UNEP ANATOMY OF ACTION

The Anatomy of Action was born out of a partnership project between the United Nations Environment Programme and The UnSchool of Disruptive Design to create an intervention that would help make sustainable living irresistibly. Our creative development approach sought to identify and communicate the most positively-impactful actions that any one of us can take, to add to the global movement around sustainable lifestyles to help achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Using the DDM, we mined the opportunity of organically-growing global movements that advance sustainable lifestyles and then conducted an extensive review of the scientific data over the last five years to cross reference what actions, when taken individually and accumulated across the globe, can and will have positive impacts on the health and sustainability of our planet.

The collected data was synthesized into a list of 15 everyday actions across five everyday lifestyle areas to create a set of actions that, when amplified, make a tangible difference in the world. We then presented them through a fun memetic reference of a hand and framed all the actions as positive gains, rather than negative losses.

We launched the project with a UNEP global challenge of 15 actions in 15 days, in which individuals and social media influencers posted chosen actions and adapted the provided graphics during the campaign from countries and in languages from around the world.

Over the 15 days, there were +19k views and +3,500 downloads of the data validation deck and graphics for posting from +100 countries. The campaign is ongoing and you can contribute with the #anatomyofaction hashtag.

This campaign includes the website, over 100 hand-illustrated and developed pieces of shareable collateral, three campaign videos and an extensive data validation report that can be accessed here to explore the science behind the Anatomy of Action.