WHAT WE DO
OUR MISSION
We envision a world where everyone has access to the resources they need, from clean air and water to education and economic opportunity.
Our mission is to design intuitive, accessible product-service systems which achieve the triple bottom line of sustainability, made up of unbounded ecological, social, and economic prosperity.
Our five design domains help us reference how our work meets the most basic needs of society and the environment. Read on for a deeper look at what these domains are, and how we use the power of design to work within them.
HEALTH
When it comes to health, we’re taking a critical look at how communities around the world are able to access the basic resources they need to survive.
+ We’re developing low-tech solutions to provide access to clean water and energy for villages with minimal infrastructure.
+ We’re examining the technologies they’re currently using to acquire heat, light, and water, and we’re creating innovations to improve the safety and efficiency of these products.
Throughout this process, our solutions emphasize the critical need for usability in ways that allow users to intuitively operate our products without extensive need for guidance or training.
All of our product design processes revolve around the capacity for stakeholder integration, or co-designing with our users. We’ve seen the negative impacts poor engagement methods can have, from products that become obsolete without trained operations and maintenance, to services that never addressed the community’s needs to begin with. By bringing our stakeholders into the design process from the beginning, we’re ensuring that our solutions actually respond to the needs and wants of its users.
EDUCATION
Our education work provides people with critical insight into the fields surrounding climate change, including what led us here and what solutions lay before us.
+ We’re specifically interested in exploring alternatives modes of communication that can break down the barriers people face in understanding climate change.
+ We know that the data on climate change is out there, but we’re also aware that for a lot of people, it can still be difficult to comprehend.
LÆRO’s in-house publishing branch focuses on producing short, concise texts supplemented by imagery to break down extensive academic works. We’re also exploring how gamification and the development of digital tools can provide an engaging interface for students and general users to interact first-hand with new and sometimes challenging concepts.
To us, education doesn’t just mean studying a topic. Instead, it can be a fun and dynamic process to advancing how we view the world.
ECOLOGY
The ecology domain at LÆRO draws direct connections between our everyday actions and their environmental impact, specifically as they might contribute to rising levels of waste and pollution.
+ We aim to construct net-zero frameworks for processing waste and circulating resources to support individuals in combatting a systemic crisis.
Our ecological design work integrates both traditional and emerging technologies into the infrastructures which facilitate our everyday life, from architecture to energy to agriculture.
As we look at these potential technology solutions, we’re also examining what policy and financial constraints we might face, and how we can support the right technologies with the case for policy reform.
ECONOMY
Our economy projects rest on achieving the “triple bottom line” of social, ecological, and economic sustainability in any sort of product-service exchange.
+ We’re pursuing work that proves how the economy and the environment can thrive in co-existence, and how emerging industries such as zero-waste shopping and pollution control can create new job opportunities without extracting resources.
Besides establishing these relationships, we’re also thinking critically about how to best frame and communicate these results to other policy and financial analysts as a way of better unifying the economic industries in the movement to limit climate change.
COMMUNITY
The community domain at LÆRO is centered on people: the needs, wants, and hopes of people in and about their communities.
+ We’re creating products that address the basic needs people have for privacy and comfort, while also looking at how the design of their communities can be improved to raise people’s quality of life.
As we’re proposing these new solutions, we’re also accounting for how these products and services will remain resilient to climate change, and how they might hinder or support its users in also adapting to a new environment. Community work is all about social sustainability, a quality that we consider can only be achieved by uplifting humans to thrive rather than survive.
