City of Savannah
Keep Connecting
The objective of the project was to empower the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability (ESS) through building alignments and a shared vision for the different city departments so they could work together towards the goals of the 2016 ESS Sustainability Assessment.
Focus: empowering the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability to better collaborate with other departments towards the city’s sustainability goals.
Services: research, prototyping, user testing, strategy design, workshop design and facilitation, capacity building.
Design Management And Sustainability
Design management methods and sustainability models are very similar. Both are based in systemic thinking and a holistic approach to problems. This is because both emerge from the urgency of changing the way society develops. “The Industrial Age has brought extraordinary improvements in public education, human rights, and material wellbeing, but it has also destroyed ecosystems, swallowed up traditional cultures that had thrived for centuries, and created a way of life that cannot continue for much longer” (Peter Senge, 2008). We are shifting towards an era where the only way to bring development to everyone and guarantee a safe future is to start a truly sustainable way of living. Business models need to incorporate systemic thinking and “invest seriously and immediately in building a regenerative economy and society that mimics nature as fully as possible” (Peter Senge, 2008).
It was especially interesting for us working with the City of Savannah’s Office of Environmental Services and Sustainability because it gave us the opportunity to explore how Savannah City works. We met and interacted with 15 of the city departments, understood how they work internally, and detected that all of them had the same wish: to be more connected with other departments and to work together to better accomplish their goals.
One of our strongest skills as design managers is facilitating collaboration, and that was exactly the main objective of our work with the ESS. We helped them to visualize how the city departments are currently connected and how they would like to be working together in the future. We also provided them with tools to further nurture those relationships, and had the opportunity to test our strategies with outstanding results: a trustworthy environment of collaborative work where every participant was committed to keep being actively engaged in future projects.
We hope this project and its results provide the ESS and other city departments with inspiration and motivation to keep connecting towards the vision of a sustainable Savannah.
