Our interactions with the world are largely channeled through products. We extract resources and use energy to create the built, manufactured, and programmed environment. Building and using our past and current products has brought us much individual convenience for those who can afford it, but also social inequality and the climate crisis. Our next products must do better. Our next products must help us navigate a rapidly changing world of more and more uncertainties while avoiding adding more damage to our planet and, thereby, the future evolution of our society.
This page is dedicated to collecting methods that might help make more regenerative product decisions. For more thoughts and perspectives, check out the corresponding Medium blog.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIJF8N4E=/?share_link_id=593321062887
by Florian Grote
Finding out how the various forms of AI can bring hands-on value to users can be difficult, as concepts of AI applications often remain abstract or overly technical. With this user-journey-based method, AI potentials can be explored for every step of interaction the user has with the product, and it can be mapped to business goals.
✨ AI for User Value Ideation AI Tool (requires Mistral API key)
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMt2a5OY=/
by Florian Grote, adapted from strategyzer 2014
Value Proposition Design by Strategyzer typically asks user-centered questions such as "What are your user’s jobs to be done?", "What pains do they have?", and "What gains do they seek?". While these questions help businesses understand direct user needs, they overlook broader community impacts. A strictly user-centric approach may unintentionally create negative outcomes for communities affected indirectly by the products.
The Regenerative Value Proposition Canvas includes the perspectives of these communities, and matches them with the user’s own vision of how their shared world should develop in the future.
✨ Regenerative Product Ideas AI Tool (requires Mistral API key)
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPQ8kuCs=/?share_link_id=962910154370
by Florian Grote
The Business Model Canvas and the Lean Canvas are established one-pager formats to collect assumptions and knowledge in user-centered product development. However, in the face of the impending climate crisis, the dangers and limitations of user-centered product development become apparent and impossible to ignore: User-centered products bring value to individuals who populate segments of society, but they can and often do bring harm to the communities these individual users live in. Through resource extraction and energy consumption, they may harm society as a whole.
The Regenerative Product Canvas takes the Business Model Canvas and the Lean Canvas as its starting point and combines the strongest aspects of both with a perspective dedicated to the effects the solution and its user value have on the users' communities.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIJ813AA=/?share_link_id=863400993316
by Florian Grote
Both canvasses can be used together, similarly to how the Value Proposition Canvas and the Business Model Canvas can be integrated. In all cases, we start with the customers and the problem they need to solve. Both canvasses extend the established view by including the community perspective in every aspect.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPMQCBPE=/?share_link_id=724808221306
by Florian Grote
The impact software product development and usage has on the environment is only starting to be more of a focus in the tech world. Software requires large-scale physical infrastructure to be used, so it is more adequate to speak of “digital” rather than “software” products. Also, it is often popular software products — such as social media platforms — which have the most profound impact on how people behave. With behavior and habit change being one of the major components in addressing the human-made causes of the climate crisis, digital product development must be enabled to take measures and live up to its responsibility.
To achieve this, we take the concept of circularity — flows that go through your product and loop around to become resources again — and use it creatively with digital products. climatedigital.cognify.berlin
✨ Climate Action for Digital Products AI Tool (requires Mistral API key)
by Florian Grote
This web app allows for the exploration of impacts a product or project might have on any selected SDG. Using LLMs for this has proven very helpful in uncovering effects which are often not otherwise obvious to product development teams.
In addition to direct impacts, the LLM comes up with ideas for how the product or project might support the selected goal. Then, it also explores systemic secondary effects of the impact on the selected SDG, thus highlighting how the SDGs are networked.
✨ SDG Wheel AI Tool (requires Mistral API key)
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPMQ1CPI=/?share_link_id=953447022953
by Florian Grote, adapted from Bocken & Short 2016
Not all strategies for building sustainable products are equally helpful. With regard to resources being used for products, avoiding new extraction is highest on the pyramid of environmentally preferable actions. Reduce, reuse, recycle and recover are common strategies known from circular economy. Landfill is at the base of the pyramid and, while it will be very hard to be avoided completely, should be used the least possible amount. Building strategies that aim at the higher parts of the pyramid can be supported by looking at different categories of action.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPMQ1CDo=/?share_link_id=62774833626
by Florian Grote
Sustainability may be understood in three dimensions: The ecological, the social, and the economic-technological. The ecological area encloses the other - social activity is only possible if the ecological environment allows for it. The economic-technological area is in return enclosed within the social, as activity there is dependent on society and the ecological environment allowing for it and providing resources.
<aside> ©️ Background image on header: Temperature change in Europe since 1901: https://showyourstripes.info/l/europe/all
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