Cycle Thinking – An introduction to the principles behind Life Cycle Thinking as a design model; a system oriented design approach that includes the product lifecycle.

Life Cycle Management – Application of life cycle thinking to the development and management of products and services.

Life Cycle Tools & Approaches – implementing change and an overview of life cycle thinking approaches such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), carbon footprints, and other environmental performance indicators.

The content of these workshops is ‘progressive,’ so the second and third workshops build on the previous content. Each workshop has an interactive learning component designed to apply and reinforce learning.

Sound interesting? Get in touch with me and we can talk about how best to support the sustainability of your innovation programme.