People are not the only stakeholders
Our mark is built from the Sustainable Development Goals, and that is not decoration. It is a statement about the scope of a design brief: a service sits inside a community, a community sits inside an economy, and all of it sits inside a planet with limits.
Human-centred, and then past the human.
Human-centred design remains the discipline we practise: start with people, research in their setting, test with them before scaling. But a method that only optimises for the person in front of you can quietly externalise the cost — onto the people downstream, onto the next generation, onto land, water and air. Inclusive and systemic design means widening the circle of who counts as affected, and keeping the planet in the room when the decisions are made.
Almost every goal, in one circle
The icons in our mark come from the Sustainable Development Goals, arranged as a single ring rather than a list. A ring because the goals are not a menu to choose from — pull on one and the others move.
A brief that arrives as “improve this form” is rarely only about the form. It touches health, work, gender, water, climate and trust in institutions at the same time. The mark is a reminder to look for those threads before scoping.
The mark appears on every page of this site, quietly, for the same reason.
Health, learning, gender, work
The goals that describe a life: care that arrives, schooling that holds, safety to move, work worth doing.
Water, climate, land, life below water
The conditions everything else depends on, and the ones a service can quietly draw down without noticing.
Cities, infrastructure, industry
Where the built environment decides who can reach a service and at what cost to them.
Peace, justice, partnership
The goals about how decisions get made, which determine whether any of the rest can hold.
Four rings around every brief
We ask the same four questions on every engagement, and we ask them in this order. Most briefs stop at the first. The interesting findings are usually in the third and fourth.
The person in front of us
Who uses this service, what are they trying to do, and where does it fail them? The starting point, never the finish.
The people not in the room
Frontline staff, families, neighbours, the users a system already turns away. Whose burden goes up if this gets easier for someone else?
The living world it sits in
Water drawn, waste produced, heat and flood exposure, land and species affected. A design decision is an ecological decision, whether or not anyone names it.
The generation after this one
What does this commit the institution to in ten years, and who pays for it then? Convenience now is often a debt later.
This is not an environmental audit bolted onto a design project. It is the same research, with the boundary drawn wider.
Read our approachWhere this shows up in the work
Each of our projects started as a human problem and turned out to have a wider boundary.
Moving freely
A question about women's safety turned out to be a question about streets, lighting and how a city is built.
SDG 4 · 11 · 16Training for the real fire
Training firefighters without burning anything: preparedness built in simulation rather than at cost to air and material.
SDG 4 · 10Amuseum
Making an existing public building teach more, rather than proposing a new one. Reuse before build.
Bring us a brief with a wider boundary.
If your work touches people and the environment they depend on — and most public services do — that is exactly the kind of problem we want.