The Blueprint #11.5
Slightly special this week (again). It's not a usual version of The Blueprint, but a follow-up. I wrote a more in depth article about "how service design can help reduce our impact on the planet"
What’s The Blueprint About?
What’s The Blueprint About?
The Blueprint is a newsletter sent every 2 weeks exploring service design topics in relation with the planetary crisis and vice-versa, under 10 minutes.
If you have any questions, comments or recommendation, you can contact me at hello@sidneydebaque.com. In the meantime, bonne lecture!
Reducing our impact on the planet isn’t about better products, but about better services
Last edition was focusing on the role of services within our society and economy, and the opportunity they represent to help us reduce our impact. Something I wanted to do for quite a few months now but never found the time was to get more in depth on this topic. I guess writing last edition helped kicking things out. So I published a longer post on UX Collective to do just that. Here are the key take-aways:
• Focusing on technological innovation isn’t enough to help us reduce our impact on the planet. We need to change the usages we make of technology, only then we can reduce our impact. This requires us to look at the front-end behaviours that inform the usages people make out of technologies, and the back-end processes that inform how companies and organisations use technologies too.
• Currently, services, processes and behaviours are designed based on a linear model: take-make-waste. An alternative model that aims to reduce our impact on the planet is the circular economy model. It aims to increase the value of products, resources and materials on a longer period of time by creating loops to keep them in use in our society, reducing waste and extraction.
• The circular economy model provides a frame to inform design enquiries, to foster practices such as sharing, maintaining, reusing, refurbishing, and recycling products and materials, or creating flows of renewable resources through cascades, compost, or development for feedstock.
• With a service design lens, there are two major opportunities to enable these practices in our society, to foster a circular economy: By designing the right services, and designing them right.
• Desining the right services has two folds:
One is about ensuring we support people throughout their journeys to get the job they set out to get done in ways that are circular. For isntance, by helping people to share vehicles whether they are commuting, going shopping, going on a weekend, thanks to different services such as carpooling, public transportation, or ad-hoc car rental. At scale, it’s about developping the right services to support circular behaviours, to support circular lifestyles.
The second, is to look at the product life-cycle. How trough its production, to its final disposal, we can design the right services to keep as much of its value through time. The goal is to develop the right infrastructure to support car-reparation, resale, refurbishment, and recycling for instance.
• The other opportunity is to design services right. Indeed, services are part of a whole, but they also are whole themselves. Designing the services right is about ensuring within a service we reduce consumption and waste, by configurating services in a way that we deliver on requirements, without encoarching on the planetary boundaries. Some of the applications can be to reduce bracketing behaviours in online shopping for instance, or reduce plastic bag consumptions in grocery shopping.
• As I concluded last time’s newsletter, all these decisions exist because of the economic model and the business models organisations operate with. Circularity can only be scalable if the organisations that operate a service benefit from it. To do that, I’ll be addressing service design strategies to reduce our impact on the planet in a future post on medium.
If you want to read the full post on UX Collective, it can be accessed here.
I’ll be back next week for a regular edition of The Blueprint.
I’m a freelance service designer who helps public and private organisations intervene to mitigate the impact of the planetary crisis on humans and vice-versa.
You can contact me for questions, comments or consulting requests at hello@sidneydebaque.com