what we are

Team D/E/S is a company created to offer strategic design for sustainments.* It is built on considerable experience in developing ways for design to be able to deliver more sustainable built environments, products and services.

The Principals of Team D/E/S are established leaders in the field, with reputations for combining innovative thinking and practical action.

Team D/E/S assists its clients in setting high sustainability ambitions, accompanied by practical and strategic pathways. But we recognise that these are more likely to be achieved through incremental steps. Strategic design can set the high ambitions and the small steps needed to realise them.

* A sustainment is something that has been designed to advance society’s ability to sustain the conditions of interdependence upon which the future depends. A sustainment might be a product, a policy, a work practice, a building or a built environment, or even a new industry. A sustainment is an incremental action taken now towards enhancing society’s ability to sustain itself and that with which it interacts and upon which it depends — including the relations between the natural and the artificial; the material and the immaterial; the economic and the cultural. ‘Sustainment’ is a concept alert to, and directive of, change and process. It is more aware of time than the more familiar idea of ‘sustainable development'.

Our preferred working method is multi-disciplinary and team based — Team D/E/S works as a team, it creates teams for specific projects and works with other teams.

We’ve worked with managers of large and small companies, with engineers, architects, planners, project managers, product designers and manufacturers. We’ve advised policy makers, university educators, professional and non-government organisations.

We have highly developed skills as researchers, writers, presenters, advocates, communicators and designers.

We bring considerable capability in social, cultural, economic and environmental analysis to the tasks we do.

We are not frightened to present radical ideas or to engage in rigorous thought. We do not define our forms of creativity by the clichés of the day (thinking outside the square, from left field, lateral thinking etc).

We are just as practical as we are creative.

In sum Team D/E/S is about creating a new kind of practice that brings a variety of design and management activities together to create something with a greater ability to deliver the conditions of sustainment than existing design practices.