From design to action: how we generate positive impact

We are a Benefit Corporation and we strive every day to create shared value with and for our stakeholders and all those involved along the design process. We have made a commitment and we are bringing it to fruition on multiple levels. As designers we cannot only consider people and business interests, nor only our own or our clients', but we must take into account the ecosystem in its entirety.

Stakeholders are those who impact or are impacted by Tangible's operations.

Business 

We are committed to using design processes and tools that create value for our and our clients' businesses and that generate a positive impact on people and the planet.

What impact will our choices today have on the future?

Our work includes designing interactions with digital services and products that, in addition to generating value for customers, stimulate dialogue and reflection on inclusion, accessibility and trust.

Our designs aim to improve the user experience by innovating interactions with services and products, both digital and physical.

Design is an economic value generator for us and our clients. And not only that: it initiates and stimulates dialogue on topics such as trust, inclusion and accessibility, making us more aware of the impact of our choices.

We have developed a model with this end in mind, the Ethical Compass, to generate innovative yet conscious products and services that can contribute to a better future for our society.

People

We believe in people and their potential, therefore we promote professional growth based on reciprocity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

Education is an area in which we are actively engaged: we teach in master's programs, give lectures at universities, organize classes in high schools, and offer support for thesis projects.

In addition, we have an active continuing education program on social and environmental topics that helps us hone our skills to pursue the common good. We carry out accessibility exercises with users with reduced sensory abilities (blind and deaf users), usability testing with senior users over 70, as well as activities aimed at measuring the impact on emissions and finding circular economy opportunities.

Ecosystem

Last but not least, we strive to promote concrete activities that help create a fairer society.

We have already restructured our organizational model, changing it from extractive to regenerative.

For every employee hired on a permanent basis we activate a distance support with Actionaid. We also use as compensation for people who participate in our research (internal or project based) vouchers that can only be spent on local, ethical activities or that promote a sustainable business model.

This idea came from a gentle nudge we gave ourselves when we wrote the Bcorp KPIs: as incentives for interviews and tests, can we use something other than Amazon vouchers?

With this question in mind, we have created a new impact:

We want to become 100% green by 2025 and are committed to reducing our CO2 emissions according to European and global targets. Among other things, we have, for example, begun tracking our impact on the environment and drafting shared guidelines to improve on several counts: logistics, conscious shopping choices, and sustainable business practices and tools.

The CO2 emissions dashboard shows the car trips tracked from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021. We took into account both home-office commuting and home-coworking commuting.

This analysis helped us figure out how to work on our carbon emissions, which we are tracking.

In the meantime, we wanted to offset the commutes tracked in 2020 with Treedom.

Such a large goal is difficult to achieve on our own. For this reason, in order to explore complexity, create new communities and regenerate our way of designing and collaborating with both designers and non-designers, we have created a series of meetings called Inspiration.

We know we need collective intelligence to imagine and face tomorrow's challenges.

Values at the heart of our work

We work according to clear and shared values, principles and responsibilities:

Integrity, legality, fairness, multiculturalism, reciprocity, and sustainability. Dialogue and continuous improvement are at the core of our organization and at the heart of the projects we work on for our clients.

Our values are the cornerstone of our activities, of our reputation and of relations with our stakeholders. Read our Ethical Code.