Designing Organizations for Sustainable Futures: Identifying interventions that empower employees to promote sustainable practices within the companies they work for

We are facing a climate crisis. Yet, the adoption of environmentally- conscious business practices is not happening as fast as the urgency of the situation requires. !e prevalent thought about who is responsible for the solution of climate change is twofold; either the expectation is that governments will step up to enforce climate policy or the pressure is placed on consumers to do the right thing. There is a third opportunity that isn’t discussed as often: shifting the business practices of large corporations. This thesis asks: How might interventions be designed to empower

employees to find new and engaging ways to promote

sustainability practices within their organization? The research borrows from transition design and explores the wicked problem of sustainable business through a holistic systems lens. Firstly, it aims to understand how we have historically viewed and understood climate change and why it is so difficult to shift to a system towards sustainability. !rough understanding the past and current state, a solid foundation is built to explore what a preferred state of business could look like and what barriers need to be overcome to get to that preferred state. To do this, this thesis explores behaviour change theories such as slow change interaction design (Siegel & Beck, 2014), design for learning experiences (Dirksen, 2011) as well as grassroot activism and bottom-up intrapreneurial approaches such as emergent strategy (Brown, 2017). Ultimately, the goal is to leverage design as an agent for positive change by providing clarity on a possible point of intervention that may nudge and incentivize employees to step up and call their business to fight for climate action. The result of this thesis are design principles that could guide the design of future interventions as well as an initial concept exploration. The

proposed intervention encourages collaboration between employees and helps them seek a deeper understanding of their business in order for them to learn how to identify areas of improvement in regards to sustainability. It proposes various learning exercises they could do to gain that understanding, but it is also an invitation for further

collaboration and development. Because climate change can only be solved together.