Design Thinking, Acting, and Making Net Zero Transformational Change Across NHS Scotland

Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. However, this challenge presents an opportunity to do things differently. This paper sets out how, using a design-led and collaborative approach, one can re-imagine the delivery of healthcare itself in a way that will deliver environmental sustainability. The paper presents a series of eight projects at the intersections of design, health and wellbeing, and complex net zero challenges, with an emphasis on inclusive, equitable, and sustainable design-led interventions. This encompasses diverse interventions across and beyond conventional design boundaries such as architecture, product design, and textile design providing insights that demonstrate the impact of design thinking, making, and acting on real-world net zero issues. Addressing such a broad and complex topic requires engagement across a wide range of stakeholders. The work undertaken has been conducted as part of a UK Government-funded Green Transition Ecosystem (GTE) Hub that has allowed multiple academic disciplines, research organisations, regional and local industry, and other public sector stakeholders, to connect with policy makers. Across seven themes, the paper describes how Design HOPES (Healthy Organisations in a Place-based Ecosystem, Scotland), as a design-led GTE Hub, brings in multiple and marginalised perspectives and how its design-led projects as one part of a wider movement for transformational change can re-use, nurture and develop these interventions sustainably. The overarching ambition being, through our collaborative design-led thinking, making, and acting, to build a more equitable and sustainable health and social care system across Scotland.