The Brief We've Been Waiting For Why sustainability may be the greatest design opportunity of our generation

Sustainability is becoming a business imperative, forcing organizations to rethink products, services, operations and decisions. This talk explores what that shift means for service designers — from redesigning customer-facing services to enabling collaboration and better decisions — and why sustainability could unlock new ways for design to create value inside organizations.

Field

Forces

Format

Talk & Discussion

Day

Friday, Oct 16

Room

Aula M

Time

12:55 PM

Sustainability is not just another challenge for organizations to solve

It is a force that is changing how businesses create value, operate, and make decisions. As sustainability moves from ambition to business imperative, organizations will need to rethink not only what they offer, but how they work. This creates a significant opportunity for service designers to apply their capabilities in new ways and unlock more value inside organizations.

Why is this conversation important now?

Sustainability is moving rapidly from a largely voluntary commitment to an increasingly embedded business requirement, driven by regulation, changing markets, stakeholder expectations and resource constraints. Organizations are therefore facing increasingly complex challenges that cut across functions, partners and levels of decision-making. At the same time, many service designers are asking where their discipline can create meaningful impact as the profession evolves. The sustainability transition brings these two questions together.

Who is this session for?

Service designers, business designers, design leaders, and innovation practitioners working in or with organizations undergoing transformation — particularly those wondering how to expand their impact beyond traditional service design projects. It is also relevant to designers interested in sustainability and to sustainability professionals curious about what design can bring to organizational change.

Key takeaways

People will leave with a broader view of where service design can create value in the sustainability transition.
They will see concrete opportunities ranging from redesigning products and services for more circular models, to designing internal services and collaboration across teams and partners, to influencing how sustainability becomes embedded in everyday decisions.
Most importantly, they will leave with a provocation: perhaps the future relevance of service design lies not only in designing better services, but in using our capabilities to help organizations change how they work.

Olga Sganzerla

Olga Sganzerla

Senior Manager, Strategy & Transformation @ Cascale

Olga is Senior Manager, Strategy & Transformation at Cascale, where she shapes strategy and organizational transformation at the intersection of member needs and the fashion industry’s climate and decent work challenges. With a background in Economics and Management Strategy, she has spent the past decade helping organizations navigate strategy, innovation, design, and transformation across consultancy, corporate, and nonprofit settings.

She worked in Group Business Transformation and CX Innovation & Strategy at Zurich Insurance, helping advance customer-centricity and embed design into projects and operations. She joined Cascale in 2022 as a Service Designer and has since evolved into a strategic transformation role, shaping strategy, strengthening member value, and guiding organizational change. Working inside the sustainability transition of the fashion industry has given her a new perspective on the role design can play in organizations — and the opportunity to create value far beyond the services and experiences we traditionally design.